This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Some of the world’s most profitable—and most polluting corporations—have invested in carbon offset projects that have fundamental failings and are “probably junk,” suggesting industry claims about greenhouse gas reductions were likely overblown, according to new analysis.

Delta, Gucci, Volkswagen, ExxonMobil, Disney, easyJet and Nestlé are among the major corporations to have purchased millions of carbon credits from climate friendly projects that are “likely junk” or worthless when it comes to offsetting their greenhouse gas emissions, according to a classification system developed by Corporate Accountability, a nonprofit, transnational corporate watchdog.

Some of these companies no longer use CO2 offsets amid mounting evidence that carbon trading does not lead to the claimed emissions cuts—and in some cases may even cause environmental and social harms.

However, the multibillion-dollar voluntary carbon trading industry is still championed by many corporations including oil and gas majors, airlines, automakers, tourism, fast-food and beverage brands, fashion houses, banks and tech firms as the bedrock of climate action—a way of claiming to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint while continuing to rely on fossil fuels and unsustainable supply chains.

Yet, for 33 of the top 50 corporate buyers, more than a third of their entire offsets portfolio is “likely junk”—suggesting at least some claims about carbon neutrality and emission reductions have been exaggerated according to the analysis. The fundamental failings leading to a “likely junk” ranking include whether emissions cuts would have happened anyway, as is often the case with large hydroelectric dams, or if the emissions were just shifted elsewhere, a common issue in forestry offset projects.

“These findings add to the mounting evidence that peels back the greenwashed facade of the voluntary carbon market and lays bare the ways it dangerously distracts from the real, lasting action the world’s largest corporations and polluters need to be taking,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, Corporate Accountability’s director of research.

The fossil fuel industry is by far the largest investor in the world’s most popular 50 CO2 offsetting schemes. At least 43 percent of the 81 million CO2 credits purchased by the oil and gas majors are for projects that have at least one fundamental flaw and are “probably junk,” according to the analysis.

The transport industry, which accounts for about a fifth of all global planet-warming emissions, has also relied heavily on carbon offsetting projects to meet climate goals. Just over 42 percent of the total credits (55 million) purchased by airlines and 38 percent purchased by automakers (21 million) for the top 50 projects are likely worthless at reducing emissions, the analysis found.

The top 50 projects include forestry schemes, hydroelectric dams, solar and wind farms, waste disposal, and greener household appliances schemes across 20 (mostly) developing countries, according to data from AlliedOffsets, the most comprehensive emissions trading database, which tracks projects from inception. They account for almost a third of the entire global voluntary carbon market (VCM), suggesting that junk or overvalued carbon credits that exaggerate emission reduction benefits could be the norm.

The VCM industry works by carbon credits being tradable “allowances” or certificates that allows the purchaser to offset 1 ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in greenhouse gasses by investing in environmental projects anywhere in the world that claim to reduce carbon emissions.

Climate experts say that the carbon trading market has failed to produce the promised planetary benefits, delayed the transition away from oil, gas, and coal, and caused harm to forests and communities in developing countries where most offset projects are located.

On Tuesday, the Biden administration published new guidelines on responsible participation in VCMs which they say will drive credible and ambitious climate action. But critics argue that offsets are fundamentally flawed.

“Overall, carbon offsets are, according to most expert analyses, neither credible nor scalable to the urgency and scale of the carbon dioxide problem,” said Richard Heede, co-director of the Climate Accountability Institute, a nonprofit research and education group.

“This report documents the prevalence of ‘worthless’ or ‘likely junk’ carbon offsets in the global Voluntary Carbon Market, and undermines the corporate rationale for claiming emissions reductions based on such credits,” Heede added.

The new sector-by-sector analysis found:

Fossil fuel firms and airlines

Oil and gas majors are among the largest corporate buyers of likely junk offsets. Almost half (49 percent) the 3.7 million carbon credits purchased by ExxonMobil are for two projects classified as likely junk or worthless. Internal company documents show that scientists at ExxonMobil, which is one of the world’s worst greenhouse gas emitters, were accurately predicting the impact of fossil fuels on the climate in the 1970s.

A spokesperson for ExxonMobil said: “Carbon offsets are a viable way to [reduce emissions and reach net zero], which is why we continue to evaluate them. We’re working to verify the claims cited in this analysis.”

With the exception of fossil fuel firms, Delta has purchased more carbon credits than any other corporation. Just over 35 percent of the 41 million carbon credits purchased by Delta were from 11 offset projects which are likely worthless or junk, according to Corporate Accountability.

In California, a 2023 civil class-action alleged that Delta misrepresented itself as carbon-neutral as the company’s reliance on the carbon trading market renders its climate friendly representations as false and misleading. The judge reduced the scope of the lawsuit last month after Delta rejected the allegations and filed a motion to dismiss. The case continues.

A spokesperson said the company is investing in sustainable aviation fuel, more fuel-efficient aircraft and reducing fuel use through operational efficiencies in a bid to reach “net zero” by 2050. “We have shifted away from carbon neutrality and offsets.”

Meanwhile almost 72 percent of the 11 million carbon credits ever purchased by easyJet, a popular low-cost European airline, were for projects classified as likely junk. In 2022, the airline announced plans to transition away from offsetting in favor of a “roadmap to net zero” emissions by 2050 through more fuel-efficient aircraft and perational efficiencies as well as sustainable aviation fuel and carbon capture and storage—technologies which scientists have warned could exacerbate the climate crisis.

An easyJet spokesperson said: “In the short period we did offset customer emissions, we had robust due diligence processes in place, with all projects recommended by expert partners and all required to meet the highest standards available.”

A 2021 joint investigation by the Guardian revealed that major airlines including Delta and easyJet were using unreliable “phantom” carbon credits to claim their flights were carbon neutral.

Car makers, entertainment giants, luxury goods

Almost half (46 percent) of the 11 million CO2 credits purchased by Volkswagen from the top 50 projects were likely junk, according to the analysis. The German carmaker recently announced a joint venture to develop its own carbon credit projects and said they increasingly rely on on-site inspections, due diligence and audit processes to verify projects. VW aims to reduce its emissions by 90 percent compared to 2018 by converting its energy supply and increasing energy efficiency among other measures.

In the world of entertainment, almost 62 percent of the 5.8 million carbon credits retired by Disney are from two offset projects which have been classified as likely junk or worthless.

The analysis also found that 75 percent of the 4.4 million carbon credits purchased by the Italian luxury fashion house Gucci have been for projects classified as likely junk. Gucci, which was once a high-profile proponent of offsetting, last year dropped its carbon neutral claim amid growing evidence that the rainforest projects it relied on were likely junk and potentially harmful. Gucci is finalizing new climate commitments with a greater focus on cutting absolute emissions through its supply chain.

The food and drinks industry is a major climate polluter—and investor in carbon markets, with 37 percent of the industry-wide credits purchased from projects classified as likely junk.

