Maeve Allsup

Part of the US is again reeling from a major disaster as Hurricane Helene has left a staggering trail of destruction, and over 100 dead, across the southeast. In Buncombe County, North Carolina, the county manager called the devastation "unthinkable" and said communities "no longer resemble what they were a week ago." Death and destruction is the grim reality our society is facing, as people all over the globe are already experiencing the direct impacts of a rapidly warming planet - warming that is driven primarily by fossil fuels that account for about 75 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Hurricanes Helene and Beryl intensified over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, with Beryl making landfall in southeast Texas in July. That storm knocked out power to over 2 million people in the Houston area, leaving many residents to swelter in the summer heat without access to air conditioning. "A category 1 storm should not have left 2.5 million people without power in 100 degrees. It was a literal nightmare," Houston resident Shauntá Floyd said at a September 25 panel event held last week during Climate Week NYC. Melissa Whittaker, a small business owner in Montpelier, Vermont, continues to face financial hardship more than a year after extreme flooding inundated the state’s small capital city in July 2023. Whittaker and her husband own a downtown Montpelier pizza shop called Positive Pie, and they had to close for six months and completely rebuild following last year’s devastating floods. And as if that wasn’t enough of a nightmare, parts of Vermont experienced more heavy flooding this past July, exactly a year to the day of the horrific 2023 floods. Whittaker said it feels like Vermont is now seeing these extreme floods occur nearly every year, and that the state no longer feels like a safe haven from extreme weather and climate disruption. “I moved to Vermont and I remember thinking, it’s the safest state,” she told me. “It does not feel like that anymore." The human toll of the climate crisis of course extends far beyond the US. From the Pacific Islands and Pakistan to Australia and Belgium, and all across the world, people are speaking out, sharing their personal stories of loss and demanding urgent climate action and climate justice. Read more in my latest piece for One Earth Now. And please subscribe to support my work and get these articles delivered straight to your inbox. https://lnkd.in/e-bpBnt8

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From Ludwig Oscuro Federigan, EMDRCM, CBP" "Since Trump's departure from office in 2021, the global climate narrative has undergone significant transformation. World leaders and organizations have increasingly acknowledged the urgent need for climate action, spurred by alarming scientific reports detailing the rising impacts of climate change, including extreme weather events, heat waves, rising sea levels and biodiversity loss. The catastrophic consequences of inaction have often eclipsed political uncertainties, motivating nations, cities and businesses to enhance their commitments to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and investing in RE." #donaldtrump #climatechange #renewableenergy #renewable https://lnkd.in/gT7yEgwh

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Today is my three-year anniversary at Reuters! It's an honor to cover essential food and agriculture issues for our stellar energy and environment policy team. Here's a few of my favorite themes and stories from the past year: 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗽𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴: The company seeking to build the world's largest CO2 pipeline in the Midwest has pledged its captured carbon won't be used for oil recovery. But state regulatory filings and recordings of public appearances by company executives showed a different message for North Dakota's oil industry. https://lnkd.in/eEkpi4pr 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗲𝗲𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲-𝘀𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗮𝗴: Farm practices like planting cover crops and reducing farmland tilling are key to the USDA's plan for slashing agriculture emissions, but my interviews with soil science experts and a review of the agency's research indicate doubt that the approach will be effective. https://lnkd.in/e8RsD8H5 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗿𝗱 𝗳𝗹𝘂 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆: Dairy cows infected with bird flu in five states have died or been slaughtered by farmers because they did not recover, suggesting the outbreak in cows could take a greater economic toll in the farm belt than initially thought. https://lnkd.in/eZmAbJMf 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗿𝗼𝗼𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗴 𝗽𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲: Landowner resistance to the Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline project reflects deep-seated public concern about carbon capture and storage (CCS) and its potential risks. https://lnkd.in/e9qurCbz

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Let's not forget the meat-guzzling population. Factory farms have a devastating impact on our planet. It's a major contributor to deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and water pollution. Factory Farms generate substantial amounts of waste that pollute waterways and contribute to climate change. It is essential for us to recognize the environmental harm caused by factory farming and strive to significantly reduce the consumption of meat.

