03 August 23
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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
“No disrespect to Donald Trump, who has been an amazing perpetrator,” Carol Foyler, a poll respondent who lives in Tempe, Arizona, said. “But it would be great to see a fresh crook in there.”
“When he was President, Trump committed crimes at an incredible rate,” Tracy Klugian, who resides in Columbus, Ohio, said. “But he’s older now, and I worry that he won’t be able to keep up that pace.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Donald Trump deserves major credit for all the laws he’s broken,” Harland Dorrinson, who lives in Springfield, Missouri, said. “But it’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of felons.”
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Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks as he attends a meeting with Ireland's Prime Minister Leo Varadkar (not pictured) at Horodetskyi House, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, July 19, 2023. (photo: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters)
Ukrainian and Western diplomats hope the meeting in Jeddah of national security advisers and other senior officials from some 40 countries will agree on key principles that would underpin any peace settlement to end Russia's war in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday he hoped the initiative will lead to a "peace summit" of leaders from around the world this autumn to endorse the principles, based on his own 10-point formula for a peace settlement.
Ukrainian, Russian and international officials say there is no prospect of direct peace talks between Ukraine and Russia at the moment, as the war continues to rage and Kyiv seeks to reclaim territory through a counter-offensive.
Neither the Jeddah gathering - which is expected to begin on Friday, with the main discussions on Saturday and Sunday - nor the peace summit would involve Russia, officials say.
Instead, Ukraine aims to first build a bigger coalition of diplomatic support for its vision of peace beyond its core group of Western backers by reaching out to Global South countries such as India, Brazil, South Africa and Turkey.
"One of the main aims of this round of negotiations will be to finally fix a common understanding of what the 10 points are about," Ihor Zhovkva, Zelenskiy's chief diplomatic adviser, told Reuters on Thursday.
The 10 points include calls for the full restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity, a full withdrawal of Russian troops, the protection of food and energy supplies, nuclear safety and the release of all prisoners.
But Western officials concede the initiative can put only limited pressure on Moscow without China, which has maintained close economic and diplomatic ties with Russia and rejected international calls to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.
Officials said on Thursday it was unclear whether Chinese officials would take part in the Jeddah talks - either in person or via video conference. China was invited to a previous round of talks in Copenhagen in late June but did not attend.
"I do think it's critical that not just India, Brazil, and other key partners are participating but also that China is sitting at the table and actually talking peace," said a senior European Commission official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Zhovkva said China's ambassador to Ukraine had attended meetings in Kyiv on the peace initiative and that Ukraine was working on having Chinese participation at Jeddah.
"The invitation is on the table," he said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not answer directly when asked by Reuters whether China would take part in the meeting.
"China is willing to work together with the international community to continue playing a constructive role in calming down the situation," the ministry said.
GRAIN DEAL
In seeking to win over Global South countries, Western officials say they will stress that food prices have jumped since Russia quit a deal to allow safe passage of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea and carried out a string of air strikes on Ukraine's port facilities.
"We'll be for sure making this point and loud and clear," the European Commission official said.
Saudi Arabia has not commented publicly on the weekend talks but Ukrainian and Western officials said the country's decision to host the meeting reflected a desire by Riyadh to play a prominent diplomatic role in efforts to resolve the conflict.
Saudi Arabia, along with Turkey, played a mediation role in a major prisoner swap between Ukraine and Russia last September.
Zelenskiy attended an Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia in May this year, at which Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman expressed his readiness to mediate in the war.
A second senior EU official said Saudi Arabia reached "into parts of the world where (Ukraine's) classical allies would not get to as easily".
U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is expected to represent the United States at the talks.
"This is still the start of the process," U.S. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller said on Wednesday. "Remember, there's still active fighting in Ukraine."
Asked about the talks earlier this week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia needed to understand their aims and what would be discussed.
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A protester kneels down as tear gas is deployed by Colorado Springs, Colorado, law enforcement during a protest against police brutality on May 30, 2020. (photo: Chancey Bush/AP)
The FBI’s secret infiltration of the 2020 protest movement, first revealed by The Intercept and the podcast series “Alphabet Boys,” is being challenged for chilling free speech.
