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New England kicks off $450M plan to supercharge heat pump adoption

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Saturday, November 29, 2025

New England winters can get wicked cold. This week, five of the region’s states launched a $450 million effort to warm more homes in the often-frigid region with energy-efficient, low-emission heat pumps instead of by burning fossil fuels. “It’s a big deal,” said Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “It’s unprecedented to see five states aligning together on a transformational approach to deploying more affordable clean-heat options.” The New England Heat Pump Accelerator is a collaboration between Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The initiative is funded by the federal Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, which was created by President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The accelerator’s launch marks a rare milestone for a Biden-era climate initiative amid the Trump administration’s relentless attempts to scrap federal clean energy and environmental programs. The goal: Get more heat pumps into more homes through a combination of financial incentives, educational outreach, and workforce development. New England is a rich target for such an effort because of its current dependence on fossil-fuel heating. Natural gas and propane are in wide use, and heating oil is still widespread throughout the region; more than half of Maine’s homes are heated by oil, and the other coalition states all use oil at rates much higher than the national average. The prevalence of oil in particular means there’s plenty of opportunity to grow heat-pump adoption, cut emissions, and lower residents’ energy bills. Read Next Installing heat pumps in factories could save $1.5 trillion and 77,000 lives Matt Simon At the same time, heat pumps have faced barriers in the region, including the upfront cost of equipment, New England’s high price of electricity, and misconceptions about heat pumps’ ability to work in cold weather. “There’s not a full awareness that these cold-temperature heat pumps can handle our winters, and do it at a cost that is lower than many of our delivered fuels,” said Joseph DeNicola, deputy commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. To some degree, the momentum is shifting. Maine has had notable success, hitting its aim of 100,000 new heat pump installations in 2023, two years ahead of its initial deadline. Massachusetts is on track to reach its 2025 target, but needs adoption rates to rise in order to make its 2030 goal. The accelerator aims to speed up adoption by supporting the installation of some 580,000 residential heat pumps, which would reduce carbon emissions by 2.5 million metric tons by 2030 — the equivalent of taking more than 540,000 gas-powered passenger vehicles off the road. The initiative is organized into three program areas, or “hubs,” as planners called them during a webinar kicking off the accelerator this week. The largest portion of money, some $270 million, will go to the “market hub.” Distributors will receive incentives for selling heat pumps. They will keep a small percentage of the money for themselves and pass most of the savings on to the contractors buying the equipment. The contractors, in turn, will pass the lower price on to the customers. In addition to reducing upfront costs for consumers, this approach is designed to shift the market by encouraging distributors to keep the equipment in stock, therefore making it an easier choice for contractors and their customers. Read Next 10 charts prove that clean energy is winning — even in the Trump era Umair Irfan, Vox, Benji Jones, Adam Clark Estes, & Sam Delgado, Vox These midstream incentives are expected to reduce the cost of cold-climate air-source heat pumps by $500 to $700 per unit and heat-pump water heaters by $200 to $300 per unit. When contractors buy the appliances, the incentive will be applied automatically — no extra paperwork or claims process required. “It should be very simple for contractors to access this funding,” said Ellen Pfeiffer, a senior manager with Energy Solutions, a clean energy consultancy that is helping implement the program. “It should be almost seamless.” Consumers will also remain eligible for any incentives available through state efficiency programs, such as rebates from Mass Save or Efficiency Maine, but will likely not be able to stack the accelerator benefits with federal incentives like the Home Efficiency Rebates and Home Electrification and Appliances Rebate programs. Program planners expect to be finalizing the incentive levels through the end of the year, enrolling and training distributors in the early months of 2026, and making the first participating products available in February 2026, said New England Heat Pump Accelerator program manager Jennifer Gottlieb Elazhari. The second program area is the innovation hub. Each state will receive $14.5 million to fund one or two pilot programs testing out new ways to overcome barriers to heat pump adoption by low- and moderate-income households and in disadvantaged communities. One state might, for example, create a lending library of window-mounted air-source heat pumps, allowing someone whose oil heating breaks down all the time to research replacement options rather than just installing new oil equipment. The innovation hub will also include workforce development and training. Organizers are talking with contractors and other partners to figure out where the gaps are in heat pump training. In the first few months of 2026, they will develop a program with a target start date in April. The goal will be not only to ensure that there are tradespeople with the needed skills to install the systems, but also to lay the groundwork for faster adoption by spreading knowledge about the capabilities of the technology and the available incentives. The third major area of the accelerator is a resource hub to aggregate information for contractors, distributors, program implementers, and other stakeholders. Overall, organizers hope to have all three hubs operational in spring 2026. Accelerator planners expect programs to boost adoption even as a federal tax credit of up to $2,000 on heat pumps and heat-pump water heaters is phased out at the end of the year, leaving states to lead the way on clean energy action. “At the state level, this is one example of a way we are helping to make progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but with a solution that can help people take control of their energy costs,” Dykes said. “That’s really what we’re focused on.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New England kicks off $450M plan to supercharge heat pump adoption on Nov 29, 2025.

