When Gina got a call that she owed money to a car financing company, it didn’t make sense. At the time, she did not have a driver’s license. In fact, she did not even know how to drive. But, the debt collector explained, her name was on the document.

Gina came to New York City from Haiti almost two decades ago. A few years after she arrived, she met a man, and they began a romantic relationship that quickly turned physically abusive. Within a month, he was sitting her down at a car dealership and telling her to sign her name. Gina didn’t understand that she’d be on the hook for his missed payments. 

“When I found out about this debt issue, I couldn’t sleep. I was crying all the time. I lost a lot of hair. I was stressing,” Gina, who asked to use a different name due to safety concerns, told me through a translator. “It was the most terrible and horrible experience I’ve ever gone through in my life.”

Gina is a victim of coerced debt, a kind of financial abuse where bad actors either take out lines of credit in another person’s name without them knowing or pressure someone into accruing debt under threat. It’s an especially challenging legal hurdle when those experiencing financial abuse have to prove that the debt in their name wasn’t amassed consensually.

Across the country, forty-three percent of survivors report being pressured to take out credit in their own name when they did not want to, and 52 percent reported that an abusive partner put debt in their name through a fraudulent or forced transaction.

Related

She Escaped Her Abuser. But Not Before He Buried Her in Debt.

Right now, there’s a bill on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk to provide a remedy for victims of coerced debt. The bill, which passed back in June, has been in the works for several years and would allow victims of coerced debt to petition creditors to have the debt in their name removed and transferred to their abuser—who debt collectors would then, in turn, be able to hold civilly liable for whatever money is still owed.

Hochul has until December 19, one more week, to sign the bill. But advocates worry it won’t get done, and fear the financial industry is stalling to alter the bill in the meantime. (In an email, Hochul’s office said, “The Governor will review the legislation.”)

“The debt collectors have exceptionally deep pockets. They are well connected in ways that our survivors simply are not,” Lauren Schuster, vice president of government affairs at Urban Resource Institute, the largest provider of domestic violence shelter services in the country, told me.

Months after the assembly passed Rep. Linda Rosenthal’s bill in June, the American Financial Services Association wrote a letter to Hochul’s office, detailing their “grave concerns” about the legislation. While the association’s members are “highly sympathetic” to victims’ “extremely difficult” situations, Christian O’Connor, the AFSA’s State Legislative and Regulatory Counsel, wrote that the bill as it was passed is “open to exploitation by bad actors.”

In another document shared with the legislature showing notes on a 2024 version of the coerced debt bill, an industry trade group was more direct in a comment: “It is important to remember that there are two victims in a coerced debt scenario – first and foremost the consumer. But the creditor is also a victim who was taken advantage of by the abuser who caused the coerced debt.”

As the New York bill is currently written, in order to receive this relief, victims would need to acquire and submit official documentation that helps to prove the debt was coerced—like a police report, a Federal Trade Commission report, or a sworn certification from a qualified third party professional who has helped them, like a domestic violence counselor, a lawyer, or a social worker. The survivor would also need to submit a statement, sworn to be true, that the debts in their name were accrued through abuse or without their knowledge. 

While coercing someone into debt is not currently illegal in New York, falsifying the kind of information survivors would need to submit is illegal—lying about this debt could amount to fraud or result in legal action, a reality that advocates say provides protection to creditors. 

Currently, the executive office and both houses of the state legislature are going back and forth with negotiations to finalize the law over various proposed amendments. Some members of the credit industry, which did not make much noise during the voting process, are now petitioning Hochul’s office to change the legislation and introduce several provisions that advocates say would increase hurdles for victims of coerced debt. 

“I understand the Governor has many, many bills,” said Rosenthal, who sponsored the legislation. “But I believe the way the bill was drafted, receiving input from all sides—from banks, from creditors, debt collectors, and of course from survivors of domestic violence and advocate groups—that the way we crafted it is the way it should be signed into law.”

Still, she continued, “well-heeled interests with deep pockets figure, ‘I don’t have to talk to the legislators, I will just go to the governor’s office.’” Rosenthal told me of the campaign to change the law. “I’ve gotten word to some of them, ‘You’re not skipping my office and my cosponsor in the senate’s office.’ So then they have to come back and say, ‘Oh we thought we called you, blah blah blah, we sent you an email,’ I’m like, ‘No you didn’t, but let’s talk now.’”

If Hochul signs the bill, New York will join a growing number of states that are introducing and passing coerced debt legislation. Texas, Maine, California, Minnesota, and Connecticut have all passed bills adding protections for victims of coerced debt—all to varying degrees. One thing that both the creditors and the advocates agree on is that this New York bill is more comprehensive than some of the other pieces of similar legislation that have been passed across the country. (Movement on the federal level to address this form of financial abuse has stalled in President Donald Trump’s administration.)

The advocates I spoke to called on Hochul’s past support and personal connection to those experiencing domestic violence and remained optimistic that she would sign the bill—and do so without introducing potentially burdensome concessions from debt collectors. 

“I’m hoping that the voices of the survivors that we worked with, and all of the advocates and professionals who’ve been working on this, I hope that those voices matter in Albany,” Naomi Mo Chee Young, another lawyer who helps survivors, said.

The AFSA outlined several edits to the bill that they urged Gov. Hochul to consider, including increasing penalties for false claims of coerced debt, removing physicians, religious leaders, attorneys, employee of a court of the state, and law enforcement officers from who is considered a “qualified third party” that can submit documentation for the victim, and excluding “secured debt” from monies that survivors can seek relief for, among other provisions.