The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, accuses the FBI, the Colorado Springs Police Department, and local police officers of overstepping their authority in infiltrating, surveilling, and requesting search warrants aimed at Colorado Springs activists. The FBI’s targeting of racial justice activists was revealed in February by The Intercept and the podcast series “Alphabet Boys.”
In a separate federal case in Denver, the Justice Department last week did not deny that the government’s initial investigation of racial justice activists was prompted by speech. That filing — the government’s first public response to revelations that the FBI infiltrated the racial justice movement in Denver using a violent felon as a paid informant — claimed that the “violent nature” of the activists’ statements “made them a legitimate subject of investigation.”
The two cases stem from the same source. During the summer of 2020, the FBI secretly hired an informant, Michael “Mickey” Windecker, to infiltrate the racial justice movement in Denver. While being paid by the FBI, Windecker accused movement leaders of being informants themselves; encouraged violence at protests; and tried unsuccessfully to entrap two Black activists in a plot to assassinate the state’s attorney general.
Internal FBI reports showed that Windecker, a tattooed, cigar-smoking white man who drove a silver hearse, first attended racial justice demonstrations in the Denver area in May 2020. Windecker then approached the FBI, claiming to have unique information about racial justice protesters. But Windecker’s tips, according to initial FBI reports, were entirely about speech. As an example, Windecker claimed one Black activist, Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall, said of the city of Denver: “We need to burn this motherfucker down.”
Based on statements he claimed to have overheard and a recording he secretly made of Hall speaking vaguely about training and revolution, the FBI enlisted Windecker as a paid informant and asked him to pose as a racial justice demonstrator.
The FBI, in its reports, stated Windecker had come forward voluntarily out of some sort of duty to protect the United States, but the bureau’s documented knowledge of Windecker complicated that claim: The FBI was aware that Windecker had prior arrests in at least four states and had been convicted of misdemeanor sexual assault and felony menacing with a weapon. The FBI also knew that Windecker had a long history of working the system as an informant, going back as far as two decades earlier, when he’d been a jailhouse snitch in a murder-for-hire case. Nevertheless, the FBI paid Windecker more than $20,000 for his work during the summer of 2020.
Windecker’s work for the FBI resulted in at least two investigations: one in Colorado Springs, led by a young female detective, and the other in Denver, led by Windecker himself. Both are now under scrutiny in federal court.
“Unconstitutional Actions”
While investigating racial justice demonstrators in Denver, Windecker provided information about a protester who was active in both Denver and Colorado Springs, according to FBI records. That prompted the bureau to recruit a young Colorado Springs Police detective, April Rogers, to infiltrate the activist community there. Wearing provocative clothing, the pink-haired Rogers suggested she was a sex worker named “Chelsi Kurti.” She offered to volunteer at the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs.
During the pandemic summer of unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, members of the Chinook Center organized a protest near the home of a police officer involved in the fatal 2019 shooting of a young Black man, De’Von Bailey. For more than a year after the demonstration, Rogers, pretending to be an activist, secretly collected information about members of the Chinook Center; she also tried unsuccessfully to lure at least two activists into gun-running stings engineered by the FBI. The information Rogers surreptitiously collected from the Chinook Center, coupled with the use of a new FBI program called Social Media Exploitation, allowed the FBI and its local law enforcement partner to build dossiers on individual activists without warrants.
After building the intelligence files, Rogers participated in a 2021 housing rights protest organized by the Chinook Center. As The Intercept reported in March, Colorado Springs police, armed with intelligence reports created by the FBI’s Social Media Exploitation program and filled with photos from social media, eagerly awaited the protesters they planned to arrest. “Boot to the face,” a police officer, Scott Alamo, said gleefully as he flipped through the pages of activists’ photos, his body camera recording the comment. “It’s going to happen.”
The cops, dressed in riot gear, violently arrested several activists on charges related to their roles in the protest near the police officer’s home a year earlier. As police stormed in to make arrests, Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike. She saw a cop charging toward her and reacted.
“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”
The charging officer sidestepped the bike, but the encounter was captured by a police body camera.
Armendariz Unzueta was not arrested that day. In the days after, local police couldn’t determine her identity because she had been wearing a face mask and a bike helmet. But Daniel Summey, a Colorado Springs detective assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, started looking for the mysterious cyclist by searching the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists.