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The Pact for the Future is the sprawling summit outcome adopted by world leaders at the UN today. It's 65 pages long. TL:DR? My piece for Lex International's Spoiler Alert shares my 5 takeaways! Covers Security Council reform, the role of the General Assembly, the need for mediation, autonomous weapons and the need for a woman Secretary-General. https://lnkd.in/e3CbZBi3

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The Unfinished Project of #Enlightenment What Jürgen Habermas’s sweeping history of Western #philosophy leaves out. by Brandon Bloch "No  one in the world feels the weakness of general characterizing more than I.” So lamented Johann Gottfried von Herder, towering figure of the German Enlightenment, in his 1774 treatise This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity. “One draws together peoples and periods of time that follow one another in an eternal succession like waves of the sea,” Herder wrote. “Whom has one painted? Whom has the depicting word captured?” For Herder, the Enlightenment dream of grasping human history as a seamless whole came up against the irreducible particularity of individuals and cultures. The German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, among the most influential thinkers of our time, grapples with much the same problem in his new work, the title of which reverses the order of Herder’s terms: This Too a History of Philosophy. Published in German last September, Habermas’s History spans over 3,000 years and 1,700 pages. It marks the apogee of a singular career. Like his eighteenth-century precursor, Habermas seeks a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the sweep of human history. “Philosophical problems,” he writes, are distinctive from merely “scientific” ones in their “synthetic force.” For Habermas, the fragmentation of modern life has hardly exhausted philosophy’s capacity for bold questions and architectonic structure. To be sure, the work pays homage to the legacy of postmodern critique. Wary of Herder’s pitfalls of “general characterizing,” Habermas eschews airy speculation for dense textual reconstruction. But this history of philosophy, no less than Enlightenment philosophies of history, is driven by a teleological intent, a principle that threads through history’s seeming randomness and contingency. For Herder, that principle was humanity’s “formation” (Bildung), a foundational concept of the German Enlightenment linking the moral development of the individual with the progress of civilization. For Habermas, it is instead a collective “learning process” (Lernprozess). History, in Habermas’s telling, is the story of humanity’s learning, a record of problems solved and challenges overcome. “New knowledge about the objective world” alongside “social crises,” he explains, create “cognitive dissonances.” These dissonances propel societies to adopt novel modes of understanding and interaction. ... https://lnkd.in/eBCMycfJ

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May is the busy Budget season for public sector reporters, so busy that it's hard to find time for social media posts. So, belatedly, here is my column from this morning, focused on the big idea driving the government's Budget strategy - social investment (although it will kick in more in 2025). I trace the social investment idea from its introduction into mainstream economics 100 years ago to its revival by 'third way' centre-let governments from the 1990s - including the Clark government. The ideological differences surrounding the social investment concept are not as straightforward as they may seem. The left argues it's a standard right-wing privatisation agenda, while the right contends that social services shouldn't be left entirely to the state. This debate is not just about ideology, but also about effective delivery. https://lnkd.in/esePeiVe

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What’s the one communication element that both U.S. Presidential candidates have both either missed or written-off. It is a simple tactic drawn from the Principles of Persuasion; namely, 👉Credibility 👉Common Ground 👉Evidence 👉Emotion. Can you guess which one has been most lacking in the 2024 Presidential campaign ? #trump #kamalaharris #mediatraining #strategicommunications #messaging #prtips #persuasion #undecideds https://lnkd.in/g67EbQ9a

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For more than a month, a team of some 270 firefighters has been battling a wall of flames consuming two Indigenous territories on the edge of Brazil's Amazon rainforest. Though the firefighters are Brazilian, their Brasilia headquarters and much of their equipment was paid for by international donors aiming to protect the Amazon, one of the world's key bulwarks against climate change. The money is channelled through the Amazon Fund, an international mechanism to direct aid to projects that halt and reverse deforestation, backed mainly by European donors, including Norway and Germany.  But last year, U.S. President Joe Biden pledged to request Congress to contribute $500 million to the Amazon Fund over five years. That amount is equivalent to nearly 70% of all the funding the fund has received since its creation in 2008. The fate of Amazon Fund projects now hinges in part on the U.S. elections more than 3,000 miles (4,800 km) away. Anastasia Moloney and andré cabette fábio have the story for Context Newsroom https://lnkd.in/ecytuX3t

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As most people who live in the NYC area can tell you - this is a week when the city is wildly crowded with delegates and meetings. As folks gather for this year's Climate Week and UN General Assembly, it is essential they keep the concerns and challenges facing communities at the intersection of global conflict and the climate crisis front and center. In this piece for DevEx Ciaran Donnelly, the IRC's SVP for International Programs, outlines why that's necessary and what it looks like to do it right: https://lnkd.in/evB4wRhr