Food and drink industry

The analysis found that almost 36 percent of the 2.2 million carbon credits purchased by Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company, were from five offset projects which have been classified as likely junk. Nestlé said that it stopped purchasing credits from these projects in 2021/2022. “Reaching net zero emissions at Nestlé does not involve using offsetting: we focus on GHG emissions reductions and removals within our value chain to reach our net zero ambition.”

While some corporations have signaled a shift away from carbon offsetting, the VCM is still valued between $2 and $3 billion—despite warnings that the industry is a false solution delaying the world’s transition away from oil, gas and coal.

“This research once again shows that big corporate polluters claiming climate credentials are the main buyers of junk credits. But racking up carbon credits doesn’t make you a climate leader. Cutting fossil fuels does. We can’t offset our way to a safe climate future,” said Erika Lennon, senior attorney at the Centre for International Environmental Law (Ciel).

“For all the talk about carbon credits accelerating climate action, they are actually greenwashing climate destruction.”

It was a relatively cool spring day in Phoenix, Arizona, as a tree-planting crew dug large holes in one of the desert city’s hottest and least shaded neighborhoods.

Still, it was sweaty backbreaking work as they carefully positioned, watered and staked a 10ft tall Blue palo verde and Chilean mesquite in opposite corners of resident Ana Cordoba’s dusty unshaded backyard.

“If I ever retire, I’d like to be able to spend more time outside. The weather is changing, so I am really happy to get these trees. We need more shade,” said Cordoba, 75, a legal secretary, whose family has lived in Grant Park for more than a century.

Over the course of three days in early April, arborists planted 40 or so desert adapted trees in Grant Park, as part of the city’s equity-driven heat mitigation plan to create a shadier, more livable environment amid rising temperatures and hundreds of heat-related deaths.

Phoenix is America’s fifth largest and hottest city, a sprawling urban heat island which has expanded without adequate consideration to climate and environmental factors like water scarcity and extreme heat. ​Multiple heat records were broken last year, including 133 days over 100F and 55 days topping 110F .

Only around 9 percent of Phoenix is protected by tree canopies, yet this citywide figure masks vast inequities between wealthy, majority-white neighborhoods like Willo (13 percent coverage) just two miles north of Grant Park (4 percent). One census tract in the north-west of the city, Camelback East, has 23 percent tree cover.

“This is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods—and one of the most neglected,” said Silverio Ontiveros, a retired police chief turned community organizer who drummed up interest for the tree planting by knocking on doors and putting flyers through every neighbor’s letterbox.

“Our goal is to change the inequity and create enough shade to provide residents and passersby reprieve from the heat. For that we need many more trees, but we also need to take care of them,” added Ontiveros, as he walked through the neighborhood making sure the right families got the right trees.

Grant Park is a majority Latino community in south Phoenix situated next to a sprawling electrical substation—a hot and dusty neighborhood with ​​200 or so homes, but no stores and plenty of empty lots and boarded-up houses. It was once a thriving neighborhood—one of the few places where people of color could live due to discriminatory housing policies that lasted most of the 20th century.

Redlined neighborhoods like Grant Park still have higher pollution levels, less vegetation, more noise pollution and higher temperatures. In recent years, the local outdoor pool was shuttered and scores of trees cut down by a previous administration to prevent homeless people from gathering in the shade.

“This is one of the hottest parts of the city because the people here don’t have political power,” said Leo Hernandez, 78, the master gardener at the thriving community garden where he created a butterfly sanctuary for migrating monarchs. “We need shade, but trees also suck up carbon dioxide, create places to socialize and healthier, happier neighborhoods.”

Trees have multiple benefits in urban areas which include cleaner air, improved physical and mental health, water conservation, increasing wildlife habitat, CO2 storage and sequestration and lower temperatures through shade.

The city is mostly concerned with reducing the urban heat island effect and improving public health, and its 2010 shade masterplan set out a goal of achieving 25 percent citywide canopy cover by 2030. Amid little progress and rising heat mortality and morbidity, in 2021 Phoenix established the country’s first office of heat response and mitigation. Its community tree planting program is now being rolled out to public schools, churches and homes in qualifying census tracts—low-income neighborhoods with little shade.

Residents can choose from a list of 19 native and desert-adapted trees including the Texas olive, Chinese red pistache and Chilean mesquites. The trees, which are a couple of years old and pretty heavy, are planted by contracted arborists. For insurance reasons, they must be within the property—not the sidewalk—and not too close to walls or power lines. Each household also gets a tree kit—a 100 foot hose, irrigation timer, and instrument to measure the soil pH and moisture, as well as written care instructions.

This is the fourth tree-planting initiative in Grant Park, but the other schemes involved donations of smaller, younger trees which residents themselves had to plant in the dry, rocky earth. Several didn’t survive last summer’s heatwave, when temperatures hit 100F on 31 consecutive days, while others died from overwatering or a lack of attention.

Tree planting has become increasingly popular among corporations, governments and environmental groups alike in recent years, with mixed results. In Turkey, 90 percent of the government’s 11 million new trees died within months, while polluting industries including mining and fossil fuel companies have been accused of trying to greenwash environmental and climate harms.

“It is very hard to grow trees here, our environment is very extreme, so we’re doing everything we can to help them survive, which includes giving people the choice so they have species they love and feel excited about,” said Kayla Killoren, the heat office tree equity project coordinator. “There’s been a lot of greenwashing, and some people are weary and think it’s a scam at first, until they see their neighbors get trees planted.”

In Phoenix, a 75 to 80 percent survival rate would be considered a success, according to Killoren.

So far, 700 trees have been planted with scores more events planned throughout April and May, and will resume again in the fall after the summer heat. The project is mostly funded through nonprofits and local and federal government grants, including millions of dollars from the Covid stimulus package—the 2021 American Rescue Plan—and the Inflation Reduction Act.

There’s a long way to go and limited funds. According to American Forests, more than 800,000 more trees are needed to achieve 15 percent canopy cover for every residential block in the city.

The slow progress in improving tree coverage has frustrated many Phoenix residents, and in May, the heat team will present a new master shade plan to the city council, setting out more nuanced data-driven goals for homes, sidewalks and parks to replace the 25 percent citywide one. At the heart of the plan will be tackling shade inequalities that make rising temperatures increasingly deadly for the city’s most vulnerable communities, according to David Hondula, who leads the office of heat response and mitigation.

The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.

The vast majority (over 99 percent) of the 281,000 metric tons (MT) of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the October 7 Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US.

According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 MT of coal.

The analysis, which is yet to be peer reviewed, includes CO2 from aircraft missions, tanks and fuel from other vehicles, as well as emissions generated by making and exploding the bombs, artillery and rockets. It does not include other planet-warming gases such as methane. Almost half the total CO2 emissions were down to US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.

Hamas rockets fired into Israel during the same period generated about 713 MT of CO2, which is equivalent to approximately 300 MT of coal—underscoring the asymmetry of each side’s war machinery.

The data, shared exclusively with the Guardian, provides the first, albeit conservative estimate of the carbon cost of the current conflict in Gaza, which is causing unprecedented human suffering, infrastructure damage and environmental catastrophe.

