Colum McCann

Irish-born novelist and nonfiction author whose books include Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon. McCann has lived in New York for three decades

Almost 40 years ago, I was as a young journalist travelling across the deep south of the United States. I found myself sitting outside a diner in Waycross, Georgia, jawing with some good ol’ boys. One of them was a perfect American cartoon. Baseball hat. Plaid shirt. He used the N-word in a protracted jukebox drawl as he struck a match head off the heel of his boots.

He turned out to be an elected sheriff from a nearby town and he was running in an election on a segregationist ticket. He invited me to his house with his wife and family amid the tall cypress trees.

It turned out the sheriff was all about “state’s rights” (meaning the right of states to pass Jim Crow laws), “freedom of association” (separating the races), more “Jee-sus” and “less government”.

I was confused and horrified. But while we were at the dinner table with his sulky children, an extraordinary thing happened. A screech of tyres. A crunch of metal. We ran outside and up the road to the corner where a lone car had smashed into a tree. Inside, the occupants, a Black family – a man, a woman and two children – were shaken up. The father had cut his forehead. The sheriff tore off his shirt and dabbed it against the blood. His wife ran home to arrange for an ambulance. The Black couple protested. They had no money. The sheriff touched the woman’s shoulder and told her they would be all right.

At the hospital, doctors insisted that the injured man stay overnight. His wife didn’t know where to stay. “Don’t worry,” the sheriff said, “y’all can sleep the night in my place.”

By the next afternoon, the car had been repaired for free and the hospital bill was settled. After making pancakes, the sheriff bid the couple goodbye.

“Hell,” he said, when I asked him about the extraordinary gulf between what he had said, and believed, and what he had done, “everyone’s human, ain’t they?”

Everyone’s human until they aren’t. If the sheriff was both old school and an advance scout for the Trumpian imagination, he also held something rare in these turbulent times: the ability to echo that turbulence, to contradict himself, and to contain, as Walt Whitman would have said, multitudes.

We live in times when the channels of certainty are deeply dug. The multitudinous aspect of who we are – not just in America but everywhere else – is largely denied. Come into the room if you sound like me, or you look like me, or you vote like me, but otherwise stay the fuck out. This disease of certainty – the absolute need to remain in the one channel – is the defining mystery of our contemporary social contract, and it’s especially evident in the current election. We are canals, not rivers. We have been carved out to a purpose. We carry things for industry and for political parties and corporations and whatever other non-human entities need us.

Hideous as he was, it would now be difficult for the sheriff to be the same man he was 40 years ago.

The political canals are dug. The private and the public American are a singular thing.

In his 1993 collection of essays, Culture and Imperialism, the Palestinian writer Edward Said suggested that no one today is purely one thing, either white or Black or western or Asian. He called on the world to recognise that it is “more rewarding – and more difficult – to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about ‘us’”. We can, he suggested, be so much more than one thing.

Maybe Kamala Harris’s difficulty is that she is, in fact, operating contrapuntally. A child of immigrants, with a Black father and an Indian mother (a district attorney, a woman with a career of shattering glass ceilings), she might be too speckled for our tied-down times. Trump, on the other hand, is relatively easy to pinpoint – he offers little more sustenance than the damp white loaf that he embodies. But his simplicity fits with the certainty and poisoned narrowness of our times that has made this race – which should not even be close – into a test of the character of our times: are we capable of being more than one thing?

Is there any hope of any solace? Given what is going on – to vast silence – in the Middle East and Sudan and elsewhere, one would have to unfortunately think no. Solace gives way to a sort of mediocre acceptance. Most centre- or left-leaning people I know feel that a Harris victory might just about be a temporary relief, while a Trump victory would be an ongoing disaster. This is not an election so much about hope as it is about survival.

But the president you get doesn’t have to be the country you get.

Is there any way to shake the soul of the US out of its malignant certainty? What could ignite an imaginative fury? Maybe a strong third party. Or full political representation for the District of Columbia (for the past 200 years Washington DC has been considered a district, and not a state, effectively denying three-quarters of a million people full political representation in Congress). Or a takedown of the electoral college, resulting in a system that – logic and democracy forbid! – gives the presidency to the person who gets the most votes.

As my late father used to say: “Don’t put all your begs in one ask-it.”

Or maybe it will come down to teachers and artists and students and ordinary people who recognise that it’s about time for some decency, cordiality and personal engagement. While we certainly don’t need the sheriffs of bygone times, we do need those who can see one another’s humanity, even in the most seemingly impossible circumstances.

What people will vote for on 5 November is the survival of a messy hope against the myopia of certainty.

Margo Jefferson

Pulitzer prize-winning critic, academic and nonfiction author whose works include Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System

We are all on tenterhooks about the election. I am following newspapers, online postings, podcasts, TV. Every so often I’ll get overwhelmed and pull back briefly, but that’s mostly to refresh myself. Like many people, I’m often terrified. It’s such a ghoulish spectacle. There’s this glee around Trump and his supporters, who thrive on vicious accusations about Haitians eating dogs and cats and women killing babies, on infantile protests, sneers and denunciations. So, yes, I’m frightened, and I’m angry too. We keep saying to one another: “How did we get here?” Well, that can be analysed, but still, he’s so low, so debased. And yet here he is.

Looking back over Biden’s time in office, he’s done some good things domestically, in his support of unions for example, and raising wages, but he has not been impressive internationally, though he likes to think that’s his core strength. Just look at the Middle East. He’s obviously made a mess of it. It’s not only his actions, or non-actions, but also his manner, the way he all but dismisses the horrors of Gaza. That’s just not acceptable.

Closer to home, one can quarrel with him or object to some mealy mouthed statement about this or that, but for people with a certain amount of social and economic security, life goes on, as it has for me. Of course I understand the anger and alarm at prices going up. But the sentimentality about the Trump years, the dreamland of how effective Trump was on the economy, I find intolerable. And I’m shocked that he is let off the hook about Covid by so many of his supporters.

I am very glad Biden didn’t run again. That would have been impossible, both for reasons that are fair, in terms of mistakes he’s made, but also in terms of the post-debate rap against him. He wasn’t going to be able to surmount that. So I was profoundly relieved when he stepped aside, but he should have done it earlier. It left Harris at a great disadvantage in terms of time. Now, voters who are unsure about her can say: “I don’t know enough about her.” I do think that is partly a form of evasion. There are ways you can find out more. But it reflects a kind of uncertainty, a suspiciousness that has everything to do with her being a woman, and a woman of colour, as well as her having been Biden’s vice-president.