The program aims to use federal funds awarded under the Biden administration to deploy more than 500,000 heat pumps in the chilly region over the next few years.

“It’s a big deal,” said Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “It’s unprecedented to see five states aligning together on a transformational approach to deploying more affordable clean-heat options.”

The New England Heat Pump Accelerator is a collaboration between Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The initiative is funded by the federal Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program, which was created by President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The accelerator’s launch marks a rare milestone for a Biden-era climate initiative amid the Trump administration’s relentless attempts to scrap federal clean energy and environmental programs.

The goal: Get more heat pumps into more homes through a combination of financial incentives, educational outreach, and workforce development.

New England is a rich target for such an effort because of its current dependence on fossil-fuel heating. Natural gas and propane are in wide use, and heating oil is still widespread throughout the region; more than half of Maine’s homes are heated by oil, and the other coalition states all use oil at rates much higher than the national average. The prevalence of oil in particular means there’s plenty of opportunity to grow heat-pump adoption, cut emissions, and lower residents’ energy bills.

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The Mystery of the Missing Porcupines

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Porcupines are easy to recognize but hard to find—so elusive, in fact, that few people have ever seen one in the wild. Emilio Tripp, a wildlife manager and citizen of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, might have been one of the lucky ones. On a nighttime drive with his father in the late 1990s, a ghostly silhouette flashed by the window. “That was my only time I’ve even thought I’ve seen one,” he recalled decades later. Tripp still can’t say for sure whether it was a kaschiip, the Karuk word for porcupine, but he holds on to the memory like a talisman. The 43-year-old hasn’t seen another porcupine since. Porcupine encounters are rare among his tribe, and the few witnesses seem to fit a pattern: Almost all of them are elders, and they fondly remember an abundance of porcupines until the turn of this century. Now, each new sighting rings like an echo from the past: a carcass on the road; a midnight run-in. The tribe can’t help wondering: Where did all the porcupines go? “It’s important for (porcupines) to be a part of our landscape. That’s part of why they’re chosen to be part of this ceremonial item.” “Everyone’s concerned,” Tripp said. “If there were more (observations), we’d hear about it.” The decline isn’t just in Northern California: Across the West, porcupines are vanishing. Wildlife scientists are racing to find where porcupines are still living, and why they’re disappearing. Others, including the Karuk Tribe, are already thinking ahead, charting ambitious plans to restore porcupines to their forests. Porcupines are walking pincushions. Their permanently unkempt hairdo is actually a protective fortress of some 30,000 quills. But their body armor can be a liability, too—porcupines are known to accidentally quill themselves. “They’re big and dopey and slow,” said Tim Bean, an ecologist at California Polytechnic State University who has collared porcupines as part of his research. They waddle from tree to tree, usually at night, to snack on foliage or the nutrient-rich inner layer of bark. But these large rodents are far from universally beloved. Their tree-gnawing habits damage lumber, and the timber industry has long regarded them as pests. Widespread poisoning and hunting campaigns took place throughout the 1900s in the US Between 1957 and 1959, Vermont alone massacred over 10,800 porcupines. Forest Service officials in California declared open season on porcupines in 1950, claiming that the species would ultimately destroy pine forests. Though state bounty programs had ended by 1979, porcupine numbers have not rebounded. Recent surveys by researchers in British Columbia, Arizona, western Montana and Northern California show that porcupines remain scarce in those regions today. Historically, porcupine populations haven’t been well-monitored, so scientists can’t say for sure whether they are still declining or simply haven’t recovered after decades of persecution. “We still don’t understand (why) they’re not reproducing and filling back in.” But anecdotal evidence from those who recall when