It comes amid growing calls for greater accountability of military greenhouse gas emissions, which play an outsize role in the climate crisis but are largely kept secret and unaccounted for in the annual UN negotiations on climate action.

“This study is only a snapshot of the larger military boot print of war…a partial picture of the massive carbon emissions and wider toxic pollutants that will remain long after the fighting is over,” said Benjamin Neimark, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, and co-author of the research published on Tuesday on Social Science Research Network.

Previous studies suggest the true carbon footprint could be five to eight times higher—if emissions from the entire war supply chain were included.

“The military’s environmental exceptionalism allows them to pollute with impunity, as if the carbon emissions spitting from their tanks and fighter jets don’t count. This has to stop, to tackle the climate crisis we need accountability,” added Neimark, who partnered with researchers at University of Lancaster and the Climate and Community Project, a US-based climate policy thinktank.

Israel’s unprecedented bombardment of Gaza since Hamas killed as many as 1,200 Israelis has caused widespread death and destruction. According to the Gaza health authority, almost 23,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed, with thousands more buried under the rubble presumed dead. About 85 percent of the population has been forcibly displaced and faces life-threatening food and water shortages, according to UN agencies. More than 100 Israeli hostages remain captive in Gaza and hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed.

In addition to the immediate suffering, the conflict is exacerbating the global climate emergency, which goes far beyond the CO2 emissions from bombs and planes.

The new research calculates that the carbon cost of rebuilding Gaza’s 100,000 damaged buildings using contemporary construction techniques will generate at least 30 million MT of warming gases. This is on a par with New Zealand’s annual CO2 emissions and higher than 135 other countries and territories including Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Uruguay.

David Boyd, the UN special rapporteur for human rights and the environment, said: “This research helps us understand the immense magnitude of military emissions—from preparing for war, carrying out war and rebuilding after war. Armed conflict pushes humanity even closer to the precipice of climate catastrophe, and is an idiotic way to spend our shrinking carbon budget.”

Climate consequences including sea level rise, drought and extreme heat were already threatening water supplies and food security in Palestine. The environmental situation in Gaza is now catastrophic, as much of the farmland, energy and water infrastructure has been destroyed or polluted, with devastating health implications probably for decades to come, experts have warned. Between 36 percent and 45 percent of Gaza’s buildings—homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, shops—have so far been destroyed or damaged, and construction is a major driver of global heating.

“The catastrophic aerial attack on Gaza will not fade when a ceasefire comes,” said Zena Agha, policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, who writes about the climate crisis and the Israeli occupation. “The military detritus will continue to live in the soil, the earth, the sea and the bodies of the Palestinians living in Gaza—just as it does in other postwar contexts such as Iraq.”

Overall, the climate consequences of war and occupation are poorly understood. Thanks in large part to pressure from the US, reporting military emissions is voluntary, and only four countries submit some incomplete data to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which organizes the annual climate talks.

Even without comprehensive data, one recent study found that militaries account for almost 5.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions annually—more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. This makes the global military carbon footprint—even without factoring in conflict-related emission spikes—the fourth largest after only the US, China, and India.

At Cop28 in Dubai last month, the unfolding humanitarian and environmental catastrophe in Gaza and Ukraine put war, security and the climate crisis on the agenda, but did not lead to any meaningful steps towards increasing transparency and accountability for armed forces or the military industry.

The Israeli delegation was mostly promoting its burgeoning climate tech industry in areas such as carbon capture and storage, water harvesting and plant-based meat alternatives. “Israel’s biggest contribution to the climate crisis comes in the form of the solutions,” said Gideon Behar, special envoy for climate change and sustainability.

Ran Peleg, Israel’s director of Middle East economic relations, told the Guardian that the question of calculating greenhouse gas emissions from IDF operations—current or previous—had not been discussed. “This is actually the first time this issue has been raised, and I’m not aware that there are any ways to count these kinds of things.”

Hadeel Ikhmais, head of the climate change office at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority, said: “We are trying to do our part on the climate crisis but even before the war in Gaza, it is hard to adapt and mitigate when we cannot access water or land or any technologies without Israel’s permission.”

Neither the Israel government nor Palestinian authorities appear to have ever reported military emissions figures to the UNFCCC.

Using its defense budget as a proxy, the new study estimates that Israel’s annual baseline military carbon footprint—without accounting for conflict—was almost 7 million MT of CO2 equivalent in 2019. This is about equivalent to the CO2 emitted by the entire nation of Cyprus, and 55 percent more emissions than the whole of Palestine.

No comparable military emissions calculation was possible for Palestine, due to Hamas’s ad hoc offensive capabilities, according to researchers.

But the Israel-Palestine situation was unique even before October 7th. In occupied Gaza, most Palestinians already faced significant food, water and energy insecurity due to the Israeli occupation, blockade, population density and the worsening climate crisis. Israelis meanwhile have long lived under the threat of rocket fire.

In order to capture some of the climate consequences of this militarized setting, researchers calculated the carbon footprint of war-related concrete infrastructure—walls and tunnels—constructed by Hamas and Israel since 2007.

Constructing the Gaza Metro—the 500 km underground network of tunnels used to move and hide everything from basic supplies to weapons, Hamas fighters and hostages—generated an estimated 176,000 MT of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the island nation of Tonga emits annually, according to the study.

Building Israel’s iron wall, which runs 65km along most of its border with Gaza and features surveillance cameras, underground sensors, razor wire, a 20ft high metal fence and large concrete barriers, contributed almost 274,000 MT of CO2. This is almost on par with the entire 2022 emissions by Central African Republic, one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world.

The US plays an oversized role in military carbon emissions—and supplies Israel with billions of dollars of military aid, weapons and other equipment that it deploys in Gaza and the West Bank.

By 4 December, at least 200 American cargo flights were reported to have delivered 10,000 MT of military equipment to Israel. The study found that the flights guzzled around 50 million liters of aviation fuel, spewing an estimated 133,000 MT of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—more than the entire island of Grenada last year.

“The role of the US in the human and environmental destruction of Gaza cannot be overstated,” said co-author Patrick Bigger, research director at the thinktank CCP.

And not just in Gaza. In 2022, the US military reported that it generated an estimated 48 million MT of CO2 , according to separate research by Neta Crawford, author of The Pentagon, Climate Change and War. This baseline military carbon footprint, which excludes emissions generated by attacks on Islamic State oil infrastructure in 2022, was higher than the annual emissions of 150 individual countries and territories including Norway, Ireland, and Azerbaijan.

According to Crawford, about 20 percent of the US military’s annual operational emissions go towards protecting fossil fuel interests in the Gulf region—a climate change hotspot, warming twice as fast as the rest of the inhabited world. Yet the US—like other Nato countries—is mostly focused on the climate crisis as a national security risk, rather than on its contribution to it.