Summey found Armendariz Unzueta on social media, matching her bicycle helmet and shoes to photos online. He then wrote an application for a warrant to search her home, but the warrant was based on activities that are protected under the First Amendment. Summey noted, for example, that the demonstration Armendariz Unzueta participated in included red flags, which Summey claimed were a “radical political symbol.” In his search warrant application, Summey also gratuitously appended a full-page photo of Armendariz Unzueta in a bikini that had nothing to do with the investigation. “Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta said of the photo’s inclusion.
The ACLU’s lawsuit against the FBI and Colorado Springs Police Departments alleges that the search warrant targeting Armendariz Unzueta and additional warrants to obtain private chats associated with the Chinook Center’s Facebook account and the group’s membership roster essentially criminalized First Amendment-protected activities and violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“The warrants targeting Chinook and Armendariz were part of a pattern and practice of unconstitutional actions intended to teach activists a lesson: Colorado Springs police would retaliate against political expression with dragnet warrants to chill free speech,” the ACLU of Colorado alleges in its complaint, the first lawsuit related to FBI’s surveillance of activist groups in Colorado during the summer of 2020.
Policing “Violent” Speech
Remarkably, the Justice Department isn’t denying that the FBI’s investigations of activists in Colorado were related to potentially First Amendment-protected activity. In the Denver criminal case, the Justice Department acknowledged that the FBI’s investigation there during the summer of 2020 was based on speech, albeit of a “violent nature.”
The admission came last week in the criminal case of Hall, the primary Black activist targeted by the FBI and its informant, Windecker, during the summer of 2020. The Justice Department was compelled to respond to Hall’s motion to vacate his felony conviction for buying and giving a firearm to Windecker, a convicted felon who was not allowed to have a gun.
Windecker asked Hall to buy him the gun after failing to persuade Hall and another Black activist to join an FBI-engineered assassination plot supposedly targeting the state’s attorney general. Hall bought the Smith … Wesson handgun for Windecker, despite knowing that Windecker was a convicted felon, and pleaded guilty to the federal charge in January 2022. He was sentenced to three years of probation.
But following the reporting by The Intercept and “Alphabet Boys,” Hall petitioned the court to vacate his conviction based on his previous lawyer’s alleged failure to investigate Windecker fully and pursue an entrapment defense. Hall claims that Windecker, who made public death threats while being paid by the FBI and claimed to have killed Islamic State fighters as a volunteer for the Kurdish Peshmerga fighting force, threatened to harm him if he didn’t buy him the gun. Windecker’s threats of violence weren’t secret. In one YouTube video, Windecker, while secretly being paid by the FBI, states: “I have a plan to kill everybody in the fucking room if need to be.”
“We believe he could have prevailed with an entrapment defense,” Lisa Polansky, a Colorado lawyer who was recently appointed to represent Hall in his effort to vacate his conviction, told The Intercept.
The Justice Department described Hall’s claims as “meritless,” but Denver federal prosecutor Rajiv Mohan acknowledged that FBI reports showed that Hall and other racial justice activists were initially targeted following Windecker’s reports about speech. Mohan claimed, however, that Hall’s decision to buy a gun for the FBI’s informant was independent of “any outrageous government conduct in relation to speech.”
The FBI’s investigation in Colorado is the first documented case of federal agents infiltrating the racial justice movement during the summer of 2020. Although the Justice Department and the FBI have said little about it, the probe has garnered attention on Capitol Hill. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon called it “a clear abuse of authority.” Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina quipped: “This is what the FBI does.” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio submitted The Intercept’s article about the FBI activity in Denver into evidence in his Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
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Angola prison in Louisiana, where the state's male death row inmates are housed. (photo: Giles Clarke/AFP)
Fifty-six of the 57 death row prisoners ask governor, who is coming to the end of his term, to act on his anti-death penalty convictions
Fifty-six of the 57 prisoners sentenced to death in Louisiana have joined forces to make a rare mass petition for mercy. They are asking John Bel Edwards, the governor who is coming to the end of his term, to act on his anti-death penalty convictions and order the pardons board to consider their pleas.