sightings were common is enough to ring alarm bells. Similar patterns appear to be playing out across the West: Veterinarians are treating fewer quilled pets, for example, and longtime rural homeowners have noticed fewer porcupines lurking in their backyards. Hikers’ accounts note that porcupines are harder to find than ever before. Some forest ecosystems are already showing the effects of losing an entire species from the food chain: In the Sierra Nevada, an endangered member of the weasel family called the fisher is suffering from lack of the protein porcupines once provided. As a result, the fishers are scrawnier and birth smaller litters in the Sierras than they do elsewhere. Porcupines are culturally important to the Karuk Tribe, whose members weave quills into cultural and ceremonial items, such as baskets. But these days, the tribe imports quills more often than it harvests them. That’s more than just an inconvenience: Not being able to gather quills locally constitutes a form of lost connection between tribal members and their homelands. “It’s important for (porcupines) to be a part of our landscape. That’s part of why they’re chosen to be part of this ceremonial item,” Tripp said. Erik Beever, an ecologist at the US Geological Survey, worries that the great porcupine vanishing act points to a broader trend. Across the country, biodiversity is declining faster than scientists can track it. The porcupine might just be one example of what Beever calls “this silent erosion of animal abundance.” But no one really knows what’s going on. Beever said, “We’re wondering whether the species is either increasing or declining without anybody even knowing.” Scientists are racing to fill this knowledge gap. Bean and his team combed through a century’s worth of public records to map porcupine distribution patterns in the Pacific Northwest. Roadkill databases, wildlife agency reports and citizen science hits revealed that porcupines are dwindling in conifer forests but popping up in nontraditional habitats, such as deserts and grasslands. Beever is now leading a similar study across the entire Western United States. Concerned scientists have several theories about why porcupines have not returned to their former stomping grounds. Illegal marijuana farms, which are often tucked away in forests, use rodenticides that kill many animals, including porcupines, while increased protections for apex predators like mountain lions may have inadvertently increased the decline of porcupines. On top of all this, porcupines have low reproduction rates, birthing only a single offspring at a time. “Things don’t seem to be getting better in over the course of my lifetime.” Understanding porcupine distribution isn’t easy. Porcupines are generalists, inhabiting a wide variety of forest types, so it’s challenging for researchers to know where to look. As herbivores, porcupines aren’t that easy to bait, either. Scientists have experimented with using brine-soaked wood blocks, peanut butter and even porcupine urine to coax the cautious critters toward cameras, but with only mixed success. In 34 years of both baited and unbaited camera surveys by the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center in the Sierra Nevada, porcupines have only shown up three times. “It’s a mystery,” said John Buckley, the center’s executive director. “We still don’t understand (why) they’re not reproducing and filling back in where there’s very little disturbance of their habitat, like Yosemite National Park.” The Karuk tribe is eager to bring porcupines back. But first, the tribe needs to figure out where healthy populations may already exist. Years of camera trap surveys have turned up scant evidence of the creature’s presence; one area that Tripp considers a “hotspot” had photographed a single porcupine. “That’s how rare they are,” Tripp said. So Karuk biologists are considering other methods, including using trained dogs to conduct scat surveys. Reintroducing the species would require a delicate balancing act. Porcupines are already scarce, and it’s unclear whether already-small source populations could afford to lose a few members to be reintroduced elsewhere. Still, Tripp feels like it’s time to act, since the ecosystem doesn’t appear to be healing on its own. “Things don’t seem to be getting better in over the course of my lifetime,” Tripp said. Yet his actions betray some lingering optimism. Tripp, his wife and daughter still regularly attend basket-weaving events involving quills, doing their part to uphold the Karuk’s age-old traditions that honor the porcupine. It’s a small act of stubborn hope—that, perhaps in a few years, the tribe will be able to welcome the porcupine home.