“Quite simply we’re preparing for the wrong risks by putting too many of our eggs in the military basket, when actually we have a much more dire emergency facing all of us. Moving military resources into the [energy] transition is low-hanging fruit,” said Crawford, who is the Montague Burton professor of International Relations at Oxford University.

Responding to the carbon analysis, Lior Haiat, a spokesperson for the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs, said: “Israel did not want this war. It was imposed on us by the Hamas terror organization that killed, murdered, executed hundreds of people and kidnapped over 240 including children, women and the elderly.

“Among all the problems facing the state of Palestine in the coming decades, climate change is the most immediate and certain—and this has been amplified by the occupation and war on Gaza since the 7 October,” said Ikhmais, the Palestinian climate director. “The carbon emissions from the military attacks contradict the UNFCCC and Paris agreement goal…recognizing the environmental impact of war is crucial.”

When Greta Thunberg posted a photo of herself holding a “stand with Gaza” sign on Instagram in October, the backlash in Israel and Germany came hard and fast.

An Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson initially told Politico that “whoever identifies with Greta in any way in the future, in my view, is a terror supporter,” although later retracted his comments. The official X account of Israel said “Hamas doesn’t use sustainable materials for their rockets” and told Thunberg to speak up for its victims. The Israeli education ministry said it would strike any reference to the Swedish climate activist from its curriculum.

In Germany, politicians and pundits across the political spectrum demanded that the national branch of Fridays for Future, the student protest movement that Thunberg started in 2018, distance itself from her views. The group put out a statement underlining its support for Israel’s right to exist and, in the weeks that followed, explicitly distanced itself from social media posts made by the international group. Germany’s leading news magazine Der Spiegel ran a lengthy article with personal comments on Thunberg’s childhood character and appearance under the headline: “Has Greta Thunberg betrayed the climate movement?”

The violence in Israel and Gaza since October 7 has become an unexpected flashpoint for climate activists in rich countries. As world leaders meet for the Cop28 summit in Dubai, the loose collection of movements, many of which have built their support around inclusivity and global justice, are divided on whether or how to take a stand on the conflict.

Positions taken have led to splits within groups and between them. “The national debates are less about the conflict itself,” said Stefan Aykut, director of the Center for Sustainable Society Research at the University of Hamburg. “Instead, they are immediately captured by the dominant cultural prism within each society.”

The legacy of the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis is central to Germany’s postwar identity, and in recent years has been used to argue that Israel’s security is fundamentally tied to the German state today.

Environmental groups in Germany have expressed solidarity with Israel during the current conflict, as well as sympathy for Palestinian suffering, whereas in the UK and US activists have criticised Israel with stronger language—describing its bombing of Gaza as a “genocide,” which Israel rejects—and pushed their governments to call for a permanent ceasefire.

For environmental groups far from the fighting, the pressure to take a position has grown even stronger as racism against Jews and Muslims has soared across the US and Europe. It has also raised the stakes of striking the wrong tone.

Part of the backlash generated by Thunberg’s post came from a blue octopus toy visible in the corner of the picture. The toy is an emblem of neurodiversity, popular with people with autism as a way to express feelings, that also resembles a symbol used in racist propaganda to falsely claim Jews control the world. Thunberg, who has a form of autism, said she was unaware of the link, and replaced the photo with one that left out the toy.

Thunberg was also criticized for her failure to condemn Hamas or support its victims in the same post in which she spoke out against Israel.

Sharona Shnayder, a Nigerian-Israeli climate activist who lost friends in the Hamas terror attack at a music festival near Israel’s border with Gaza, said: “She didn’t even bother to mention it until people called her out. It hurt on a level that I don’t think you can describe.”

Shnayder, who founded a litter picking movement called Tuesdays for Trash, and was herself inspired by Thunberg, said the lack of compassion towards Israeli victims of the war in global discourse has alienated local activists. “I talk about trash a lot. I talk about waste management. In that moment, I really felt: ‘Wow, maybe I have no value in this world.’”

Hamas militants killed 1,200 people in Israel on 7 October and took more than 200 hostages, according to the Israeli government. Since then, Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinians, according to health officials in Gaza, and starved more than 2 million Gazans of food, water, fuel, and medical care.

While Fridays for Future did not respond to a request for comment on this article, FFF Sweden including Thunberg wrote a piece in the Guardian on Tuesday clarifying their stance, saying: “Contrary to what many have claimed, Fridays for Future has not ‘been radicalized’ or ‘become political’. We have always been political, because we have always been a movement for justice.”

The German branch has said it stands in solidarity with the victims of Hamas’ violence and with Jews across the world, while also “seeing” the suffering of Gazans and being “greatly concerned” by the rising anti-Muslim racism in Germany. “None of these are contradictions,” it said. “Our hearts are big enough to feel all of this at the same time.”

A spokesperson for the group said: “There is no room for compromise when it comes to the protection of Jewish lives and Israel’s right to exist. We are horrified by the suffering experienced by innocent lives and stand in solidarity with civilians both in Israel and Gaza.”

Germany has become an outlier among rich democracies in the breadth of its political and media support for Israel’s response. “Germany is a special case when it comes to those politics,” said Oscar Berglund, a climate activism researcher at the university of Bristol.

Faced with a death toll that started high and has risen rapidly, other climate advocacy groups have condemned the killing of civilians on both sides without naming the actors involved.

Namrata Chowdhary, head of public engagement at campaign group 350.org, said: “We’ve been very deliberate about taking a slower, more cautious approach, and speaking where it seems appropriate for us to do so in solidarity.”

The group has called for a ceasefire and respect for international humanitarian law. “We recognize that there can be no climate justice without peace, and in calling for peace we’re being very clear about peace on both sides.”

Greenpeace made similar demands: “Targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.”

The unfolding horrors—and how to respond to them as a movement—have been a focus at Cop28 this past week. While two large environmental justice coalitions—the Palestinian Environmental NGOs network and La Via Campesina, an international movement representing millions of peasants, landless workers, farmers, Indigenous people, pastoralists, and migrant farmworkers—have boycotted the summit, others have used it as an opportunity to put a spotlight on the conflict.

Last Thursday, the first day of the summit, the UNFCCC, the United Nations body overseeing the conference, cut off a livestream to the event as Asad Rehman, director of the UK-based organization War on Want and founder of the global campaign to demand climate justice, called for a permanent ceasefire. All protests have to be pre-approved by the UNFCCC and no countries or companies are allowed to be mentioned. “The Palestinian struggle is woven into every struggle for justice including climate justice,” Rehman said. “We want a free Palestine.”

Tasneem Essop, an anti-apartheid campaigner from South Africa and director of the Climate Action Network, the world’s largest coalition of 1,900 climate action groups, said: “The unfolding genocide in Gaza may not affect the negotiations directly, but will play into the growing divide and mistrust between the global south and the global north.”

Many climate justice groups in the UK have swung behind the Palestinian cause. Friends of the Earth UK became one of the earliest, explicitly stating it stood in solidarity with its Palestinian sister organization “in its longstanding opposition to the occupation” of Palestinian lands.