When Harris stepped forward, there was the ebullience and joy of having a new candidate and being released from the terrible certainty that Biden would lose. So some of the joy came from sheer possibility. There are points I wish she would emphasise more fully and declarations I wish she would make, but she’s certainly shown, given the level of misogyny in our society, get-down-to-business gutsiness. Discipline and intelligence. You saw that in the debate. She’s not afraid of Trump in any way. That’s impressive. What I can’t gauge is what difference it’s making to people who are wavering. If you’re undecided, you have to take more of a leap of thought as well as faith to vote for Harris.

One of the obsessions in the news coverage in recent weeks has been about Harris losing Black male votes. Of course it’s worrisome, but the major problem here is disgruntled white men not voting for her. It was almost as if there was a kind of projection of all our worries on to these Black men, who certainly should know better. Well, your white men should know better too, but they don’t.

Trump is very much the same beast we’ve seen before, only worse. The insults flung at women, at immigrants, or at any opponents, are gleeful, reckless and genuinely ugly. They excite people and they stick. He’s more degraded, the aggression has intensified, and now he’ll say anything that his little psyche throws up. It’s horrifying to watch. I don’t invest huge amounts of psychic energy into being proud to be an American, but I find looking at him humiliating. This is what this powerful country has produced, and what so many citizens endorse. My God. It’s not just shameful. It is humiliating.

Whoever wins, we are going to have demonstrations, fights, all kinds of legal challenges. We will be in turmoil. At least if Harris wins, there will be some kind of norm, of respectability, of reasonableness, of legal and political systems operating in ways that we understand and have legislated for. But it will be harder because the Republican party remains the Republican party. These divisions and their will to power are unshakable.

What will I be doing on 5 November when the results start coming through? I was talking about that with friends, some of whom are insisting they’ll go to bed early. I remember doing that in 2016 when it became clear that Trump was going to win and I just thought, well, night night. This time I will be watching up to a point, probably up to midnight, and then I suspect it will get so cluttered and clamorous that one will try to sleep, but will any of us sleep, really? As told to Killian Fox

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Richard Ford

Novelist best known for his series featuring the character Frank Bascombe, including The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer prize-winning Independence Day and Let Me Be Frank With You

The problem for American now is how to ready ourselves to face a new Trump presidency. Preparing seems the only sensible thing to do – rather than putting on the blinkers like most of my friends. Oh, I loathe the prospect. Don’t get me wrong. And we need to hold an election, first. I’d have voted for Biden. He’s a good enough man, though he proved surprisingly power-hungry and had to be driven out of the race whingeing and mewling. And I’ll unhesitatingly vote for Ms Harris – though she hasn’t made an especially good candidate, yet might make a decent president if she can get over her fear of making mistakes. In their own quite hesitant and narcissistic way, the Democratic party has put the country up for grabs by not ratifying a qualified Biden successor two years ago. They’re a disgrace, and in their doze don’t even seem to know it. Whether they win or lose, it’s hard for me to wish a future for them as they are. No wonder only 66% of us vote.

Trump, meanwhile, has basically promised to ruin the country if he’s elected: to be a dictator, to terminate the constitution, to drag the US out of Nato, to forgo our Ukraine and Taiwan commitments, to sell out the Palestinians, to build walls of expensive tariffs, to give Russia carte blanche to invade more of its neighbours, to attack Iran, to re-exit the Paris climate accords – and these are just his foreign policy goals.

Domestically, he pledges to repopulate the justice and state departments with his sycophants, to stack the supreme court with more extremists, to prosecute and jail his opponents, to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency and the department of education, to ban the teaching of Black history, to abandon school meals programmes for kids, and to leave reproductive rights to the coarse motley of the 50 states. Pretty much everything but ordering drone strikes on Chicago.

A lot of Americans want precisely that, of course. My wife and I hear them snarling and fuming about it in diners, in the grocery store, in car repairs and at the bank around where we live, here in eastern Montana. On my flight across the Atlantic last month, I sat beside a professor of constitutional law at the prestigious University of Virginia. This woman told me she believed vice-president Harris to be a non-entity, and that a second Trump presidency would “stabilise America’s place in the world”. She conceded there were “some problems” with Trump. But I walked off the plane convinced she’d vote for him. Who knows what these people have been drinking?

Curiously, though, polling shows that when American voters see more of Mr Trump his popularity declines. Whereas, when they see less of him, his popularity squirts up – a bad omen, you’d think, in a popularity contest. Yet it might make the task of beating Trump easier if swooning Democrats can just cause more people to see him, and by framing him the way they want him seen – which is pretty much as he is: a bloated, orangish, cartoon creature spouting nonsense and untruth a mile a minute, a figure so unreal and inauthentic it might be difficult to make him out clearly.

In what may turn out to have been a providential stroke (though it seemed to me too tame at the time), Harris’s brain trust, last summer, hit upon a momentarily resonant strategy – portraying Mr Trump as “weird” rather than as the great Satan. A diminished buffoon. No one to take seriously. This is a familiar American archetype, one we all grew up with. The incompetent, slightly daft village screw-loose. A sort of feral Oliver Hardy – unquestionably an individual most Americans wouldn’t imagine being president, albeit not misreading the threat he fecklessly poses to us and the world.

Thus. Seeing Trump as he bizarrely presents is what we citizens will have to do if he incongruously wins back the presidency. This is how we face it.

Plus, setting goofy archetypes aside, I find myself taking perverse comfort that such a man as strange as Trump actually submits to running for the presidency at all, that he mounts an actual campaign, worries and fidgets and blasphemes that he might not win. That he fears prison – just the way a normal, non-orange person would. This suggests to me that Donald Trump is at heart an institutional creature; a clownishly spoiled child, always trying to get away with something, but who knows it and knows better; a man, in Trump’s case, who cares inordinately about how he looks and how history will judge him. His Maga followers may be nihilists and anarchists and thugs, or just greedy oligarchs who cheat on their taxes. But Trump is (one almost wants to say merely) a narcissist, whose most destabilising defect is that he and we never know what he’s going to say or do next. Listen to his speeches – if you can. All he wants is to please and aggrandise himself. Big, complicated countries may pride themselves on having strong leaders, but they thrive on predictability and consistency at the top. Whereas Trump’s idea of leading is just to say stuff – such as abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, or terminating the constitution, or injecting bleach into humans to cure Covid. After which he says other opposite stuff – such as after boasting about abolishing the right to an abortion, he declares himself a supporter of reproductive freedom. He’s nearly 80 – my age, for Christ’s sake.

