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Climate change activists hang a sign on Tower Bridge during a demonstration against the climate crisis, in central London, Britain, April 8, 2022.
Climate change, Trump tariffs, India rice rules
2.2: As the world gets hotter from climate change, we are using more energy to cool ourselves down, which is making climate change worse. According to the IEA, record-high temps in 2024 were responsible for half of the rise in emissions from energy – as severe heat waves caused air conditioning usage to surge, fueling electricity demand, and in turn raising emissions. This contributed to a 2.2% increase in global energy demand, up from 1.8% the year before. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions from energy consumption grew by 0.8% over the past year.
25: Donald Trump on Monday announced a 25% tariff on all imports from countries that buy Venezuelan oil or gas, starting April 2, alongside new tariffs on Venezuela itself. Venezuela will face a “secondary” tariff because it is the home to the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump said is sending members to the US.
40: India has lifted its restrictions on rice exports, a move that should help curb food price inflation and increase agricultural workers’ salaries amid an economic slowdown in the country. Initially imposed after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine to prevent domestic shortages, the curbs drove up prices worldwide. As the largest rice exporter – accounting for over 40% of global rice exports – India’s decision should benefit poorer nations, especially in Africa, where rising food costs have fueled unrest. However, it will come at a cost for other rice-producing countries like Thailand and Pakistan, which worry that India will flood the market and prices will plummet.
93: US egg imports from Brazil surged 93% in February as a part of the Trump administration’s $1 billion plan to lower egg prices, which includes upping imports, helping farmers prevent the spread of the virus, and researching vaccine options. The eggs will end up in processed foods, freeing up more fresh eggs for grocery shelves. The US Food and Drug Administration is also reviewing a petition from the National Chicken Council to allow for the sale of eggs laid by chickens raised for meat – something it has previously forbidden because of salmonella risks.
200,000: Speaking of eggs, the Trump administration is seeking corporate sponsors for the White House Easter Egg Roll, a departure from tradition. Sponsorship packages range from $75,000 to $200,000, offering perks like logo placement, media engagement, and exclusive tickets. But there will still be a number of free tickets available.
At a joint press conference in front of the Constitutional Court in Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea, on August 29, 2024, youth climate litigants and citizen groups involved in climate lawsuits chant slogans emphasizing that the court ruling marks not the end, but the beginning of climate action. The Constitutional Court rules that the failure to set carbon emission reduction targets for the period from 2031 to 2049 is unconstitutional and orders the government to enact alternative legislation by February 2026.
South Korea’s climate verdict: A catalyst for worldwide legal action
South Korea’s constitutional court has ruled that the country’s climate change measures are insufficient for protecting the rights of citizens, particularly those of future generations. On Thursday, it ordered the government to go back to the drawing board to set more ambitious — and legally binding — carbon-reduction targets for 2031 and beyond.
The ruling was based on a case involving 250 plaintiffs — one-third of them children or teenagers — upset by the absence of legally binding greenhouse gas emission targets. The court agreed with them and said the lack of targets beyond 2030 shifted an undue burden onto future generations.
“Environmental litigation is becoming a global phenomenon. A key catalyst is the UN’s 2022 resolution, which established a universal right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment,” says Franck Gbaguidi, director of global sustainability at Eurasia Group. “It has given more power to existing climate laws and made it easier to take legal action against environmental harm without necessarily needing to prove specific harm to health, life, or property.”
This ruling is the first of its kind in Asia, but it is “expected to trigger a domino effect across Asia, where many similar cases are in the works,” says Gbaguidi. It comes on the heels of similar rulings in Germany, Switzerland, India, and Montana that governments have a constitutional responsibility to their citizens, current and future, to combat climate change.
“We’re now entering an era of intense legal scrutiny on environmental policies, making it more likely for these cases to succeed,” says Gbaguidi. “This means we’ll see more strategic and sophisticated lawsuits against governments and companies, with courtrooms becoming key battlegrounds for climate change action.”Two hands touching each other in front of a pink background.
Hard Numbers: Startups are up, Google gas, Brazil dings Meta, Slow and steady
27.1 billion: From April to June, investors poured $27.1 billion into US-based artificial intelligence startups, according to PitchBook. That’s nearly half of the $56 billion that all American startups raised during that time. Startup investment is up 57% year over year — something for which the AI industry can claim lots of credit.