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More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate

Workers say the firm’s ‘warp-speed’ approach fuels pressure, layoffs and rising emissionsMore than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to “democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations. Continue reading...

More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to “democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations.Among the signatories are staffers in a range of positions, including engineers, product managers and warehouse associates.Reflecting broader AI concerns across the industry, the letter was also supported by more than 2,400 workers from companies including Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft.The letter contains a range of demands for Amazon, concerning its impact on the workplace and the environment. Staffers are calling on the company to power all its data centers with clean energy, make sure its AI-powered products and services do not enable “violence, surveillance and mass deportation”, and form a working group comprised of non-managers “that will have significant ownership over org-level goals and how or if AI should be used in their orgs, how or if AI-related layoffs or headcount freezes are implemented, and how to mitigate or minimize the collateral effects of AI use, such as environmental impact”.The letter was organized by employees affiliated with the advocacy group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. One worker who was involved in drafting the letter explained that workers were compelled to speak out because of negative experiences with using AI tools in the workplace, as well as broader environmental concerns about the AI boom. The staffers, the employee said, wanted to advocate for a better way to develop, deploy and use the technology.“I signed the letter because of leadership’s increasing emphasis on arbitrary productivity metrics and quotas, using AI as justification to push myself and my colleagues to work longer hours and push out more projects on tighter deadlines,” said a senior software engineer, who has been with the company for over a decade, and requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal.Climate goalsThe letter accuses Amazon of “casting aside its climate goals to build AI”.Like other companies in the generative AI race, Amazon has invested heavily in building new data centers to power new tools – which are more resource intensive and demand high amounts of electricity to operate. The company plans to spend $150bn on data centers in the next 15 years, and just recently said it will invest $15bn to build data centers in northern Indiana and at least $3bn for data centers in Mississippi.The letter claims that Amazon’s annual emissions have “grown roughly 35% since 2019”, despite the company’s promise in 2019 to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. It warns many of Amazon’s investments in AI infrastructure will be in “locations where their energy demands will force utility companies to keep coal plans online or build new gas plants”.“‘AI’ is being used as a magic word that is code for less worker power, hoarding of more resources, and making an uninformed gamble on high energy demand computer chips magically saving us from climate change,” said an Amazon customer researcher, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation for speaking out. “If we can build a climate saving AI – that’s awesome! But that’s not what Amazon is spending billions of dollars to develop. They are investing fossil fuel energy draining data centers for AI that is intended to surveil, exploit, and squeeze every extra cent out of customers, communities, and government agencies.”In a statement to the Guardian, Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser pushed back on employees’ claims and pointed toward the company’s climate goals. “Not only are we the leading data center operator in efficiency, we’re the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for five consecutive years with over 600 projects globally,” said Glasser. “We’ve also invested significantly in nuclear energy through existing plants and new SMR technology–these aren’t distractions, they’re concrete actions demonstrating real progress toward our Climate Pledge commitment to reach net-zero carbon across our global operations by 2040.”AI for productivityThe letter also includes strict demands around the role of AI in the Amazon workplace, demands that, staffers say, arose out of challenges employees are experiencing.Three Amazon employees who spoke to the Guardian claimed that the company is pressuring them to use AI tools for productivity, in an effort to increase output. “I’m getting messaging from my direct manager and [from] of all the way up the chain, about how I should be using AI for coding, for writing, for basically all of my day-to-day tasks, and that those will make me more efficient, and also that if I don’t get on board and use them, that I’m going to fall behind, that it’s sort of sink or swim,” said a software engineer who has been with Amazon for over two years, requesting anonymity due to fear of reprisal.The worker added that just weeks ago she was told by her manager that they were “expected to do twice as much work because of AI tools”, and expressed concern that the output expected demanded with fewer people is unsustainable, and “the tools are just not making up that gap.”The customer researcher echoed similar concerns. “I have both personally felt the pressure to use AI in my role, and hear from so many of my colleagues they are under the same pressure …”.“All the while, there’s no discussion about the immediate effects on us as workers – from unprecedented layoffs to unrealistic expectations for output.”The senior software engineer said that the adoption of AI has had imperfect outcomes. He said that most commonly, workers are pressured to adopt agentic code generation tools: “Recently I worked on a project that was just cleaning up after a high-level engineer tried to use AI to generate code to complete a complex project,” said this worker. “But none of it worked and he didn’t understand why – starting from scratch would have actually been easier.”Amazon did not respond to questions about the staffers’ workplace critiques about AI use.Workers emphasized they are not against AI outright, rather they want it to be developed sustainably and with input from the people building and using it. “I see Amazon using AI to justify a power grab over community resources like water and energy, but also over its own workers, who are increasingly subject to surveillance, work speedups, and implicit threats of layoffs,” said the senior software engineer. “There is a culture of fear around openly discussing the drawbacks of AI at work, and one thing the letter is setting out to accomplish is to show our colleagues that many of us feel this way and that another path is possible.”