So, if he becomes president again we need not to take up arms against our neighbours or relocate to Bali or Connemara, but to strive evermore to see Trump as that strange but knowable creature he is. More like our fallible selves than the great destroyer. This can be our way to preserve our country: vigilantly to see Donald Trump so we can vigorously oppose him, stymie him, impugn him, deride and defeat him using whatever institutions of government he can’t abolish. As with all our 46 presidents, governing the US has always required a battle.

And by the theory of lasts, I also happen to think that President Donald Trump doesn’t really want his legacy to be that he took down the United States of America – no matter what he says. Not that I think he’s really a good guy, down deep. He’s really not. He just couldn’t do without the US. Its institutions and traditions are his vital context. But whether he wins or loses, I have to stay hopeful – not let him turn me against my better self or my country’s. In the end, I think there’ll be more Americans who don’t want to see the US wrecked than there are those who do or who don’t care. There’s a chance good might prevail in November. We just can’t avert our gaze from the thought that it might not and in that way render ourselves unready.

First, though, there’s November fifth. We need to vote.

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Marilynne Robinson

Award-winning novelist and essayist whose 2005 book, Gilead, won the Pulitzer prize

A great source of energy behind the rise of the Maga phenomenon is the idea, and realisation, that there has been a pervasive and highly effective campaign of indoctrination going on in this country for decades, since the civil rights movement. All societies indoctrinate their members, of course. They educate, adjudicate, give or withhold approval, expressing and reinforcing assumptions that support institutions and shape character. In our case the indoctrination was meant to promote change rather than to maintain a status quo. The country had, beginning in the 1950s, passed through a great awakening, more powerful than most. Americans realised finally that prevalent attitudes about colour and gender led to insupportable injustice and the suppression of gifted populations. The problem was societal. Behind any instance of insult or exclusion there were the prejudices that normalised such behaviour. So, much of America set about to change these attitudes. The work is not done but the effort has been fruitful enough to have triggered a potent reaction against it in the past decade.

“Indoctrination” is a word with darkly negative connotations. But the best societies do have doctrines which at least name their aspirations, and they teach them, actively and passively. In our case, the promotion of reform came under the hostile scrutiny of the conspiracy-minded. The genius of this worldview is that no policy or idea has to be considered on its merits because it is all scheming and fakery, however apparently plausible. No fact need be acknowledged, no source credited unless it is wise to the great deception. Debate and persuasion are defeated before they begin.

The recoil from liberalisation has placed its opponents in a very strange place. When America was church-going and many churches were sound, precepts that ran against the grain of personal interest were familiar and respected. These revanchists overwhelmingly claim to be Christian, but if loving the neighbour, not to mention the stranger or the enemy, involves any cost or disadvantage they are outraged. With Trump as their guide and model, they have found their way to a netherworld of primitive emotions. We know these feelings from the cradle, though we may unlearn them at an attentive mother’s knee. Basically, they go like this: if I feel fear, then something or someone is threatening me and this must be dealt with as a matter of extreme urgency. So too with anger and resentment. Greed belongs in this suite of primal emotions because it is admired and because it lies behind fear of the loss of status, whatever that may have amounted to, and behind the anxious certainty that others’ prosperity must diminish one’s own. No profit or happiness is imagined that might come to a society truly committed to justice.

I have been amazed and appalled to see my great-hearted America go into eclipse behind this mean, undignified nonsense. My former home state, Iowa, has turned deep red, rejected its own liberal history, relaxed its child labour laws, cut food aid to poor children, banned books, prohibited equity policies in state universities, and on and on.

But then came the Democratic national convention, and our much disparaged diversity showed its beautiful face. I am old enough to know how much has been accomplished, how gratifying it is to have the benefit of the brilliance and purpose of people who, in my childhood, had virtually no voice or presence in public life. The convention was a joyous celebration of the fact that we do know how to reform, which gives us practical hope for further reform. The change in the political atmosphere in this country has been unbelievably swift, in fact sudden. The emergence of Kamala Harris has put matters in extremely capable hands, clearly. And many of us, quite possibly an electoral majority, were waiting for the day when civility, humanity and hope would reassert themselves.

If Harris wins I expect important continuity with Biden, especially regarding foreign affairs. I would expect big programmes like his, to ease the housing shortage, for example. I think she would support and enhance education and healthcare, the kinds of things expected of a Democrat. A normal president has a strong interest in basic continuity, with changes the public and the Congress can agree to support. I would expect her to be strategic and persuasive.

If Trump wins, I don’t think anyone, even he, knows what to expect. Everything depends on what he thinks from day to day are his interests, and how they can best be served. He has his pals and is very readily influenced by them, and by flattery. As a rhetorical tactic, he makes truly terrible threats involving mass deportations of immigrants, also concentration camps, prosecution of critics and political opponents, and he makes truly crazy threats, like bombing drug cartels in Mexico or giving Putin free rein in Europe. He desolates the landscape of rational expectation, then if he hasn’t done anything as dreadful as his threats, it is as if there were nothing in the malicious lunacy he offers to his crowds that should alarm us. Major Republican politicians support him on this basis. He has acquired vast latitude on the grounds that few actually believe anything he says. How do you challenge someone with no credibility? I have never heard of such a creature, or seen influence like his. He says hideous things about America to people swaddled in flags and they cheer themselves hoarse. He is neither Christian nor nationalist but he might stir up a crusade of sorts among people who claim these identities in order to fall into line with him. God knows how that would end. He is silent about normal policy positions. He wants to cut taxes. The wealthy would benefit.

We may expect him to govern in accordance with his own interests as he perceives them – an adviser might suggest he be more presidential, but that would mean no more calling names or selling gimmicks to suckers, so that won’t happen. Other than that, he seems to feel he has the mandate of heaven without regard to votes. If he actually is elected, he will be full of a sense of the truly preposterous power of an American president, and of whatever retrogressive or retributive use he might try to make of it.

A global summit on halting the destruction of nature ended in disarray on Saturday, with some breakthroughs but key issues left unresolved.

Governments have been meeting in Cali, Colombia, for the first time since a 2022 deal to stop the human-caused destruction of life on Earth. Countries hoped to make progress during the two-week summit on crucial targets such as protecting 30% of the Earth for nature and reforming parts of the global financial system that damage the environment.