Should the board recommend clemency, Edwards would have the executive power to take the 55 men and one woman off death row and place them on life without parole.
Such a move would be unprecedented and game-changing for the death penalty, advocacy groups say.
“This large clemency effort is historic and important,” said Samantha Kennedy, executive director of the Promise of Justice Initiative in New Orleans. “Commuting these death sentences would be a model for the south, and give a big push to the move away from capital punishment in the US.”
Impetus for the mass petition came from remarks made by Edwards in March in which, for the first time since he became governor in 2016, he openly expressed his opposition to the death penalty. He pointed to the risk of executing innocent people, and said the practice of taking lives in the name of justice offended his Catholic faith.
Launched in June, the mass petition is in effect an invitation to Edwards to act on his own words. But the death row inmates know that they are in a race against the clock.
Edwards must move within the next two weeks to instruct the clemency board, whose five members he appoints, to hold formal hearings into each of the 56 applications if there is to be any chance of success before he leaves the governor’s mansion in January. So far, he has remained silent on the issue.
The Guardian asked Edwards to clarify his position, but did not receive an answer.
Sir Richard Branson, a longtime death penalty abolitionist, wrote to the governor last month. The Virgin Group founder applauded Edwards’ opposition to the practice and expressed strong support for the mass clemency application.
But the petition faces a formidable adversary in Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s Republican attorney general, who is competing to replace Edwards as governor. Landry is a gung-ho supporter of capital punishment who has indicated in his gubernatorial electoral campaign that should he win he is minded to restart executions next year.
Louisiana last executed a prisoner in 2010. Executions have stalled because of the scarcity of lethal injection drugs caused by an international blockade of death penalty states.
Landry says he will bypass the shortage by bringing back the firing squad and electric chair. Advocates fear that should he become governor, he could unleash a wave of judicial killings that would put all 57 death row inmates’ lives in immediate peril.
Landry, who is clear frontrunner to become the Republican candidate in the governor’s race, has used his political muscle to block the mass clemency petition. He issued a four-page opinion last month in which he argued that the pardons board could only consider mercy pleas from death row inmates up to a year after their appeal rulings were issued – effectively negating all 56 applications.
In the wake of Landry’s opinion, the clemency board set aside all the 56 petitions.
Advocacy groups say that Landry’s legal argument is inaccurate and misleading.
“There is clear history that shows that this interpretation is improper and disingenuous – it has never been interpreted this way in the 25 years of this policy, a time period which includes applications for clemency from death row which were permitted under the same conditions,” Kennedy said.
The prospect of Louisiana potentially restarting executions under a Republican governor is chilling to criminal justice advocates, given the state’s dark racial history. Not only does it have the highest incarceration rate over the past decade of any democracy in the world, but it also provides one of the sharpest examples of the slavery-to-capital punishment pipeline.
Angola prison, where Louisiana’s male death row is housed, is located on a former plantation where enslaved people were forced into the fields to pick cotton. The institution is named after the African country where many of those enslaved people originated.
Today, 38 of the 57 people on death row – 67% – are African American in a state in which 33% of the population is Black.
“Death row in Louisiana is rooted in a lynching system,” Kennedy said. “Angola is the size of Manhattan and has been an active plantation since antebellum slavery, where currently Black men are still forced to pick crops under life-threateningly dangerous conditions, under the threat of violence and severe deprivation, replicating slavery.”
She added that until only recently Black men at Angola were forced to do this “under the eyes of a white man on a horse with shotgun in hand”.
Among the 56 mass petitioners, five are Black men sentenced to death by all-white juries.
Louisiana also has an atrocious record with sentencing innocent people to death. Nine people have been exonerated from death row in the past quarter-century, and the reversal rate for cases post-conviction is above 80%.
“That means Louisiana more often than not gets it wrong with the death penalty,” Kennedy said.
Among the 56 mass petitioners are LaDerrick Campbell, who was allowed to dismiss his lawyers and represent himself during his capital murder trial despite having been diagnosed with schizophrenia and showing signs of paranoid delusions in the courtroom.
Another petitioner, Jimmie Duncan, was condemned to death using the thoroughly discredited junk science theory of bite-mark evidence. Antoinette Frank, the only woman on death row in Louisiana, is also among the group.