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I love when the people who work for polluters try to attack Clean Creatives like this because it shows just how thin and weak the arguments for working with fossil fuel clients really are. By word count, this op-ed is roughly 40% rhetorical questions, which is a great demonstration of how confident he is that he's doing the right thing. It's VERY funny to be accused of "hyperbole" by someone who claims that Clean Creatives somehow wants to stop research into fusion energy, shut down 60% of the power grid (???) and lots of other things that he entirely made up. How proud is Rosely Group of their fossil fuel clients, in reality? They don't have a single case study of fossil fuel work on their website, or on the last year of their LinkedIn posts. (They did share a great story about 'climate quitting' though 🧐) Clean Creatives is advocating for PR agencies to stop working for fossil fuel clients because those companies knew about climate change decades ago, lied about it, and are still investing $1 trillion a year in the outdated products they know are pushing us into a catastrophic global emergency. That is objectively bad business, and it's bad business to be associated with it. Over 1000 agencies have taken the Clean Creatives pledge, and it is helping them grow healthier, happier agencies that will thrive in the clean energy economy.

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Clause Out isn’t meant to replace protests or traditional activism. We’re building tech tools to organize public debate and translate citizen demand for change into actual reforms. The question we’re solving for: “How do we get our platform to broaden, ground, and accelerate policy development - ideally all at once?” This all came into focus this morning when we came across a protest gathering for more climate action. It took place in front of the building where Denmark passed its tripartite climate deal. While this deal is perhaps the first of its kind, it leaves climate activists and experts unsatisfied. Clause Out aims to channel these initiatives and ideas into concrete proposals. Advancing reform - on the margin, down to the clause. 💅 #BuildingWithThePublic - Day 90

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🇺🇸 Reimagining American Democracy: The Triune Presidency 🏛️ Last week I shared the exciting designs for a democratic Legislature and Judiciary developed by my colleagues and I at #unify . Today continues the series, with a groundbreaking proposal for 21st-century executive governance. 🔥 Key highlights of "The Triune Presidency" vision: 1️⃣ Three Co-Presidents instead of one, focusing on:   • Diplomacy & Defense 🌍🛡️   • Environment & Infrastructure 🌿🏗️   • Economic & Social Justice 💰⚖️ 2️⃣ Innovative selection process combining elections, deliberation, and democratic lotteries 🎲 3️⃣ Citizens' Advisory Councils to boost accountability and civic participation 🤝 4️⃣ A "First Citizen" as ceremonial head of state 🏅 5️⃣ Reimagined Cabinet structure with staggered terms 👥 This proposal aims to create an executive branch that's more representative, deliberative, and accountable to the people. It's a bold reimagining of our democratic institutions for the complex challenges of today and tomorrow. Check it out!🗽 #DemocraticInnovation #CitizensAssemblies #DeliberativeDemocracy

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This week in SitRep: The outcome of the U.S. Presidential election will have profound consequences for the major crises roiling the globe today. Most immediately, here’s what the election could mean for the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. https://lnkd.in/ePihpdPy

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Well, folks: a new job has brought me back to Twitter/X. If you still use that platform, please follow me at @WittesNDI for National Democratic Institute (NDI) news and updates! (And if you think I would do better to put my energy into a different platform, leave your wisdom in the comments below!)

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Liars beware, I am now Intermediate at Digital Investigation Techniques according to AFP and Google News Initiative. This course focused on tracking election disinformation and verifying climate claims. It was interesting to see how the course's tools could be used to examine past/current elections.

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At the start of 2024, I highlighted the critical role YouTube and Google Search would play in shaping the political narrative, particularly in right-wing digital strategies. This focus was grounded in a deep understanding of these platforms’ outsized influence on public opinion and their prominence in right wing digital campaigns. This year, I worked closely with progressive teams and abortion ballot initiative campaigns, training others on a proven strategy and developing targeted interventions to counter disinformation from search on these key platforms. This article, in addition to recent research, validates this focus. Our analysis of search behavior and digital platforms continues to provide valuable insights. This process is providing clarity in the post-election landscape and revealing the impact of our efforts. As the media landscape evolves, understanding how voters access and engage with information becomes increasingly important. The data we’re examining offers a clearer picture of online advocacy strategies and potential new approaches for progressive outreach in the digital space. And this is what is giving me life this week. #disinformation #misinformation #abortion #election #google #googleseo #seo #informationecosystem

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