Negotiations were due to finish on Friday evening but ended in confusion on Saturday morning after almost 12 hours of talks. Governments failed to reach a consensus on key issues such as nature funding and how this decade’s targets would be monitored. Many were forced to leave the talks early to catch flights, and negotiations were suspended at 8.30am when fewer than half of the countries were present, and the meeting lost quorum. Countries will need to continue the talks next year at an interim meeting in Bangkok.

A number of countries expressed fury at the way the talks had been dragged out and the order of discussions, which left crucial issues undecided at the final hour.

“We really question the lack of legitimacy of discussing such an important issue at the end of the Cop,” the Brazilian negotiator Maria Angelica Ikeda said, shortly before discussions of resource mobilisation were cut off. “We should have started discussing these issues at the beginning … We should have decisions guaranteeing that we have the resources we need.”

The negotiator for Fiji, Michelle Baleikanacea, emphasised that many developing nations – who did not have budgets to change flight plans – were forced to abandon the meeting. “Unfortunately Fiji is the only remaining Pacific island country present at this Cop – we came as a delegation of 10 and I am the only one left. We cannot afford to be changing flights because we don’t have the funds,” she said.

Governments were able to make some significant breakthroughs: they agreed on a global levy on products made using genetic data from nature, potentially creating one of the world’s largest biodiversity conservation funds; and formally incorporated Indigenous communities in the official decision-making of the UN biodiversity process, in what negotiators described as a “watershed moment” for indigenous representation.

But while the digital sequence information (DSI) fund plan passed at the meeting, it was unclear whether there were enough countries still present to formalise the vote. If not, countries could question the legitimacy of the decision at a later date.

Observers said that despite the agreements, Cop16 fell short of what was needed to halt the crisis in the natural world, warning that many governments and UN officials were not acting with the required urgency. They pointed to a lack of leadership from the EU, China, Canada and others who had played a leading role in helping to reach agreements on this decade’s targets just two years ago.

During the summit, it became clear that many countries were making weak or no progress on crucial aims such as reforming environmentally harmful subsidies, protected areas and even submitting national plans for meeting the targets.

“We saw insufficient leadership from the wealthier countries, the European Union and France in particular, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, the UK, but also China. The executive secretary of the UN convention on biodiversity was also quite phantomatic,” said Oscar Soria, director of thinktank the Common Initiative.

Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, said too many countries and UN officials came to Cali without the urgency and level of ambition needed. “The world doesn’t have time for business as usual,” he said. “The suspension of the Cop without any agreed-upon finance strategy is alarming.”

“The pace of Cop16 negotiations did not reflect the urgency of the crisis we are facing,” said Catherine Weller, director of global policy at Fauna & Flora.

“Despite the hard-won breakthrough on creating a fund for profits from nature’s genetic information and ongoing rhetoric about the urgency of scaling up finance for nature, there has not been significant headway made on how we will finance nature recovery, nor clarity on how we monitor progress at a global level. Two years on, the vast majority of nature targets agreed in Montreal regrettably currently still feel like unfunded words on paper,” she said.

What countries did – and didn’t – deliver

Agreement to make companies share profits from commercial discoveries derived from nature’s genetics

Genetic data from nature, known as Digital Sequence Information, is playing an increased role in commercial drug and product discoveries. Much of this information has so far been accessed for free on global databases despite generating billions in revenue, infuriating the nature-rich countries from where the data originates. But this is expected to change.

Companies that meet two of three criteria – sales of more than $50m (£39m), profits of more than $5m, and $20m in total assets – will need to contribute 1% of profits or 0.1% of their revenue to the DSI fund.

While the deal is voluntary and national governments will need to introduce the rules domestically, some estimate that the fund could generate more than £1bn a year for nature conservation.

At least half of the money raised will flow to Indigenous communities and a portion will be dedicated to ensuring that developing countries benefit.

“It’s a significant step forward,” said Pierre du Plessis, a veteran former negotiator from Namibia and a DSI expert.

“But I can’t help feeling we have missed a major opportunity to rally around a far more ambitious approach [to finance], which could mobilise resources at the scale urgently required.”

Indigenous and local communities to have a permanent role in biodiversity decision-making

For more than 20 years, Indigenous peoples and local communities have had an informal working group as part of the UN biodiversity process. This has been upgraded into a permanent body – meaning they can contribute to negotiations without being reliant on the goodwill of governments.

This is the first time a UN environment body has made this decision. Jennifer “Jing” Corpuz, a lead negotiator for the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB), called it “watershed moment in the history of multilateral environmental agreements”.

Local communities are defined as groups of people who have a long association with the land or water they live on, and the text includes mention of the rights of afro-descendant people, which refers to people of African descent living in the Americas often as a result of slavery.

No strategy for raising $200bn a year to finance nature conservation

One of Cop16’s priorities was to implement a strategy for raising money to fund nature protection. In 2022, countries had committed to raising $200bn a year by 2030, including $20bn to be given by richer countries to developing countries by 2025. It failed to do so.

Bernadette Fischler Hooper, global advocacy lead at WWF, said the lack of progress was “really disappointing”. She said: “It’s a real anticlimax. I’ve been here for three weeks and it’s kind of ended in a little dust cloud,” she said.

Throughout talks, developing nations raised concerns that wealthy countries were not going to deliver on their $20bn promise, given that the deadline is just two months away. During final discussions, delegates from countries in the global south made impassioned speeches about the limited resources they have to protect biodiversity.

“This Cop has neither delivered that additional funding nor given us confidence that governments will work together to deliver it in a transparent and urgent manner,” said Jiwoh Abdulai, minister of environment and climate change from Sierra Leone. “Governments have shown time and time again that they can materialise the funds needed when they want – be that for pandemics or wars. Why then can they not materialise it to fight the greatest existential threat we face?”

Developing countries – especially the Africa group and Brazil – had demanded a new “finance mechanism” to distribute biodiversity finance. They argue that the current fund – which sits within the Global Environment Facility (GEF) – is too burdensome to access and controlled by wealthy nations. This remains unresolved.

The meeting also ran out of time to approve the Convention on Biological Diversity budget for the next two years.

No plan for how biodiversity targets will be monitored

Governments failed at Cop16 to sign off on how this decade’s targets would be monitored, something that was underscored as a key priority before the summit. After 23 targets and four goals were agreed upon at Cop15 in Montreal two years ago, it remains undecided how progress to meeting them will be officially tracked.