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Elon Musk introduces the Model X car at the company's headquarters, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2015, in Fremont, California. (photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)
An attorney representing the social media site wrote to the Center for Countering Digital Hate on July 20 threatening legal action over the nonprofit’s research into hate speech and content moderation. The letter alleged that CCDH’s research publications seem intended “to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims.”
Musk is a self-professed free speech absolutist who has welcomed back white supremacists and election deniers to the platform, which he renamed X earlier this month. But the billionaire has at times proven sensitive about critical speech directed at him or his companies.
The center is a nonprofit with offices in the U.S. and United Kingdom. It regularly publishes reports on hate speech, extremism or harmful behavior on social media platforms like X, TikTok or Facebook.
The organization has published several reports critical of Musk’s leadership, detailing an increase in anti-LGBTQ hate speech as well as climate misinformation since his purchase. The letter from X’s attorney cited one specific report from June that found the platform failed to remove neo-Nazi and anti-LGBTQ content from verified users that violated the platform’s rules.
In the letter, attorney Alex Spiro questioned the expertise of the researchers and accused the center of trying to harm X’s reputation. The letter also suggested, without evidence, that the center received funds from some of X’s competitors, even though the center has also published critical reports about TikTok, Facebook and other large platforms.
“CCDH intends to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims,” Spiro wrote, using the platform’s former name.
Imran Ahmed, the center’s founder and CEO, told the AP on Monday that his group has never received a similar response from any tech company, despite a history of studying the relationship between social media, hate speech and extremism. He said that typically, the targets of the center’s criticism have responded by defending their work or promising to address any problems that have been identified.
Ahmed said he worried X’s response to the center’s work could have a chilling effect if it frightens other researchers away from studying the platform. He said he also worried that other industries could take note of the strategy.
“This is an unprecedented escalation by a social media company against independent researchers. Musk has just declared open war,” Ahmed told the Associated Press. “If Musk succeeds in silencing us other researchers will be next in line.”
Messages left with Spiro and X were not immediately returned Monday.
It’s not the first time that Musk has fired back at critics. Last year, he suspended the accounts of several journalists who covered his takeover of Twitter. Another user was suspended for using publicly available flight data to track Musk’s private plane; Musk had initially pledged to keep the user on the platform but later changed his mind, citing his personal safety. He also threatened to sue the user before allowing him back on the platform under certain restrictions.
He initially had promised that he would allow any speech on his platform that wasn’t illegal. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk wrote in a tweet last year.
X’s recent threat of a lawsuit prompted concern from U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who said the billionaire was trying to use the threat of legal action to punish a nonprofit group trying to hold a powerful social media platform accountable.
“Instead of attacking them, he should be attacking the increasingly disturbing content on Twitter,” Schiff said in a statement.
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Family members of Ricky Cobb II, a Black man who was shot and killed by a Minnesota State Patrol trooper, speak at a news conference outside Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023. (photo: Trisha Ahmed/AP)
The groups and relatives of 33-year-old Ricky Cobb II made the demands at a news conference outside the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, two days after Cobb was killed during a traffic stop.
Troopers had pulled over Cobb for a traffic stop early Monday on Interstate 94 in Minneapolis. Body and dash cam video from the state patrol shows the taillights were out on the Ford Fusion Cobb was driving.
According to the head of the Minnesota State Patrol, after stopping the car the troopers tried to take Cobb into custody for allegedly violating a restraining order before fatally shooting him as he began driving away.
Black Lives Matter Twin Cities, The Racial Justice Network, Black Lives Matter Minnesota, and Cobb’s relatives gathered at the government center to demand that Democratic Gov. Tim Walz fire the state troopers who were involved in Cobb’s death and that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charge the officers in the case and issue a warrant for their arrests.
“The circumstances simply did not require the use of deadly force. Those officers acted recklessly and they must be held accountable,” Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and founder of the Racial Justice Network, said in the statement.
Cobb’s mother, Nyra Fields-Miller, described the pain she has endured after her son’s death.
“I’m exhausted. My heart is heavy every day for the last three days. Waking up, I have migraines. And I’m hurt,” Fields-Miller said. “I would like those officers to man up.”
The governor’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press about the family’s demand that Walz fire the troopers.