In a statement on its website, Extinction Rebellion described “the collective punishment being imposed on innocent civilians in Gaza” as a “war crime.” The organization declined to comment for this article, but XR groups have taken autonomous actions. On November 11, the date of a contentious Palestine solidarity march and counterprotest that coincided with the UK’s Remembrance Day, XR Parents placed hundreds of children’s shoes on the steps of Trafalgar Square in London and read out the names of the 4,100 Palestinian and 26 Israeli children who had already then been killed.

Robin Wells, director of Fossil Free London, said her group had mobilized support for three of the big solidarity marches in London, as well as staging their own, smaller protests outside the energy companies BP and Ithaca for their roles in extracting gas from Israeli-controlled fields in the eastern Mediterranean contested by the Palestinians.

But even beyond the moral question of what position to take, climate activists have also been divided on the strategic value of championing causes that go beyond fossil fuels.

For some, the shift in focus has been an unwelcome distraction. At a recent protest in Amsterdam where Thunberg spoke alongside Afghan and Palestinian women, a man stood up on stage and snatched the microphone from her hands. “I came for a climate protest, not a political point of view,” he said.

Some climate advocacy groups have chosen not to comment on the war, with one adding that they had not expressed a position on previous conflicts. Others have argued that climate and social justice are too tightly linked to ignore extreme violence.

A spokesperson for Greenpeace said: “We see a strategic benefit and a moral imperative. Environmental issues are hardly ever ‘just’ environmental issues. Many of the crises we face are interconnected, whether it’s social inequalities fuelling the climate crisis or climate impacts driving up food prices and propelling social injustices.”

Berglund said an issue that some environment movements have faced is their lack of explicit political values or goals. “It was never tenable in the long run to have a depoliticized climate movement,” he said.

Activists are also having to reckon with the risk of striking the wrong tone and losing support from the people and politicians they are trying to reach. At the CSS in Hamburg, Aykut said that even though the climate movement is global, its impact was “first and foremost” in the countries with the greatest power over emissions.

“It is not only about rallying minorities, but also about persuading the wider public,” said Aykut. “Intersectionality is obviously crucial for the climate movement but it is not a simple maths problem where you can add more and more different groups until you get a majority. Every time you include a new faction and address their concerns, there is the risk of alienating another part of the movement.”

Like many community-based solutions, the community lighthouse network in New Orleans can be traced back to a crisis moment when people realized that something had to change and they—not elected officials—would have to make it happen.

“For [Hurricane] Ida we were ready with showers, mattresses, shelter and food, but once again the electricity was out so we couldn’t serve our community,” said Antoine Barriere, a 61-year-old pastor. “The power was the missing piece.

“We realized that we had to stop waiting for a fix and do it ourselves. We need to get off the grid and be self-sufficient, as with climate change we’re going to get more disasters.”

In late August 2021, several faith leaders were on a Zoom call during yet another citywide blackout which left vulnerable residents struggling to cope with extreme heat and humidity. The power lines had been knocked out by Hurricane Ida, a category 4 Atlantic storm that had made landfall on 29 August, exactly 16 years after Hurricane Katrina.

Ida left some parts of New Orleans in the dark for 10 days and overwhelmed the city’s emergency response efforts. But a couple of months earlier a new network had been launched called Together New Orleans, which included churches, mosques, synagogues, unions, and environmental nonprofits whose leaders are working across historical racial and religious divides to build collective political power and challenge longstanding anti-sustainable pro-business policies.

The fix, they decided, would be the community lighthouse network, solar-powered disaster response hubs that could transform the city’s approach to resilience for climate and other natural disasters.

On a bright, balmy autumn morning a couple of weeks ago Barriere climbed a long, steep ladder to show me the 460 solar panels that now cover a third or so of his church’s flat roof.

The solar panels were generating more than enough energy to power Household of Faith, a non-denominational megachurch with 4,000 mostly Black parishioners in New Orleans East. Downstairs, a cabinet was stacked with backup batteries that were fully charged in case of a power outage—a frequent occurrence thanks to the low-lying city’s vulnerability to hurricanes, thunderstorms, high winds, extreme heat and flooding.

In a worst-case scenario—no sun, thundery dark skies and power outage—the backup batteries could power essential appliances for a couple of days including the water heater, five commercial fridge freezers storing perishables for the weekly food pantry, and air conditioning for the vast main hall which could be converted into a dormitory-style shelter.

But on this brilliant cloudless morning, most of the solar-generated energy was going into the city’s electric grid. New Orleans’ one-for-one net metering scheme allows the church to offset its excess clean energy against the utility’s dirty energy, and this should become a net zero facility within 12 months.

Household of Faith is among seven, and so far the largest, community lighthouse, but TNO has ambitions to build dozens more and is working with sister networks statewide.

The idea is that each community lighthouse should be an institution locals already know and trust—such as a place of worship, health clinic or community center—that can be converted into a resilience hub where people can converge during a power outage to get cool, recharge phones, have a meal, connect to a medical device or store medication that requires refrigeration such as insulin.

In addition, community lighthouses will be able to keep the services running that people rely on such as the food pantry and religious sermons, while also adding capacity to the city’s wider emergency-response efforts as a distribution hub, shelter and possibly even house a makeshift clinic.

A couple of weeks before my visit, a run-of-the-mill storm took out some power lines, causing an outage during the church’s weekly bible study class.

“We just kept going, the power just switched to the batteries,” said Barriere. “The grid is going to keep going down while the sun will always come up. And even when it’s cloudy, we’re still generating some—and saving money.”

It was the first time the system was tested for real, outside a disaster simulation exercise, and while it was only a couple of hours, people were relieved to see that it worked.

At bible study that night was the 68-year-old parishioner Linda Thomas, who spends most of her day attached to an oxygen tank due to chronic lung damage caused by an autoimmune disease. She is mobile but frail, while her husband takes intravenous medication for congestive heart failure which must be kept refrigerated. They managed to stay at home after Ida, using a small generator and portable oxygen tanks until the power was restored on their street on the fourth day. But any longer, and they would have had to evacuate.

Thomas said: “Moving in an emergency is very stressful and hard physically, so it’s absolutely great that our church has solar because there is no place like home.”

Economically, it works too. Household of Faith’s electricity bill, after taking into account maintenance and insurance costs and the monthly solar service charge to pay TNO back for the upfront material and installation, is expected to drop by 20-30 percent, according to Pierre Moses, the project’s technical expert.

The city faces power outages that are not just triggered by storms such as Ida, and it’s much worse for low-income neighborhoods where local people are mainly Black, Latin and Asian. On top of this, the climate crisis is exacerbating other extreme weather events such as record-breaking heat and humidity.

Residents agree that it is a matter of when the next major hurricane strikes, not if.

“We need to be up and running by the next hurricane season,” said Sonya Norsworthy, the Household of Faith community lighthouse coordinator.

The next step is to recruit and train volunteers and begin mapping the vulnerable residents within a mile-and-a-half radius of the lighthouse. Volunteers will contact them before an incoming storm or tornado, and then again within 24 hours of an outage, as part of the project’s post-disaster response plan.