The world has never met a target on halting the destruction of nature, and several vague aims were blamed for a lack of progress on the last decade’s deal. It is understood that most countries are in agreement on the draft monitoring framework for the deal but were unable to sign off on it after they ran out of time while discussing other more divisive topics.

Federal authorities have confirmed that they seized drugs, homemade weapons and electronic devices during a sweep of the jail where Sean “Diddy” Combs is being held on sex trafficking conspiracy charges ahead of a trial next year.

The Bureau of Prisons, which headed up the interagency sweep of the Metropolitan detention center (MDC) in Brooklyn that began on Monday, said the action was not related to Combs’s detention but was “preplanned and coordinated to ensure the safety and security” of staff and inmates.

The jail, which holds 1,200 people, has been under renewed scrutiny since two men were fatally stabbed over the summer. Five inmates were later charged with murder.

Four other detainees and a guard were also charged with assault over incidents that included a man who was stabbed 44 times by three gang members, and one in which an inmate was stabbed in the spine with a makeshift ice pick.

An MDC corrections officer was also charged with shooting at a car during an unauthorized high-speed chase.

“Violence will not be tolerated in our federal jails,” US attorney Breon Peace said, adding that the charges should serve as a “warning to those who would engage in criminal conduct behind bars, and anyone else who facilitates those crimes: your conduct will be exposed, and you will be held accountable”.

The detention center has in recent years held Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and currently holds cryptocurrency swindler Sam Bankman-Fried along with Combs, whose lawyers have made poor conditions at the jail a part of their argument for bail.

The music impresario, who is facing over a dozen civil claims of sexual assault, has asked the 2nd US circuit court of appeals to grant his release after twice being denied bail by two separate judges in Manhattan. The arguments are set for Monday.

A federal grand jury will also hear new evidence against Combs next week, which is expected to include testimony from a man.

Prosecutors have also urged a federal judge in papers filed late Wednesday to reject requests by Combs’ defense team for early disclosure of evidence, including his accusers’ identities, describing the request as “blatantly improper”.

The justice department said the requests were “a thinly veiled attempt to restrict the government’s proof at this early stage of the case and to hijack the criminal proceeding so the defendant can respond to civil lawsuits” and “poses to witness security”.

The celebrity news website TMZ last published what it said was a non-disclosure agreement that Combs asked party-goers to sign for attending one of his notorious gatherings, or “freak offs”.

The NDA document directs signatories not to photograph, film or record – or, have another person photograph film or record – Diddy or anyone in his orbit without his written consent, and specifically names social media sites where attendees can’t post photos to without Combs’s permission.

A poll in Iowa that has unexpectedly put Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in what was previously expected to be a safe state for the Republicans has sent shockwaves through America’s poll-watchers.

The Selzer poll carried out for the Des Moines Register newspaper showed Harris ahead of her Republican rival by three points.

Midwestern Iowa is not one of the seven battleground states of the 2024 election, which have consisted of the Rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and the Sun belt states of Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona.

While political experts and pollsters are very wary of putting too much store in any one single poll, Selzer is a widely respected polling organisation with a good record in Iowa. If Harris were even competitive in Iowa – which Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 – it could radically reshape the race.

The Selzer poll has Harris over Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters. A September poll showed Trump with a four-point lead over Harris and a June survey showed him with an 18-point lead over then-candidate Joe Biden.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, told the Register. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

The poll showed that women are driving the late shift toward Harris in the state. If true and borne out more widely, that would also be significant as the Harris campaign has focused on turning out women amid a broad gender gap with Republican-trending male voters. Harris and her campaign have focused on the overturning of federal abortion rights by the conservative-dominated US supreme court.

The reaction among pundits and pollsters was largely one of shock and surprise, though it was also pointed out that a rival polling group still had Trump leading in Iowa.

“This is a stunning poll. But Ann Seltzer [sic] has as stellar a record as any pollster of forecasting election outcomes in her state. Women are powering this surge. Portents for the country?” said David Axelrod, a former top aide to Barack Obama.

“I mean, margins of error exist and polls can be outliers and I doubt Harris will win Iowa, but Selzer is extremely well-regarded and a within-the-margin race in Iowa is not impossible particularly if the reported late shifts to Harris were real,” said Washington Post columnist Philip Bump.

Selzer is the highest-rated pollster on the national US survey done by polling guru Nate Silver, one of the most closely watched polling experts in the US.

“In the world where Harris wins Iowa, she is probably also cleaning up elsewhere in the midwest, particularly in Michigan and Wisconsin, in which case she’s already almost certain to win the electoral college,” Silver said on his website.

However, he also cautioned that another survey had been published on Saturday in Iowa that still had Trump ahead. The Emerson poll put the former US president up by nine points in the state compared with Harris.

“It is incredibly gutsy to release this poll. It won’t put Harris ahead in our forecast because there was also another Iowa poll out today that was good for Trump. But wouldn’t want to play poker against Ann Selzer,” Silver said.

That seemed to prevent any premature celebrations on behalf of many Democrats.

“Celebrate the Selzer poll for 90 seconds and get back to work. We have an election to win,” said Christopher Hale, a former Democrat congressional candidate in Tennessee.

Detectives investigating historic allegations of sexual assault against Russell Brand have asked prosecutors to consider bringing charges against the actor and comedian.

It follows a joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Sunday Times, published in September 2023, in which four women accused Brand of offences including rape, sexual assault, and emotional abuse.

The allegations date back to between 2006 and 2013, when the 49-year-old was at the height of his fame.

He has denied any wrongdoing and insisted his sexual relationships have been “absolutely always consensual”.

Following the initial media reports, the Metropolitan police confirmed it had “received a number of allegations of sexual offences in London” and elsewhere in the country.

On Saturday it said “a man in his 40s had been interviewed by officers under caution on three separate occasions”.

“A file of evidence has now been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service for their consideration,” it said.

At the time of the alleged offences, Brand was working as a presenter on BBC Radio 2 and Channel 4 and as an actor in Hollywood, appearing in films including Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

One woman told Dispatches that Brand entered a relationship with her when he was 31 and she was 16.

She alleged that the relationship, which lasted three months, was ­emotionally abusive and controlling and that Brand would refer to her as “the child”. Another woman alleged Brand raped her in 2012 in his Los Angeles home, adding that she received treatment at a rape crisis centre the same day, the Sunday Times reported.