But Walz said earlier Wednesday on X, the social platform formerly called Twitter, that he had offered his condolences to Cobb’s mother and “assured her that a swift, thorough investigation has already begun and that we will do everything we can to get to the bottom of what happened.”
On Monday, the troopers who checked Cobb’s license found what Patrol Chief Col. Matt Langer called a “pick up and hold” on Cobb, meaning the nearby Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office suspected he committed a felony violation of a protection order and wanted to question him.
Langer said troopers checked to make sure Ramsey County deputies still wanted Cobb in custody, then tried to get him to leave the car.
When troopers opened his doors and attempted to pull him out, Cobb began driving with two troopers still hanging out the sides of the car, body and dash camera footage shows. A trooper then shot him as he drove away.
The Hennepin County coroner ruled Cobb’s death a homicide caused by multiple gunshot wounds.
The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating. Three troopers have been placed on administrative leave, per State Patrol policy.
Moriarty said in a statement Tuesday that her “heart goes out to Mr. Cobb’s family.” She noted previous deaths caused by police.
“I also know this community continues to navigate the trauma and grief that results from police violence and the tragic loss of our community members at the hands of law enforcement, no matter the circumstances,” she said. “And I know that our community wants answers. We will work as swiftly as possible to provide them.”
In May 2020, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police sparked a global protest movement and a nationwide reckoning on racism in policing.
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks to reporters outside the White House after a meeting with President Biden in May. (photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
New research casts doubt on the climate strategy pushed by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other GOP leaders
“God has blessed America with resources,” McCarthy said. “If we have the ability to produce those resources, America will be stronger and the world will be safer.”
Smoke from Canadian wildfires hung in the air as McCarthy spoke. Asked about his plans to prevent further fires and other disasters fueled by climate change, the speaker suggested a strategy popular among Republicans: Plant a trillion trees.
The plan has some prominent backers. President Donald Trump announced in 2020 that the United States would join a global initiative to plant a trillion trees, despite his antagonism toward climate science. The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee has introduced legislation to plant a trillion trees as “a comprehensive, practical solution to the climate issues we’re facing today.”
But in recent years, climate scientists have grown more skeptical about relying on tree-planting programs. They have warned that heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by the end of this century unless humanity swiftly phases out the burning of oil, gas and coal.
Now, new research finds that planting a trillion trees would have a minimal effect on halting global warming, partly because of the long lag time for trees to reach maturity and absorb large amounts of carbon. The analysis by John Sterman, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Andrew P. Jones, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Interactive, found that planting a trillion trees would prevent only 0.15 degrees Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100.
“Trees are great. I personally love to be out in the forests as much as I possibly can,” Sterman said. “But the reality is very simple: You can plant a trillion trees, and even if they all survived, which wouldn’t happen, it just wouldn’t make that much difference to the climate.”
The analysis relied on a global climate simulator called En-ROADS, developed by Climate Interactive and the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative. It also found that planting a trillion trees would only sequester 6 percent of the carbon dioxide that the world needs to avoid emitting by 2050 to meet the goal of the Paris climate accord: limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
“Planting a trillion trees is not a serious solution to the climate crisis,” Jones said. “It is too little, too late.”
Trees do store vast amounts of carbon dioxide in their trunks, branches and roots. But old-growth forests sequester much more carbon than younger forests, and it usually takes 20 to 30 years for trees to reach full maturity. That means a tree planted today would do little to reduce emissions over the next crucial decades.
Trees are also especially vulnerable to drought, wildfires and pests, all of which are becoming more common as the world warms. In Montana, where the average temperature has increased by nearly 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, a mountain pine beetle infestation has damaged or killed hundreds of thousands of acres of forests.
The researchers also highlighted that planting a trillion trees would require an enormous amount of land — 900 million hectares, or nearly three times the size of India. It would be nearly impossible to acquire that much land without disturbing grasslands or farmland, which already store carbon. Although producing renewable energy is also land-intensive, avoiding the same amount of carbon emissions by building more wind and solar farms would require only 15 million hectares by 2050, the authors found.
The research has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal. But Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and the payments company Stripe, said the findings are “generally consistent” with his own analyses.