48: Google’s greenhouse gas emissions are up a whopping 48% since 2019, thanks in no small part to its investments in AI. In the tech giant’s annual environmental report, it chalked up the increase to “increased data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.” It previously set a goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2030 and now says that’s “extremely ambitious” given the state of the industry. Many AI firms are struggling to meet voluntary emissions goals due to the massive energy demands of training and running models.
9,000: The Brazilian government on Tuesday ordered Meta to stop training its AI models on citizens’ data. The penalty? A fine of 50,000 Reals (about $9,000). The government gave Meta five days to amend its privacy policy and data practices, citing the “fundamental rights” of Brazilians.
75: Bipartisan consensus is hard to come by these days. But in a recent survey of US voters, conducted by the AI Policy Institute, 75% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans said it’s preferable that AI development is slow and steady as opposed to the US racing ahead to gain a strategic advantage over China and other foreign adversaries.
Graphic Truth: Carbon in context
The US and Canada are both racing against the clock to lower their greenhouse gas emissions. As the effects of climate change become more apparent and deadly, countries are grappling with how to curb their emissions without curbing economic growth.
Canada, a resource-rich nation, is at a crossroads. Along with transportation and industry, the oil and gas sector dominates the country's emissions profile. Still, Canada has embarked on an ambitious journey to redefine its environmental legacy with one of the boldest climate commitments: pledging to reduce emissions by 40-45% below 2005 levels by 2030. Policies such as carbon pricing, identified as the top driver of emissions reductions, will prevent 226 megatonnes of carbon pollution from being released by 2030.
Meanwhile, the US energy sector, primarily powered by fossil fuels, is the largest source of emissions, contributing significantly to the nation's carbon footprint. Transportation, industry, and agriculture follow closely behind. But the US has made strides in addressing its emissions through a combination of federal mandates, state-level initiatives, and private-sector innovation. The Clean Power Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, are meant to incentivize the private sector to lead the way in renewable energy innovation and adoption.
Places where oil and gas are produced, however, may experience the most economic upheaval from the clean energy transition, while local communities near fossil fuel industries are more likely to experience environmental degradation and health impacts.President Joe Biden riding around in a Hummer EV during a tour of the General Motors 'Factory ZERO' electric vehicle assembly plant, in Detroit, Michigan, back in 2021.
Biden boosts EVs with new tailpipe emissions rules
As goes the American car market, so goes the world. Or at least large swathes of North America. With the Biden administration’s latest auto regulations, that may mean electric vehicles pull ahead as those with internal combustion engines.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden introduced tailpipe pollution limits that require automakers to reduce carbon emissions from their vehicles by 56% by 2032 based on 2026 levels.
The new rules also require automakers to ramp up EV production. The administration is aiming for full EVs to account for roughly 35 to 56% of all vehicle sales and for plug-in hybrids to make up 13 to 36% within the next eight years. Full EVs currently account for 7.6% of sales.
Conscious of growing American protectionist impulses – and the coming presidential election – Biden hammed hard on protecting American auto jobs, promising the EVs would be made in the US-of-A. Democrats were concerned about alienating unions or automakers and their workers ahead of November.
In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government is planning for 20% of new light-duty vehicles sold to be zero-emissions by 2026, gradually rising to 100% by 2035. Biden’s move may help his cause as it pushes automakers to speed up production on more environmentally friendly vehicles.Trudeau may have to give up the carbon tax stick
After years of staring down opponents to his national carbon tax – which puts a price on emissions and sends taxpayers rebates as a way of encouraging the reduction of climate-harming pollution – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has finally blinked, putting his whole emission-reduction plan in jeopardy. The move raises questions about whether it’s possible to use carrots and sticks to change voter behavior.
The problem started a month ago when a Liberal party member of Parliament from rural Newfoundland voted with the Conservative opposition for a motion to repeal the carbon tax. Turns out, voters in Canada’s rural Atlantic region, many of whom heat their homes with oil, have been letting their representatives know that they don’t appreciate the extra cost of the tax, which comes on top of higher global oil prices. They want carrots, not sticks, from environmental policies.
Ken McDonald, the MP for the riding of Avalon, voted with his people instead of his government. “Everywhere I go, people come up to me and say ... 'We're losing faith in the Liberal party,” he said.
Atlantic voters have been reliable Liberal voters since Trudeau was first elected in 2015, but the polls show support in the region collapsing, putting withering pressure on his MPs. So last week, Trudeau backed down, announcing a three-year pause on the application of the carbon tax to fuel oil, which came as a huge relief to his Atlantic MPs, but not to people in other parts of the country, who heat their homes with cleaner natural gas.