The end goal is to build a lighthouse within 15 minutes walking distance of all 375,000 city residents—and hundreds more across the state. They are hopeful about the next wave after recently helping the state win a $259 million in federal grant to improve grid resilience.

“After Ida hit, there was an overwhelming frustration and feeling powerless,” said Abel Thompson, a TNO organiser. “That’s when people switched from asking when will they [solve this] to why not us? And we can solve this.”

Coal-fired power plants killed at least 460,000 Americans during the past two decades, causing twice as many premature deaths as previously thought, new research has found.

Cars, factories, fire smoke, and electricity plants emit tiny toxic air pollutants known as fine particulate matter or PM2.5, which elevate the risk of an array of life-shortening medical conditions including asthma, heart disease, low birth weight, and some cancers.

Researchers analyzed Medicare and emissions data from 1999 and 2020, and for the first time found that coal PM2.5 is twice as deadly as fine particle pollutants from other sources. Previous studies quantifying the death toll from air pollution assumed all PM2.5 sources posed the same risk, and therefore probably underestimated the dangers of coal plants.

Government regulations save lives, according to the research, which is published in Science, as most deaths happened when environmental standards were weakest and PM2.5 levels from coal-fired power stations highest.

“Air pollution from coal is much more harmful than we thought, and we’ve been treating it like it’s just another air pollutant,” said the lead author, Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor in the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure engineering at George Mason University. “This type of evidence is important to policymakers like EPA [the US Environmental Protection Agency] as they identify cost-effective solutions for cleaning up the country’s air, like requiring emissions controls or encouraging renewables.”

Henneman led a group of researchers who used publicly available data to track air pollution— and its health effects—from the 480 US coal power plants that operated at some point between 1999 and 2020. A model was used to track the wind direction and reach of the toxins from each power station. Annual exposure levels were then connected with more than 650m Medicare health records that covered most people over age 65 in the US.

The coal plants associated with most deaths were located east of the Mississippi River in industrialized states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where power stations were historically constructed close to population hubs. But every region had at least one plant linked to 600 deaths, while 10 were associated with more than 5,000 deaths across the study period.

About 85% of the total 460,000 coal plant-related deaths occurred between 1999 and 2007, an average of more than 43,000 deaths per year. The death toll declined drastically as plants closed or scrubbers—a type of sulfur filter—were installed to comply with new environmental rules. By 2020, the coal PM2.5 death toll had dropped 95%, to 1,600 people.

“By linking records of where Medicare beneficiaries lived and when they died, we found that risks due to PM2.5 from coal were more than double the risks related to PM2.5 from all sources,” said co-author Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics, population, and data science at the Harvard TC Chan School of Public Health.

Coal use has declined in the US, but there are still more than 200 coal-fired power plants, accounting for 20% of electricity generation in 2022, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Indiana, Kentucky, and Texas have the most operational coal plants, followed by Illinois, Missouri, and Pennsylvania.

Globally, coal-generated power is still rising, with South Africa, China, India, and Poland among the countries most dependent on the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

“As countries debate their energy sources—and as coal maintains a powerful, almost mythical status in American energy lore—our findings are highly valuable to policymakers and regulators as they weigh the need for cheap energy with the significant environmental and health costs,” said Dominici.

Fossil fuel companies have spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign donations to state lawmakers who sponsored anti-protest laws—which now shield about 60 percent of US gas and oil operations from protest and civil disobedience, according to a new report from Greenpeace USA.

Eighteen states, including Montana, Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana, West Virginia, and the Dakotas, have enacted sweeping anti-protest laws which boost penalties for trespass near so-called critical infrastructure, that make it far riskier for communities to oppose pipelines and other fossil fuel projects that threaten their land, water and the global climate.

Another four states have enacted narrower versions of the same law, but which could still be exploited to issue trumped-up charges against peaceful protesters. Many were based on a “model bill” promoted by the industry-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

According to the report, nine of the top 10 companies that lobbied most for anti-protest bills since 2017 are fossil fuel companies, including US companies ExxonMobil, Koch Industries and Marathon Petroleum, as well as Canadian companies Enbridge and TC Energy (Trans Canada).

In addition, 25 fossil fuel and energy companies have contributed more than $5 million to state anti-protest bill sponsors in this timeframe, data from political finance trackers Open Secrets and Follow the Money shows.

According to Dollars v Democracy 2023: Inside the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Playbook to Suppress Protest and Dissent in the United States, a playbook of tactics has been deployed by corporations, law enforcement agencies and fossil fuel-friendly lawmakers in the US since the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests at Standing Rock in 2016. This includes mass arrests, spurious litigation, intelligence sharing, harsh policing tactics such as water cannons and sophisticated public relations efforts to depict activists as troublemakers and extremists, the report says.

It’s part of a global strategy reported by the Guardian to silence, discredit and criminalize environmental activists and Indigenous rights defenders opposed to polluting energy, mining and other extractive projects that are incompatible with meaningful climate action.

“We are seeing an escalation of tactics to criminalize, bully, and sue those working for climate action, Indigenous rights and environmental justice… [as] oil and gas companies find new ways to delay the transition to clean energy and protect their own profits,” said Ebony Twilley Martin, the executive director of Greenpeace USA. “Frontline activists should not face extreme, life-altering legal risks for putting their bodies on the line to keep our planet habitable.’

Since 2017, more than 250 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 45 states including legislation to eliminate driver liability for hitting protesters and create felony offenses for demonstrations construed as riots, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law.

The bills appear to have proliferated as a response to prominent student, environmental and racial justice movements such as Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter, and experts say they restrict the first amendment protected right to free speech, assembly and protest.

Lawmakers have claimed that the bills are needed to prevent violence, despite the laws banning violent acts and property damage already existing while the overwhelming majority of protests in the US are nonviolent.

In Minnesota, law enforcement—which along with other agencies received millions of dollars in payments from the Canadian company Enbridge behind Line 3—more than 1,000 arrests were made between December 2020 and September 2021 as nonviolent protesters tried to stop the rerouting and expansion of the 1,097-mile tar sands oil pipeline through Indigenous lands and waterways. At least 967 criminal charges were filed including three people charged under the state’s new critical infrastructure protection legislation.

Fossil fuel firms are also increasingly using civil litigation to intimidate activists and chill legitimate dissent, according to the new report.

Greenpeace found that about 75 percent (86 out of 116) of known SLAPPs—strategic lawsuits against public participation—and other forms of judicial harassment cases since 2010 were linked to companies that have also lobbied for anti-protest criminal laws, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and TransCanada. The SLAPPs include a $300 millon lawsuit filed against Greenpeace US by the US company behind the DAPL, Energy Transfer, which alleges that the non-profit organized the massive Indigenous resistance at Standing Rock. The case, which experts fear could have major ramifications for advocacy, is scheduled to open in North Dakota next summer.