“I don’t think there’s too much uncertainty here that that amount of trees would reduce global temperatures by a bit more than a tenth of a degree,” he said. “So it’s by no means a silver bullet.”
At the same time, Hausfather emphasized that “every tenth of a degree matters. So if you can reduce temperatures by 0.15C, that still opens up more room for us to be able to achieve our most ambitious climate targets. It just means that it’s not a replacement for reducing emissions as quickly as possible.”
Both Hausfather and the authors of the analysis also clarified that they support preserving existing forests, including rainforests. Although the Amazon has historically acted as a massive carbon sink, deforestation is pushing the critical rainforest toward a tipping point, scientists say.
Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee and earned a master of forestry degree from Yale University, defended tree planting as a climate solution.
“It’s proven. It’s low-cost. It’s large-scale,” Westerman said in an interview last week. “I don’t know of any other solution anybody’s proposing that you can get two of those benefits from.”
Asked about phasing out U.S. production of fossil fuels, the Republican scoffed, noting that China last year approved the largest expansion of coal-fired power plants since 2015.
“That’s a pipe dream,” Westerman said. “If we phase them all out here, they’re still going to be increasingly used around the world. ... But if you want to kill people and starve people to death and go backwards in technology and innovation, then, yeah, phasing out fossil fuels would certainly do that and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
The Trillion Trees Act, which Westerman introduced in 2021, garnered 105 co-sponsors, including three Democrats and three members of the current House GOP leadership. Westerman said he hopes to reintroduce the measure after this month’s congressional recess.
Chris Barnard, vice president of external affairs at the American Conservation Coalition, a group that seeks to engage younger conservatives on climate change, said he thinks Republicans’ remarks about planting trees have been misconstrued. He said GOP lawmakers are not suggesting that planting a trillion trees is the only way the world should address climate change. The party, for instance, has also proposed expanding nuclear power, accelerating the permitting process for energy projects, and bolstering America’s supply chains for the critical minerals used in electric vehicles and other green technologies.
“These are all things Republicans have championed,” Barnard said. “But the party has not done a good job of messaging that to people, especially to young people who care about climate issues.”
Polling has found that while Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over climate change, younger voters in both parties prioritize the issue, and tree planting remains popular across ages and ideologies. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 90 percent of Americans in both parties support planting a trillion trees to absorb carbon emissions, compared with 71 percent who support tougher fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks.
Although many Democrats favor a rapid transition to renewable energy, they also support a targeted approach to planting trees. The bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 authorizes the U.S. Forest Service to plant more than a billion trees in national forests over the next decade. President Biden’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, also provides more than $1 billion to increase access to trees in urban neighborhoods experiencing the “heat island effect,” in which heat reflects off surfaces such as concrete and asphalt.
The funding will help ensure that “families have a place to go to cool off,” Biden said last week while announcing new measures aimed at protecting communities from extreme heat this summer.
Public interest in planting a trillion trees exploded in 2019, when an eye-catching study claimed that such a move could remove two-thirds of all carbon emissions from human activities that remained in the atmosphere. The paper in the journal Science received intense media coverage, with a headline in the Guardian proclaiming that “tree planting ‘has mind-blowing potential’” to tackle the climate crisis.
But the backlash was swift. Several scientists criticized the authors’ assumptions and findings, saying they wildly overestimated trees’ potential to store carbon. The authors later issued an “erratum” acknowledging several errors and clarifying that they had never intended tree planting to be a replacement for emissions-cutting measures.
During his visit to Ohio in June, however, McCarthy cited the 2019 study’s original findings. “If we planted a trillion trees, we would take two-thirds of all the emissions created from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution till today,” he said.
McCarthy’s office and Jean-François Bastin, the lead author of the 2019 paper and a professor at the University of Liège in Belgium, did not respond to requests for comment.
The paper seems to have resonated with policymakers and the public, despite its “astronomically incorrect” numbers, said Carla Staver, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University. It is important to correct the record, she said, and spread awareness of the potential downsides of planting trees as a climate strategy. Her work has found that planting trees in African savannas can threaten plants and animals that have not adapted to forest ecosystems.
“There are real impacts on real ecosystems,” Staver said, “that probably shouldn’t have more trees in them.”
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