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Australia finally acknowledges environment underpins all else. That’s no small thing | Ken Henry

In what are dangerous times for democracies around the world, parliament’s overhaul of nature laws in the EPBC Act shows ambitious reform remains possibleSign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter hereGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastThe passage of long overdue reforms to the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act demonstrates powerfully that democratic governance is alive and well in Australia.The Australian parliament has done its job and passed 21st-century reforms that support a modern economy, enable the creation of new and sustainable jobs while promising not to destroy, but in fact improve, the health of the natural world. Continue reading...

The passage of long overdue reforms to the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act demonstrates powerfully that democratic governance is alive and well in Australia.The Australian parliament has done its job and passed 21st-century reforms that support a modern economy, enable the creation of new and sustainable jobs while promising not to destroy, but in fact improve, the health of the natural world. This is no small thing. In what are clearly dangerous times for democracies around the world, the Australian parliament has demonstrated emphatically that ambitious economic reform remains possible. And yes, I do mean “economic” reform.As in the past, courageous leadership has been rewarded with agreement. As in the past, the parliament has engaged constructively, in the national interest, rising above the debilitating personality politics and culture wars of recent years.Sign up: AU Breaking News emailThe winners stand to be future generations of Australians. In this instance, our elected representatives have demonstrated they understand that this is where their most weighty obligation is owed. But meeting that obligation is hard. Democracies often appear carefully designed to reward short-termism. Yet the success of a parliament can only be assessed according to what it does for the future. In the final sitting week of 2025, the Australian parliament appears to have delivered.The package of reforms to the EPBC Act fixes an ugly policy mess. The mess had been called out in several reviews, including Graeme Samuel’s review delivered more than five years ago.As I observed in an address to the National Press Club mid-year, report after report tells the same story of failure. The environment is simply not being protected. Biodiversity is not being conserved. Nature is in systemic decline. The environmental impact assessment systems embedded in the laws are simply not fit for purpose. Of particular concern, they are incapable of supporting an economy in transition to net zero.The mess of poorly constructed environmental laws has been undermining productivity. I noted that we simply cannot afford slow, opaque, duplicative and contested environmental planning decisions based on poor information, mired in administrative complexity.This week’s reforms promise to fix the mess.The reformed act will deliver a set of standards that aim to protect matters of national environmental significance. It will provide certainty for all stakeholders about impacts that must be regarded as “unacceptable” and therefore avoided.It builds integrity into the administration of the laws through the establishment of an independent, national EPA. It promises to end the absurd carveout for native forests, the landscapes that remain most richly endowed with biodiversity and healthy ecosystem functioning. And it lays the foundations for the development of regional plans that provide an opportunity for the three levels of government to work with local communities, including First Nations custodians, to design sustainable futures.Significantly, long-overdue protection will be provided for our forests. The lungs of the Earth, a lifeboat against climate change, a filter against sentiment destroying