Axing the tax
Trudeau saved himself some pain in one part of the country, but he has undercut the arguments for the tax. His government has always insisted that most people get bigger rebates than it is costing them, but he has now acknowledged it is causing hardship for some, opening the door to similar complaints. It looks like political favoritism. In fact, one of his own ministers gave an interview saying that if Westerners want their fuel tax cut, “perhaps they need to elect more Liberals.”
Strangely enough, Westerners have not welcomed that message, and people in the rest of the country are crying foul. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is so upset that he has threatened to stop remitting carbon tax charged on natural gas.
Meanwhile, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is poised to benefit, since he has made getting rid of the carbon tax the centerpiece of his leadership, holding well-attended “Axe the Tax” rallies in rural Canada, where resistance to the tax is greater than in cities. Poilievre has enjoyed a double-digit lead over the Liberals for months.
“This is not going to convince anybody who was gonna vote for Poilievre because they didn't like the carbon tax to come back,” says Graeme Thompson, a global macro-geopolitics analyst with Eurasia Group. “But they also now risk alienating some of their supporters, maybe more in the center and on the left, who really support action on climate change. I wonder if they've kind of just opened up a bit of a two-front war.”
Not only in Canada
As voters face cost-of-living pressure around the world, politicians are under growing pressure to back away from emission-reduction measures. In September, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak postponed measures designed to bring Britain to net zero by 2050.
But Canada is facing a unique challenge because of US President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is providing huge subsidies to green-tech projects. This provides an opportunity for the Conservatives, who can campaign on dropping Trudeau’s carbon tax and adopting Biden’s plan by subsidizing green projects, says Thompson.
“Take the Biden policy, make it the Conservative policy, say, ‘We’re going to incentivize investment. We're going to incentivize energy production. That’s going to produce jobs. We’re going to get growth, and we’re going to eliminate the carbon tax, and there’s our platform.’”
A problem of design
The Trudeau government has promised there will be no more carve-outs, but the pressure will not stop. Environmentalists are disappointed that Trudeau backed down. Tim Gray, executive director at Environmental Defence in Toronto, worries that the design of Canada’s carbon tax makes it hard to sustain politically because voters notice the increase in their fuel bills and tend not to notice the rebates.
“The way that the carbon pricing system in Canada was designed at the retail level gives you the worst way to go forward in terms of building political support, based on our experience and knowledge of where people arrive on these kinds of issues.”
When he announced the three-year pause, he also announced an Atlantic pilot project for heat pump rebates. Gray thinks the government should have done more of that and paid for it by taking money from the oil companies profiting from the high prices.
“It would have been better to pair deeper investments in fossil fuel transition — not just for oil but also natural gas, etc. — with a windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry because it’s a narrative that is easily explained.”
Trudeau’s carbon tax is one of the government’s signature accomplishments, which enjoyed wide support from environmentalists and climate-conscious voters, a political message that he managed to sell in three election campaigns and that his lawyers successfully fought for in court cases.
But it is starting to look like using sticks as well as carrots to bring down emissions is not going to work, and Canada may eventually be forced to match the American policy, which is all carrot and no stick.
Aerial footage shows raging wildfire in British Columbia of Canada.
Trudeau’s climate compromise?
Leading a government means balancing tradeoffs, for both policy and political gain, and few stories illustrate the choices facing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau more clearly than his sizeable proposed investment in cleaning up Canada’s notoriously dirty oil industry.
Trudeau has styled himself an environmentalist, in part by introducing a national carbon tax and other steps to decarbonize industry in a country that’s the world’s fourth-leading oil producer. But prime ministers must also protect jobs and economic growth where they can, and Canada’s oil and gas sector accounts for about 7% of the country’s GDP and more than 20% of the country’s goods exports.
The trouble is that Canada’s oil sands are tremendously polluting, and that’s why Trudeau’s government has promised C$12.4 billion (US$9.1 billion) in tax credits for the construction of carbon capture systems he hopes will help Canada cut carbon emissions by 40% below 2005 levels by the end of this decade.
Environmental groups and some experts are skeptical the scheme will work on the scale needed to approach that target and would rather see that money invested to develop green technologies that don’t produce carbon that needs to be captured. For Trudeau, this investment plan is a big policy and political gamble.Has Biden ditched the environment?