The paper said she then messaged him to say she had been scared and felt taken advantage of, adding: “When a girl say[s] NO it means no.” Brand reportedly replied saying he was “very sorry”.

A third woman said Brand sexually assaulted her while she worked with him in Los Angeles and that he threatened to taken legal action against her if she told anyone, according to the paper.

A fourth woman said she had also been sexually assaulted by Brand and that he had been “physically and emotionally abusive” towards her, the Sunday Times said.

The paper said the women it had spoken to did not know each other and had mostly chosen to remain anonymous.

Following the allegations, the BBC and Channel 4 removed material featuring Brand from their websites, while YouTube stopped him making money from videos posted on his channel.

King Charles and Prince William’s property empires are taking millions of pounds from cash-strapped charities and public services including the NHS, state schools and prisons, according to a new investigation.

The reports claim the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, which are exempt from business taxes and used to fund the royals’ lifestyles and philanthropic work, are set to make at least £50m from leasing land to public services. The two duchies hold a total of more than 5,400 leases.

One 15-year deal will see Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS hospital trust in London pay £11.4m to store its fleet of electric ambulances in a warehouse owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, the monarch’s 750-year-old estate.

The king will also make at least £28m from windfarms because the Duchy of Lancaster retains a feudal right to charge for cables crossing the foreshore, according to an investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Sunday Times.

William’s Duchy of Cornwall, the hereditary estate of the heir to the throne, has signed a £37m deal to lease Dartmoor prison for 25 years to the Ministry of Justice, which is liable for all repairs despite paying £1.5m a head for a jail empty of prisoners because of high levels of radon gas.

His estate also owns Camelford House, a 1960s tower block on the banks of the Thames, which has brought in at least £22m since 2005 from rents paid by charities and other tenants. Two cancer charities, Marie Curie and Macmillan – of which the king is a longstanding patron – have both recently moved out to smaller premises.

The Duchy of Cornwall has charged the Royal Navy more than £1m to build and use jetties and moor warships. It also charges the army to train on Dartmoor but the Ministry of Defence refused a Freedom of Information Act request asking how much it costs. The duchy also made more than £600,000 from the construction of a fire station and stands to get nearly £600,000 from rental agreements with six state schools.

In spite of the king and Prince William’s speeches and interventions on environmental issues, many residential properties let out by the royal estates are in breach of basic government energy efficiency standards.

InvestigatorsThe investigation found 14% of homes leased by the Duchy of Cornwall and 13% by the Duchy of Lancaster have an energy performance rating of F or G. Since 2020, it has been against the law for landlords to rent out properties that are rated below an E under the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards regulations.

The Duchy of Lancaster said: “Over 87% of all duchy-let properties are rated E or above. The remainder are either awaiting scheduled improvement works or are exempted under UK legislation.”

The royal estates also have deals with mining and quarrying companies.

The investigation has prompted calls for a parliamentary investigation and for the two empires to be folded into the crown estate, which sends its profits to the government. The king and Prince William pay income tax on profits from the estates after business expenses have been deducted, but both now refuse to say how much.

Critics say the estates, the income from which have been used by successive governments to keep the headline cost of the monarchy to the taxpayer down, enjoy a commercial advantage over rivals because they are exempt from corporation tax and capital gains tax.

Baroness Margaret Hodge, a former chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said the duchies should at least pay corporation tax. “This would be a brilliant time for the monarch to say, I’m going to be open, and I want to be treated as fairly as anybody,” she said.

Both duchies said they were commercial operations that complied with statutory requirements to disclose information. They also emphasised their efforts to become greener.

The Duchy of Lancaster said: “His majesty the king voluntarily pays tax on all income received from the duchy.”

In Spain, more than 200 people have been killed after the deadliest floods in the country’s modern history. Australia is heating faster than the global average, meaning more extreme heat events, longer fire seasons, increasingly intense heavy rain and sea level rise. And globally, this year is highly likely to be the hottest on record, beating the current title holder, 2023. For some, this escalating scientific evidence can be alarming. But the person in charge of Australia’s response to the climate crisis says that is not a word he would choose.

“If alarm implies concern, sure. But alarm implying surprise? No,” says Chris Bowen, the country’s climate change and energy minister.

“We’re living climate change. What we’re now trying to do is avoid the worst of it,” Bowen says.

“Report after report, temperature records tumbling, natural disasters increasingly unnatural – that’s why we keep going. That’s what drives me. It gets me out of bed every day. So perhaps alarmed is the wrong word. Disturbed, maybe. But, you know, not surprised.”

Bowen is speaking to Guardian Australia shortly before a US presidential election where polls indicate a 50-50 chance voters will elect a candidate who calls climate change a “hoax” and who would lead an administration intent on gutting clean energy and science programs and again pulling the US out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Six days after the US election, thousands of delegates from nearly 200 countries will land in the Russia-aligned petrostate of Azerbaijan for Cop29, an annual UN climate summit. Bowen will be at the centre of that meeting, having been invited to help lead negotiations on what is considered its most important work – setting a new finance goal to help the developing world.

The Australian government is also likely to learn if it will co-host the Cop31 summit with Pacific countries in 2026, an event that would bring tens of thousands of people to the country and increase scrutiny on its role as the world’s third biggest fossil fuel exporter.

But for now, all eyes are on the US.

What will a Trump win mean?

Speaking in his ministerial office in the Sydney CBD, Bowen acknowledges the election result will be seismic, and will shape the fortnight-long talks starting in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku on 11 November.

Asked for his view on what a Donald Trump victory would mean, he is cautious but clear: the Albanese government and the Biden administration have been “closely aligned in policy and personal terms” and “obviously, having a United States administration with a very forward leaning climate policy is a good thing”.

He also gives three reasons why he believes a second Trump administration would be unlikely to live up to the former president’s anti-climate rhetoric on the climate crisis.

“Firstly, they are the United States. So the state functions are very important. And perhaps unlike 2016, where the result came as a surprise, if it is a Trump administration people are doing more preparation for it,” he says.

“Secondly, it’s hard to legislate in the United States, but it’s also hard to un-legislate. So the Inflation Reduction Act [which includes an extraordinary US$370bn in clean energy support] is the law of the land and will remain the law of the land unless it gets repealed, which will be very difficult to do. And thirdly, the private sector can help. In the United States, regardless of federal mandates, they know [climate action] is good business.

“Will the dynamics of Cop be different depending on who’s president? Of course they will. But does the rest of the world just walk away if the United States president is Donald Trump? No.”