the Great Barrier Reef and a haven for wildlife will be provided real protection, while incentives will be provided to support a modern forestry industry based on plantations.And there is another thing that should be called out at this time. This may be the most important thing.For centuries, humans have believed that economic and social progress necessarily comes at the expense of the environment. We have believed that the destruction of the natural world is a price that must be paid for everything else that matters to us; as we accumulate physical and financial capital, we must run down the stock of natural capital.We have acted as if we can choose, indefinitely, to trade-off environmental integrity for material gains. Our choices have created deserts, waterways incapable of supporting life, soils leached of fertility, climate change driving weather events of such severity and frequency that whole towns, suburbs and agricultural landscapes are fast becoming uninsurable.This week’s amendments acknowledge that the state of the natural world is foundational. That without its rebuilding, future economic and social progress cannot be secured.We should think of economic and social progress as exercises in constrained optimisation. This framing is familiar to those immersed in economic policy. And yet, as I noted in the National Press Club address, economics has for the most part ignored the most important constraints on human choices. These are embedded in the immutable laws of nature. Our failure to recognise that is now undermining productivity growth and having a discernible impact on economic performance. It threatens livelihoods, even lives.Writing into law an acknowledgment that environmental protection and biodiversity conservation necessarily underpin everything else, and that they must therefore have primacy, is a profound achievement. An unprecedented bequest to future generations.

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EPA cements delay of Biden-era methane rule for oil and gas

The Trump administration on Wednesday cemented its delay of Biden-era regulations on planet-warming methane coming from the oil and gas industry. Earlier this year, the administration issued an “interim final rule” that pushed back compliance deadlines for the Biden-era climate rule by 18 months. On Wednesday, it announced a final rule that locks in the delay. The delays apply to requirements to install certain technologies meant to reduce emissions. It also applies to timelines for states to create plans for cutting methane emissions from existing oil and gas. Methane is a gas that is about 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide at heating the planet over a 100-year period. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin said that the administration was acting in order to protect U.S. energy production. “The previous administration used oil and gas standards as a weapon to shut down development and manufacturing in the United States,” Zeldin said in a written statement. “By finalizing compliance extensions, EPA is ensuring unrealistic regulations do not prevent America from unleashing energy dominance,” he added. However, environmental advocates say that the delay will result in more pollution. “The methane standards are already working to reduce pollution, protect people’s health, and prevent the needless waste of American energy. The rule released today means millions of Americans will be exposed to dangerous pollution for another year and a half, for no good reason,” Grace Smith, senior attorney at Environmental Defense Fund, said in a written statement. Meanwhile, the delay comes as the Trump administration reconsiders the rule altogether, having put it on a hit list of regulations earlier this year. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Analysis-Brazil Environment Minister, Climate Summit Star, Faces Political Struggle at Home

By Manuela AndreoniBELEM, Brazil (Reuters) -Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva fought back tears as global diplomats applauded her for...