This year has marked a further blow to the constitutional right to protest in the US, starting with the fatal police shooting of forest protector and anti-Cop City activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán in Atlanta in January 2023. It was the first case in US history of police killing an environmental activist while protesting.

In September, the Georgia state attorney general indicted 61 community organizers on racketeering charges, alleging that those who peacefully opposed the construction of the sprawling police training complex were part of a criminal enterprise. The officers who peppered Paez Terán with 14 bullets, leaving 57 wounds, will face no charges.

Also this year, developers of the Mountain Valley pipeline—which will transport fracked gas 300 miles through West Virginia and Virginia—filed a $4 million civil lawsuit which seeks to restrict 41 individuals and two organizations from fundraising and other activities alleged to have slowed construction. While in North Carolina a draconian new anti-protest law allows up to 19 years in prison and $250,000 in fines for impeding an energy facility.

David Armiak, research director with the Center for Media and Democracy, said the Greenpeace report “exemplifies how the fossil fuel industry exerts its outsized influence over state and local politics to curtail the constitutional right to protest with the goal of extending its profit model.”

He added: “As the climate emergency intensifies, policy makers should adhere to the authors’ recommendations and pass anti-Slapp laws, repeal anti-protest policies and ensure that treaties with Indigenous communities are respected.”

Private equity firms are increasingly profiting from cleaning up climate disasters in the US, while failing to better protect workers and often also investing in the fossil fuels that are causing the climate emergency, new research has found.

The demand for skilled disaster restoration or resilience workers, who are mostly immigrants and refugees from Latin America and Asia, is soaring as greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels heat the planet, provoking more destructive storms, floods and wildfires.

As the industry has become more profitable, at least 72 companies that specialize in disaster cleanups and restoration have been acquired by private equity firms since 2020, according to the research, by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and Resilience Force, a labor rights organization with thousands of members.

Wage theft, lack of protective clothing, and other unsafe conditions are rampant across the industry at the expense of workers, communities and climate, according to the report, Private Equity Profits from Disasters, shared exclusively with the Guardian.

At risk are tens of thousands of resilience workers, traveling from disaster to disaster cleaning up and rebuilding American communities while facing hazards such as unstable buildings, ash and other toxins, and water-borne diseases.

Researchers found that an increasingly complex web of franchises, contractors and subcontractors, insurance providers, labor brokers and agencies and mostly temporary jobs makes it difficult for workers to know who is ultimately accountable for violations.

“Disasters have become more intense and destructive, and rebuilding has become more profitable. As the money started pouring in, companies started consolidating, and private equity started circling and buying up these companies,” said Saket Soni, director of Resilience Force. “Wage theft and health and safety violations are deeply endemic … and private equity is failing to establish higher standards.”

Osha, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, recorded 194 violations at private-equity owned restoration companies and their franchises between January 2015 and January 2022, the report found. Most violations were classified as serious, and included failures to protect workers from asbestos, respiratory problems and falls. (The true number of health and safety violations is likely to be higher, given the small number of OSHA compliance officers).

It is impossible to say precisely what proportion of the disaster workforce is currently controlled by private equity, but acquisitions are gathering pace, with 14 in the first six months of this year compared to 13 during the entire course of 2020. Acquisitions included companies from 28 states, but most were in Florida and Texas—states hit by multiple billion-dollar climate disasters in recent years.

“This is the latest example of a disturbing trend where we see private equity coming into industries where there is a lot of money—and indeed a lot of federal investment—in order to pad their pockets by cutting costs,” said the Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. “This is already a dangerous industry…cutting costs will cut quality, and increase the threats to essential workers—who are already extremely vulnerable to greedy employers. Those who put up the money, in this case private equity, are ultimately responsible.”

Overall, the number and cost of weather and climate disasters in the US is rising due to a combination of population growth, development and the influence of human-caused global heating on extreme events like floods, drought and fires. Over the past seven years (2016 to 2022), 122 separate billion-dollar disasters have killed at least 5,000 people and cost more than $1 trillion in damage, according to data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Historically, the disaster restoration industry was made up of smaller, independent businesses handling local projects. But after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, private equity firms saw an opportunity to consolidate the market by buying up smaller companies, and some estimates value the US restoration industry as high as $200 billion. The Restoration Industry Association, whose board includes three private equity executives, did not respond to the Guardian.

Taxpayer dollars increasingly pay for restoration costs—involving public buildings like schools and hospitals, and for folks without insurance. Yet the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, does not attach mandatory labor or health and safety standards to its payouts, while private equity firms have a track record in cost-cutting to maximize profits.

Private equity refers to an opaque form of private financing in which funds and investors buy and restructure companies, including troubled businesses and real estate, using money from wealthy individuals and institutional investors such as university endowments and state employee pension funds.

In recent years, some private equity firms have become major greenhouse gas polluters, often acquiring risky oil, gas and coal projects with minimal public scrutiny or regulatory oversight—which means firefighters, nurses and teachers have little way of knowing if their retirement nest egg is financing police surveillance equipment, disaster companies or leaky pipelines.

Researchers found a third of the private equity companies with disaster restoration company investments are also backing fossil fuel-linked projects—ostensibly profiting from the cause and effect of the climate emergency.

The Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity firm, which manages over $1 trillion, backs 21 energy companies, of which 52 percent are fossil-fuel projects. In 2020, Blackstone’s power plants produced 18.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere—equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 4 million gas-powered vehicles.

Blackstone’s institutional investors include Los Angeles, Maine, Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, New York state, and Oregon public sector worker pensions.

In March 2019, Blackstone acquired a majority share in Servpro Industries, a damage restoration company with more than 2,000 independently owned and operated franchises across the US and Canada. Servpro franchises helped with restoration efforts after Hurricanes Harvey, Matthew and Sandy—some of the most devastating storms to hit the US mainland in recent years. Higher temperatures and sea level rise caused by burning fossil fuels are making storms more intense and destructive.

In Massachusetts, a Servpro franchise in 2022 settled claims by the state that its restoration work at an elementary school led to asbestos contamination, forcing the school to close for months. In November 2019, a Servpro franchise in Boynton Beach, Florida, was forced to pay more $200,000 in back wages to almost 150 restoration workers after a department of labor investigation.

In another example the commercial restoration firm BlueSky, which operates in more than 40 states, is owned by two private equity companies including Partners Group, whose portfolio also includes gas pipeline companies in the US and Europe.

“Firms like Blackstone are using the public’s money to personally profit off both sides of disasters,” said Azani Creeks, PESP research coordinator and co-author of the report.

“Public employees have a right to know that their pension dollars are being used to purchase fossil-fuel plants that are contributing to climate disasters—and companies that profit off of these very disasters, most often off the backs of wage workers with little health and safety protections.”

A Blackstone spokesperson rejected the report’s findings as “cherry-picking,” and said that some of the cases related to matters prior to their investment—and that there was no evidence that the alleged shortcomings were related to private equity ownership:

“As a franchisor, Servpro Industries does not control or direct the operations of its independent local franchises, nor does it employ their workers…Since Blackstone’s investment, the company has expanded the training resources available to its franchisees—including worker safety related to Osha compliance and use of personal protective equipment, among other areas—and continually evaluates ways to further expand and enhance those efforts.”