Within climate activist circles, there is an expectation that if Kamala Harris wins, she may quickly set a 2035 emissions reduction target and other countries may follow. If Trump wins, many countries, including Australia, are likely to delay and recalibrate before setting their 2035 commitments, which are due next year.

Bowen says Labor will set a target based on “what we think we can achieve and what our contribution should be under the science” – and what others are doing. Initial advice from the Climate Change Authority found a target of up to a 75% cut below 2005 levels would be “ambitious, but could be achievable”.

According to a recent UN Environment Programme analysis, current national commitments would lead to only a 2.6% emissions reduction below 2019 levels by 2030. It is far short of what countries have agreed is necessary: a 43% reduction over that timeframe and a 60% cut by 2035.

Bowen says he understands “to a degree” why this big discrepancy makes people cynical, but argues the summits are important, not least because they send a signal to governments and investors marshalling trillions of dollars. He says there was genuine progress last year, including a non-binding agreement the world should transition away from fossil fuels and triple renewable energy by 2030.

“What’s the alternative? Not bother, not talk to other countries, not have targets?” he says. “Is it perfect? No, but it’s what we’ve got. I’d be surprised if people who are concerned about climate activism argue we should not be active participants in the global conversation.”

Bowen will arrive in Baku, an historic oil town on the shores of the Caspian Sea, wearing three hats. The most important role is co-charing with the Egyptian environment minister, Yasmine Fouad, negotiations to create a new finance goal – known in UN lingo as a “new collective quantified goal”, or NCQG – to help developing countries fight and limit climate catastrophe.

It is meant to replace a US$100bn a year goal that was set more than a decade ago and that it is agreed is woefully insufficient. Bowen says their ability to wrangle a consensus on the issue – covering how much is needed, who pays and what sort of public, private and multilateral bank finance should be counted – will largely determine if the summit is seen as a success or failure.

“I probably should manage expectations, but … this is the finance Cop,” Bowen says. “So getting an NCQG right is the key element.”

He is also chair of the negotiating bloc known as the umbrella group, which includes the US, UK, Canada and Japan, and will be representing Australia as it seeks to finalise whether it will host Cop31. Australia is favoured to win, but Turkey is also in the running and the decision-making process is opaque.

The bid has been mostly warmly received by clean energy and climate advocates and business groups, but some critics say Australia should not be rewarded with summit hosting rights while it is still allowing large new coal and gas developments.

This is the conflict in the Australian government’s climate position. At home, it has a program to underwrite enough renewable energy to generate 82% of the country’s electricity by 2030 and has legislated policies to drive a shift to cleaner cars and that promises to start to deal with pollution at large industrial sites. It is also attempting to argue against a Coalition nuclear energy proposal that many experts say would in reality boost fossil fuel power over the next two decades.

But it also has no plan to limit coal and gas developments for export. In September the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, approved the expansion of three thermal coalmines that could lead to more than 1.5bn tonnes of CO₂ being pumped into the atmosphere.

Asked if the government’s mixed messages – action at home, but unlimited shipments of fossil fuels to burn overseas – undermines its credibility and risks making people disengage on climate, Bowen responds that the Greens’ argument for no new coal and gas is a “neat, politically effective slogan”, but that “life is nowhere near that simple”.

“The idea that we can just say we’re going to stop approving new coal, which means we stop exporting coal in due course, that is not the way you get this job done,” he says. “People say, ‘Oh, it’s a drug dealer’s defence’. Well, ok … But the reality is that other countries will continue to export coal, and we need to think about our place in the world.

“I agree with this entirely: the biggest impact [on climate] we can have is on our exports. Hence, the need to become a renewable energy superpower.”

He points to an ambitious $30bn-plus SunCable plan to export solar energy from the Northern Territory to Singapore via subsea cable. Bowen was in the city state last month for the announcement the project had received conditional approval.

“You’ve got to look holistically,” he says. “Yes, our exports are important, but replacing our current fossil fuel exports with renewable exports is the key to it. Not just focusing on the negative – that we should be stopping fossil fuel exports.

“We should be replacing fossil exports with renewable energy. And that is a big task, which is going to take a little while.”

Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib declined to endorse Kamala Harris at a union rally in Detroit, where the war in Gaza is the top issue for the largest block of Arab American voters in the country.

Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, is the only one of the so-called leftist “Squad” that has not endorsed the Democrat candidate. The other three members – Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – endorsed Harris in July.

“Don’t underestimate the power you all have,” Tlaib told a get-out-the-vote United Auto Workers rallygoers. “More than those ads, those lawn signs, those billboards, you all have more power to turn out people that understand we’ve got to fight back against corporate greed in our country.”

Tlaib’s non-endorsement of Harris comes as a voter survey published on Friday suggested that 43% of Muslim American voters support the Green party candidate, Jill Stein.

After Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Democrats blamed Stein voters for the loss of Michigan and Wisconsin to the Republican candidate. Some Democrats fear that the same scenario could play out again next week.

Earlier this year, during the presidential primary campaigns, about 100,000 Michigan voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” as a mark of protest against the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the cross -border Hamas attack in October last year that killed 1,200 people and took more than 200 hostages, mostly civilians.

Israel’s attack on Gaza has since killed more than 40,000 people, with many of them women and children. In Lebanon, where Israel has now invaded to fight with Iran-backed Hezbollah, more than 2,897 people have been killed and 13,150 wounded, the country’s health ministry reports. A quarter of those killed were women and children.

The US has been a staunch ally of Israel during the fighting, continuing to send arms to the country and limiting its public criticism of Israeli actions.

Tlaib has been critical of the Democratic party’s position on the growing and bloody conflict, saying it was “hard not to feel invisible” after the party did not include a Palestinian American speaker at its convention in Chicago in August.

In an interview with Zeteo, the news organization founded by former MSNBC host (and Guardian contributor) Mehdi Hasan, Tlaib said the omission “made it clear with their speakers that they value Israeli children more than Palestinian children”.

“Our trauma and pain feel unseen and ignored by both parties,” she added. “One party uses our identity as a slur, and the other refuses to hear from us. Where is the shared humanity? Ignoring us won’t stop the genocide.”

Harris has faced continued protests on the trail, as demonstrators call for her to break with President Joe Biden and support an arms embargo on Israel. Harris has said Israel “has right to defend itself”, and that Palestinians need “dignity, security”.