BELEM, Brazil (Reuters) -Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva fought back tears as global diplomats applauded her for several minutes on Saturday in the closing plenary of the COP30 global climate summit."We've made progress, albeit modestly," she told delegates gathered in the Amazon rainforest city of Belem, before raising a fist over her head defiantly. "The courage to confront the climate crisis comes from persistence and collective effort."It was a moment of catharsis for the Brazilian hosts in a tense hall where several nations vented frustration with a deal that failed to mention fossil fuels - even as they cheered more funds for developing nations adapting to climate change.Despite the bittersweet outcome, COP30 capped years of work by the environment minister and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to restore Brazil's leadership on global climate policy, dented by a far-right predecessor who denied climate science.Back in Brasilia, a harsher political reality looms. Congress has been pushing to dismantle much of the country's environmental permitting system. Organized crime in the Amazon is also a problem, and people seeking to clear forest acres have found new ways to infiltrate and thwart groups touting sustainable development.All this poses new threats to Brazil's vast ecosystems, forcing Lula and his minister to wage a rearguard battle to defend the world's largest rainforest. Scientists and policy experts warn that action is needed to discourage deforestation before a changing climate turns the Amazon into a tinderbox. Tensions have been mounting between a conservative Congress and the leftist Lula ahead of next year's general election. Forest land is often at heightened risk during election years.Still, Silva insists Brazil can deliver on its promise to reduce deforestation to zero by 2030. "If I'm in the eye of the storm," she told Reuters, "I have to survive."Silva, born in 1958 in the Amazonian state of Acre to an impoverished family of rubber tappers, was more rock star than policymaker for many at COP30. Like Lula, she overcame hunger and scant early schooling to achieve global recognition. As his environment minister from 2003 to 2008, she sharply slowed the destruction of her native rainforest.After more than a decade of estrangement from Lula's Workers Party, Silva reunited with him in 2022. Many environmentalists consider her return the most important move on climate policy in Lula's current mandate, which he has cast his agenda as an "ecological transformation" of Brazil's economy.It is a stark contrast from surging deforestation under Lula's right-wing predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, who cheered on mining and ranching in the rainforest.Still, Lula's actual environmental record has been ambiguous, said Juliano Assuncao, executive director of the Climate Policy Institute think tank in Brazil. "What we have at times is an Environment Ministry deeply committed to these issues, but at critical moments it hasn't been able to count on the support of the federal government in the way it should," he said.Lula's government has halved deforestation in the Amazon, making it easier to fine deforesters and choke their access to public credit. New policies have encouraged reforestation and sustainable farming practices, such as cattle tracing.Still, critics say Lula's government has not done enough to stop Congress as it undercut environmental protections and blocked recognition of Indigenous lands. Lawmakers have also attacked a private-sector agreement protecting the Amazon from the advance of soy farming.Lula's environmental critics concede he has limited leverage.When a government agency was slow to license oil exploration off the Amazon coast, the Senate pushed legislation to overhaul environmental permitting. Lula vetoed much of the bill, but lawmakers vowed to restore at least part of it this week. Similar tensions in Lula's last mandate prompted Silva to quit over differences with other cabinet ministers. This time around, Lula has been quick to defend her and vice-versa. During a recent interview in her Brasilia office, Silva suggested that Lula had not changed, but rather that a warming planet has ratcheted up the urgency of climate policy."Reality has changed," she said. "People who are guided by scientific criteria, by common sense, by ethics, have followed that gradual change." HIGHER TEMPERATURES, MORE GUNSEarth's hottest year on record was 2024, fueling massive fires in the Amazon rainforest that for the first time erased more tree cover than chainsaws and bulldozers.Brazilians hoping to preserve the Amazon must struggle against more than just a warmer climate and a skeptical Congress. Organized crime has grown in the region after years of tight funding left fewer federal personnel to fight back, said Jair Schmitt, who oversees enforcement at Brazil's environmental protection agency Ibama. Ibama agents have been caught more often in shootouts with gangs, he added, suggesting more guns than ever in the region. "Rifles weren't this easy to find before," he said.Another challenge: Illegal deforesters have also infiltrated Amazon supply chains touting their sustainability, from biofuels to carbon credits, Reuters has reported. To overcome them, Brazil will need to steel its political will, said Marcio Astrini, the head of Climate Observatory, an advocacy group. Other than that, he added, "we have everything it takes to succeed."(Reporting by Manuela AndreoniEditing by Brad Haynes and David Gregorio)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