Blackstone had invested more than $20 billion in the energy transition, the spokesperson said: “Legacy exploration and production investments today total less than 1 percent of our overall fair market value portfolio.”

According to the 2022 state of the industry report, the biggest issues facing the disaster restoration industry is finding—and retaining—skilled workers, and increasing wages for certified employees.

Information about the disaster workforce is limited, but more than 100,000 people are estimated to work occasionally or full time in the industry, according to Resilience Force. Most workers are concentrated in southern states prone to natural disasters like Louisiana, Texas and Florida, but are often deployed thousands of miles away for weeks or months at a time. It is a male-dominated industry, but also includes thousands of women, with Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, India, and the Philippines among some of the most common countries of origin.

While the work is predominantly done by immigrants who are often undocumented or have temporary residency status, the workforce also includes current and ex-incarcerated people and US-born people of color—also groups which have historically faced discrimination and poor working conditions.

In one case, migrant workers who helped rebuild luxury hotels destroyed by Hurricane Irma in Florida Keys in 2017, were forced to sue Cotton Commercial, acquired by the private equity firm Sun Capital in 2020, and a temp agency to recover more than $280,000 in back pay and damages.

A spokesperson for Cotton said: “All Cotton contracts include provisions on subcontractors’ responsibility for payment to their personnel in accordance with all applicable employment laws and regulations, as well as strict safety requirements.”

The need for climate resilience workers is likely to continue rising, and next month Jayapal will re-introduce the 2022 Climate Resilience Workforce Act which would help create a well-trained, fairly paid workforce to help the US prepare for the climate emergency—and ease the transition to a green economy.

Soni, the director of Resilience Force, said: “Disaster restoration is a public good, and we need a strong sustainable workforce as disasters increase. Many people deeply love the work and are dedicated…but the work gets more dangerous year after year, because there are no standards. We’re depleting the workforce when we ought to be building it.”

The heat expert leading efforts to make America’s hottest city more bearable insists that Phoenix could eventually eradicate heat deaths—despite July’s record-breaking death toll.

As many as 300 people may have died during the hottest ever month on record as the temperature in Phoenix topped 110F (43C) for 31 consecutive days. Heat deaths in the city have more than quadrupled in the past decade, and 2023 is on track to be another record-breaking year as Phoenix braces itself for the next spell of 110F-plus temperatures forecast to hit by Monday. Despite this, David Hondula, director of the city’s heat response and mitigation team, insists that every heat death can be prevented.

“We can get to zero deaths with the right resources…obviously no city yet anywhere in the world has yet demonstrated what the right mix of resources looks like for zero heat-related deaths, but [we’re] at the forefront of pursuing them,” Hondula said.

Phoenix, the capital of Arizona and America’s fifth-largest city with 1.6 million people, is accustomed to a hot desert climate, but temperatures are rising due to global heating—made worse by decades of unchecked urban development that created a sprawling heat island.

Hondula was appointed as the Phoenix heat tsar in the fall of 2021 to coordinate the city’s efforts to mitigate and adapt to the extreme heat that is killing and injuring more and more people every year.

July was the hottest ever month globally; Phoenix, meanwhile, had the hottest month ever recorded in a US city. Temperatures hit 115F on 17 days, breaking the previous record of six days set in 2020, according to the National Weather Service in Phoenix.

So far this year, 345 suspected heat deaths are under investigation by the Maricopa County medical examiner—a 20% increase compared to the same period last year—which itself was the worst year on record. Overall, 911 calls for heat-related emergencies are up 30% so far this year, but last month paramedic call-outs doubled and hospitals reporting a surge in contact burns requiring specialist treatment.

July’s prolonged extreme heatwave would have been “virtually impossible” without the climate crisis, and climate scientists warn that failing to stop burning fossil fuels will make such hot—or even hotter— spells increasingly likely. According to Andrew Pershing, vice-president for science at Climate Central, the climate signal was strongest at night, as the temperature failed to drop below 90F for 16 consecutive days – including one night when the low was 97F.

The climate crisis is making the American southwest increasingly inhospitable but Hondula says that it is possible to make the city—and region—more livable.

“There is no reason that the Phoenix of the future can’t be more comfortable for everyone, even if the temperature increases. I’m thinking about outdoors, access to shade, and about people’s experiences indoors—which for many in the population accounts for a majority of their time.”

Hondula’s team is leading the city’s urban forestry and built shade program, as well as coordinating outreach efforts with a growing bank of volunteers to get the word out about the network of cooling centers. The team has expanded to six full-time staff, and funding for the tree shade program is about to double.

But, reducing heat-related illness and deaths—and making the city more comfortable for all its residents—is way beyond the scope of a single team or agency. Keeping people safe will require more affordable housing and temporary shelters, better addiction services, and workplace protections to limit heat exposure, as well as financial aid for those struggling to afford to keep their homes cool.

“It’s not just that the city has never had a heat office. The city has never had a comprehensive coordinated response to heat, and I am increasingly recognizing that this needs to be nurtured and worked on. Simply having the programs that the heat office leads can only be part of the portfolio. We need to be the drivers of a change in approach and tactic across the whole organization. It’s really through the big departments [health, housing, transit] with the big budgets, that we’ll be able to accelerate impact at scale.”

As heat deaths have risen over the past, so has drug use. In 2022, 54% of heat deaths involved drugs compared to 11% a decade ago.

Heat deaths are most common among people experiencing homelessness, and last year accounted for 56% of the death toll compared to 18% in 2012. Four out of five deaths occurred outdoors last year. The unsheltered population is rising, and despite an increase in shelters, thousands of people are sleeping in tents, shop doorways, parks, and parking lots where the ambient temperature is much much higher than the record-breaking air temps—especially at night when winds are weak, and the extra heat absorbed by the asphalt and concrete structures during the day is re-radiated into the atmosphere.

“The multifaceted nature of the challenge for the unsheltered community remains at the top of mind. It’s not like there’s one singular answer for all the different circumstances that folks are in…it is challenging,” said Hondula.

For years, the mainstay of the city’s heat relief response has been a network of city and volunteer-run cooling centers—air-conditioned halls, libraries, and other facilities, which are popular though there is little empirical evidence of their impact.

Most operate during office hours, none are open overnight, and some exclude people with pets or luggage or those who can’t keep awake—which are often signs someone is homeless. Last month, the city deployed a cooling bus to the downtown area where many of the unsheltered people are concentrated, as part of the emergency response to the unprecedented heat—which activists have criticized as inadequate.

Hundreds of people have used the cooling bus, but the death toll continues to rise—and ultimately reducing deaths is what the heat team will be judged on. Hondula says he is both “disappointed” and “motivated” by the deaths, and that it’s too soon to know which services and programs are effective— and have perhaps prevented some deaths and illnesses.