Back in 2020, candidate Joe Biden vowed to be the greenest president in the history of the United States. This was not a nod to his political coming of age – the soon-to-be octogenarian has been around the block – but rather a reference to Biden’s super ambitious climate agenda.
Fast forward 15 months, and Biden, facing an unprecedented energy crisis, has been accused of doing an about-face on climate, veering into drill, baby, drill territory to encourage more oil production to boost dwindling global supplies.
Promises made, (some) promises kept. Focused on uniting a divided Democratic Party upon taking office, Biden vowed to go big on climate change mitigation. He followed through immediately with a series of executive orders, first rejoining the Paris Climate Accords ditched by his predecessor, realigning the US with nearly 200 countries that agreed to cooperate on keeping global warming levels below 2 degrees Celsius.
Biden also abandoned the Keystone XL Pipeline that would have pumped oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Texas Gulf. His friend next door, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, had seen the writing on the wall but was still stung by the move. Importantly, the decision successfully appeased the left flank of the Democratic Party.
What’s more, while campaigning for the presidency, Biden said there would be “no more drilling” on public lands in a bid to curb fossil fuel extraction and achieve his goal of halving carbon emissions from 2005 levels by the end of the decade.
Enter Putin. Even before February 24, Biden was facing a series of political crises — COVID and the culture wars, inflation, immigration woes — that were hurting his poll numbers. But then Putin pummeled Ukraine, sending the global energy industry into a tailspin and further threatening Biden’s already-cratering credibility at home.
Biden has since tried to pin his inflationary woes on the Kremlin, using the pithy slogan “Putin’s Price Hike” to suggest that rising gas and food prices are an inevitable result of Russian aggression. But Americans remember that prices already started rising last year, so many aren’t buying it.
Desperate times. As oil and gas prices surged, an increasingly desperate Biden has appeared to flip-flop on some of his climate pledges. Crucially, his administration is opening up federal lands across nine states for oil and gas drilling, the first such move since Biden took office.
The embattled president is trying to show working-class Americans – whose support he is wooing ahead of crucial midterm elections in November – that he feels their economic pain. But for another core constituency – environmentalists, many of whom reluctantly backed him – Biden’s recent move is nothing short of a betrayal.
In a bid to placate the greenies’ grumblings, Biden has upped the royalties – from 12.5% to 18.75% – that energy companies must pay when drilling on these lands.
But this strategy could prove self-defeating, disincentivizing already-skeptical energy companies concerned about the costly investment and impact on market valuation from boosting production.
So will Biden’s ploy move the needle? Eurasia Group expert Shari Friedman says this was a political reaction more than an impactful one. It was “aimed at reducing anxiety and taking action in the face of rising gas prices,” she says.
“In reality, there is not much that the Biden administration can do to reduce domestic energy prices in the near term,” Friedman says.
It is one thing to sell leases, but getting an oil rig online takes a long time. “Developers already have vast reserves of both productive and currently undeveloped fossil-fuel leases, and any leases that occur today are unlikely to produce oil for many years,” says Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.
“There is considerable value in curtailing fossil-fuel leasing now and preserving the option to lease or not lease in the future,” he adds.
Complicating matters further is the fact that many of Biden’s climate policies are wrapped up in the Build Back Better Act, which is now dead in the water because of Democratic holdouts. Short of getting that passed – which looks like a pipe dream – Biden is going to struggle to make major investments in emission-reduction schemes anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the president is getting an earful from some Democrats and special interest groups that say he’s reneged on promises that helped secure their backing. But given the severity of the current energy crisis, was there another way?
“I don’t think this was necessarily inevitable from the start, but it is the logical outcome of where we find ourselves,” says Director of Eurasia Group's US desk, Clayton Allen, noting the benefit of hindsight.
But Allen also points out that Biden’s hands were largely tied because of a court order banning his administration from pausing the issuance of new permits for oil and gas leases on federal lands (the litigation is ongoing).*
Western responses to Russia’s aggression have also played a role. The West’s “willingness to respond strongly has expanded the dislocations to oil supply resulting from the war,” Allen says, adding that “markets face an increasing pinch the longer the war goes on.”
Politicians often go back on their word when faced with new realities. But for Biden, who heads an extremely unwieldy Democratic Party, the main problem is that the people he needs on his side want very different things.
* This story was updated on April 29, 2022.