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Suggested Viewing

Ser Manguezal

Ser Manguezal, created by Eliseu Cavalcante, was inspired by Josué de Castro's book "Of Men and Crabs" from 1967. De Castro was a Brazilian geographer, physician, writer and activist against world hunger. In his book, Castro envisions men as crabs, learning to walk in the mangroves. This relationship between them seems to unify and blend all together making the human being part of that specific biome. This film is part of an ongoing project that examines those who depend on the mangrove ecosystem to survive, and the delicate relationship between humans and this particular ecosystem. It seeks to recognize the hard-working crab hunters of the mangroves and make their work more visible, and to bring awareness about the importance of mangroves to the environment. Worldwide, 3,400 square kilometers (1,300 square miles) of mangrove forests were lost between 2000 and 2016, or about 2% of the global mangrove area (NASA). About 62% of the losses were due to direct human causes such as agriculture and aquaculture. Mangrove degradation is greater than the average for tropical and subtropical forest loss.

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Plants

Carbon Men Salvation: The Senator's Dilemma

Climate change is heating up the world at an accelerating rate, but Congress is frozen to action. Humanity is heading towards devastation; there is only one chance to change the future by traveling into the past. Brilliant climatologist student Anna Jones is researching a massive glacier in Antarctica that is on the verge of collapse. This disaster will drown coastal cities, trigger unprecedented climate refugee numbers and loss of life, while inciting wars. Anna’s father, Dan Jones, the newly elected Senator from New Jersey, is pivotal to the success or failure of a key climate bill. The vote is imminent. Powerful climate denier factions work against the necessary climate actions, even as the planet teeters on the prime tipping point where human behavior, science and legislation collide. Only Noah Poem, a time traveling scientist from the future, can help Anna Jones convince her climate doubting father to do the right thing. But time is running out as science fiction meets science fact. The fate of the human race hangs in the balance. One vote could save humanity.

Government

Climate

Activism

Rise and Fall

A film to provide an awareness of climate change and the individual measures we can take to combat it. The production process of Rise and Fall began as your stereotypical documentary meant to showcase various aspects of the Earth and Ocean Sciences Department at UNCW. Still, as the interview process was underway, it was quickly decided to move in another direction. It is an essay film about the science of climate change, what we can do in our day-to-day lives to combat it, and its impacts. Without using talking heads, the images of the natural world provide a sensual look at what will be affected by climate change.

Climate

Nature

Documentary

Living with Landslides

This film documents the devastating costs of landslides to both private property owners and taxpayers, and offers solutions. Climate change means landslides will only get worse.

Land Use

Education

Climate

The Pleasure of Killing Bugs

In the near future, the climate crisis reaches an irreversible point. A nun and a priest meet to talk about the disappearance of insects.

Climate

Fiction

Student

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Carbon Men Salvation: The Senator's Dilemma

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a sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

New England kicks off $450M plan to supercharge heat pump adoption

Related News

The Mystery of the Missing Porcupines

More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate

Australia finally acknowledges environment underpins all else. That’s no small thing | Ken Henry

EPA cements delay of Biden-era methane rule for oil and gas

Analysis-Brazil Environment Minister, Climate Summit Star, Faces Political Struggle at Home

Suggested Viewing

Ser Manguezal

Carbon Men Salvation: The Senator's Dilemma

Rise and Fall

Living with Landslides

The Pleasure of Killing Bugs

Join us to forgea sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Join us to forge
a sustainable future