Confronted by a protester in Wisconsin two weeks ago who accused the Jewish state of genocide, Harris said: “I know what you’re speaking of. I want a ceasefire. I want the hostage deal done. I want the war to end.”

At a rally in Dearborn earlier on Friday, Tlaib the criticized Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, who has been endorsed by the Muslim mayors of Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck.

“Trump is a proud Islamophobe + serial liar who doesn’t stand for peace,” Tlaib posted on X. “The reality is that the Biden admin’s unconditional support for genocide is what got us here. This should be a wake-up call for those who continue to support genocide. This election didn’t have to be close.”

A piece of the radioactive fuel left from the meltdown of Japan’s tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been retrieved from the site using a remote-controlled robot.

Investigators used the robot’s fishing-rod-like arm to clip and collect a tiny piece of radioactive material from one of the plant’s three damaged reactors – the first time such a feat has been achieved. Should it prove suitable for testing, scientists hope the sample will yield information that will help determine how to decommission the plant.

The plant’s manager, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (Tepco), has said the sample was collected from the surface of a mound of molten debris that sits at the bottom of the Unit 2 reactor’s primary containment vessel.

The “telesco” robot, with its frontal tongs still holding the sample, returned to its enclosed container for safe storage after workers in full hazmat gear pulled it out of the containment vessel on Saturday. But the mission is not over until it is certain the sample’s radioactivity is below a set standard and it is safely contained.

If the radioactivity exceeds the safety limit then the robot must return to find another piece, but Tepco officials have said they expect the sample will prove to be small enough.

The mission started in September and was supposed to last two weeks, but had to be suspended twice.

A procedural mistake held up work for nearly three weeks. Then the robot’s two cameras, designed to transmit views of the target areas for its operators in the remote control room, failed. That required the robot to be pulled out entirely for replacement before the mission resumed on Monday.

Fukushima Daiichi lost its cooling systems during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, causing meltdowns in three of its reactors. An estimated 880 tons of fuel remains in them, and Tepco has carried out several robotic operations.

Tepco said that on Wednesday the robot successfully clipped a piece estimated to weigh about 3 grams from the area underneath the Unit 2 reactor core, from which large amounts of melted fuel fell during the meltdown 13 years ago.

The plant’s chief, Akira Ono, said only the tiny sample can provide crucial data to help plan a decommissioning strategy, develop necessary technology and robots and retroactively establish exactly how the accident had developed.

The Japanese government and Tepco have set a target of between 30 and 40 years for the cleanup, which experts say is optimistic. No specific plan for the full removal of the fuel debris or its final disposal has been decided.

A high school in California has decided not to invest in coal, oil or gas, instead pledging to put money into clean energy. It’s the latest win in a new fossil fuel divestment campus campaign launched by high schoolers across 11 countries that is gaining support in the US.

The Nueva School, an elite private school outside San Francisco, pledged in spring 2024 to invest a portion of its $55m endowment in renewable power. The commitment followed months of pressure from students.

“If you’re choosing to put that money in the right projects, then you’re helping the world get where it needs to be,” said Ines Pajot, 18, a former student of the Nueva School who helped spearhead the campaign.

Unlike many other institutions that have faced divestment calls, the Nueva School had no direct investments in coal, oil or gas to pull. But it does have indirect investments, with less than 4% of its endowment in funds that are indirectly exposed to fossil fuels.

The students at the Nueva School say their win was made possible by engaging with the school’s board of trustees over the course of six years. By including a promise to place financial stakes in climate-friendly causes, they say the institution’s pledge goes a step further than traditional divestment commitments like those seen on many college campuses.

“The divestment movement looks different now than it did 15 years ago,” said Anjuli Mishra, 18, a Nueva student and coalition leader. “There are more opportunities to invest in clean energy, and it’s imperative for schools to align with this new investment landscape.”

Pajot said the students took a “collaborative” approach to their pressure campaign, choosing to work openly with the board and hear its concerns rather than simply making demands.

“We had a lot of conversation with the board and our knowledge very much evolved,” she said. The students started by calling for divestment, then became interested in a “divestment and reinvestment” framework. Eventually, they landed on a call for sustainable investment “because we realized that, to our core, we wanted to use money to facilitate the energy transition”, Pajot said.

The Nueva School organizers are part of the International High School Clean Energy Investment Coalition, which officially launched this fall after two years of informal organizing. The group of private high school students – hailing from about 50 schools, half of which are in the US and the rest of which span 10 other countries – are pushing their institutions to clean up their financial portfolios. Some of those schools have endowments of more than $1bn, rivaling those of some private universities, Pajot said.

In another recent win, the board of the prestigious Seattle Academy in Seattle, Washington, officially voted in favor of a divestment proposal this year and is determining next steps. And St Marks, a private boarding school in Southborough, Massachusetts, started to phase out its fossil fuel investments in 2022, while pledging not to directly invest in fossil fuels in the future. Today, less than 3% of the school’s endowment is tied to fossil fuels.

“The fact that the schools are making this decision shows that they’re taking climate change, in and of itself, seriously,” said Pajot.

Bill McKibben, the veteran environmental activist and author, praised the students’ efforts. “They understand the deep contradiction between educating people for the future and investing in ways that make sure that future won’t exist,” he wrote in an email. “Thank heaven they’re gently calling out that hypocrisy!”

High schools are a new arena for the fossil fuel divestment campus movement. Until now, activists have largely been focused on universities, where they have seen major wins.

More than 260 educational institutions worldwide have in recent years committed to halt investments in fossil fuel companies, according to data from Stand.earth and 350.org. Over the past four years, students at two dozen schools in the US have also filed legal complaints arguing that their institutions’ investments in planet-heating fossil fuels are illegal.

In 2015, a Pennsylvania high school made history when, under student pressure, it divested its $150m endowment from all holdings in coalmining companies. At that time, at least five other east coast high schools had launched fossil fuel divestment campaigns; an initiative at St Paul’s School in New Hampshire resulted in a decision not to divest.

Some educators are bringing the divestment movement beyond individual private institutions. In 2022, the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teachers union in the nation, overwhelmingly supported a resolution calling on pension trustees to pull members’ retirement funds from fossil fuels and reinvest in “projects that benefit displaced workers and frontline communities”.

“As a lifelong educator, I’ve learned that climate change is probably the No 1 concern on their list that is keeping them up at night,” said Lee Fertig, head of the Nueva School. “They’re looking at this as an educational endeavor and not just a financial endeavor – what they can do, as young people dealing with pressing challenges thrust upon them.”