The latter point on secured debt, if included, would make it so vehicle debts would be unavailable for relief. So victims like Gina would still be out of luck. 

After several years and repeated threats from her abuser, Gina’s lawyers were able to get the creditors to dismiss the case based on a technicality, but not all victims are able to escape this kind of financial abuse. “She got lucky,” Divya Subrahmanyam, a lawyer with the Brooklyn-based nonprofit CAMBA who helped Gina, told me. “Most survivors are not getting lucky.”

A former Los Angeles County district attorney who was put on administrative leave in 2022 after he based a prosecution around tips from a right-wing group that has promoted election fraud conspiracy theories is now the top voting rights official at the Department of Justice, according to a legal filing reviewed by Mother Jones.

Recently, Eric Neff’s name began showing up in emails to state election officials and on DOJ legal filings, which referred to him as a “trial attorney.” But a new lawsuit filed against Fulton County, Georgia, on Thursday showed Neff got an apparent promotion. The legal complaint, which seeks 2020 ballot and signature envelopes to search for irregularities, refers to Neff as “Acting Chief, Voting Section.”

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Working as a California prosecutor in October 2022, Neff led efforts to accuse Eugene Yu, the CEO of Michigan-based election management company Konnech, of storing sensitive data about California poll workers on Chinese servers—an alleged violation of his contract with Los Angeles County. The county charged Yu with embezzlement and conspiracy.

Neff’s boss at the time, District Attorney George Gascón, emphasized there was no evidence Yu’s alleged misconduct affected the legitimacy of the 2020 election results, but the charges nonetheless fed into right-wing conspiracies that China was somehow involved in stealing Donald Trump’s reelection. Both Trump and the late Charlie Kirk celebrated Yu’s arrest at the time.

Less than two months later, Gascón dropped the charges because there was “potential bias” in the “presentation” of evidence. According to the Los Angeles Times, Neff’s investigation into Yu was apparently spurred by a tip from one of the co-founders of True the Vote, a right-wing group that has promoted baseless allegations that the 2020 election was stolen. Neff was placed on administrative leave, and the county subsequently paid Yu $5 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit.

True the Vote is most notable for its false claims about people committing mass fraud in 2020 through ballot drop boxes; Dinesh D’Souza based his now-debunked 2022 film, 2000 Mules, around the group’s work.

Neff’s career advancement comes as the DOJ voting section attempts to compile a national voter roll in a purported effort to uncover examples of voter fraud. As my colleague Ari Berman and I reported last week, Trump and his allies could use this voter registration information to challenge election outcomes, or even to illegally cull voters from voter rolls.

“This administration is abandoning the congressional mandate that the division has to stamp out discrimination and protect vulnerable populations,” Chiraag Bains, a former high-ranking official in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told us. “They’re not just abandoning it. They’re actually weaponizing the power of the federal government to try to cut off access to the ballot.”

Chicago has been one of the latest stops on the Trump administration’s deportation tour. “Operation Midway Blitz” started in September and, for months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents have been roaming the streets and detaining hundreds of people.

This week on Reveal, host Al Letson and producer Ashley Cleek visit Chicago to see “Operation Midway Blitz” in action, and find out what it’s been like for those targeted by it. Letson and Cleek found citizens detained, Chicago police officers pepper-sprayed, and communities terrified. Most Chicagoans arrested by federal agents in the operation had no criminal record, not even a traffic ticket.

Letson and Cleek also see how communities are mobilizing to protect each other, and how some of the tensions over immigration raids stretch back to decisions made by the city back in 2022. They also learn from 404 Media’s Joseph Cox about face-scanning apps used by federal agents in Chicago—and how the use of this kind of surveillance points to a broader shift in how the US government deploys its technologies against people inside the country.

Karen Gleason, a veteran reporter, lit a cigarette as she steps out of her white sports car into the sweltering dry heat of the South Texas summer. It took her a few minutes to reach the border wall then recently expanded by Gov. Greg Abbott to deter migrants from Central America. The wall, despite having gaps throughout, is daunting and monstrous. But it does not impede migrants, nor does it resolve the political divide of Del Rio, the city where Gleason lives.

Del Rio sits on the banks of the Rio Grande River in Val Verde County in southwestern Texas. The small border city of 34,000 people has been at the center of the migrant crisis, most notably when thousands of Haitian migrants made headlines in September 2021 as they sheltered under a bridge outside of town.

This crisis was just one of several incidents during which residents of Del Rio and surrounding communities received a slew of misinformation and disinformation. The Del Rio News-Herald, a longstanding daily newspaper, closed in November 2020, making the city part of a growing trend of news deserts across the country.

With the paper closing, community members rely on other, sometimes unchecked, sources for information about immigration, crime, and politics, like the local radio station (which at times gets information from Fox News), right-wing individuals who stand in as citizen journalists with a growing Facebook platform, and social media accounts with anonymous contributors.

A popular Facebook account run by former Border Patrol agent Frank Lopez Jr. consistently associates immigrants with heightened crime in the area, often calling recent border crossers “terrorists, criminals, and rapists.” Lopez occasionally uploads videos of himself on location in front of migrants, telling his nearly 50,000 followers how tax dollars are being funneled to support them.

“This is one of the many misconceptions that has been magnified throughout different media,” says Tiffany Burrow, director of operations at Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition (VVBHC). “We don’t receive federal funding. So people say, ‘My taxes are paying for the work that you’re doing…’ We are a faith-based organization; there’s other ways to raise funding besides the federal government. [We receive] no federal funding.”

As a short-term respite center, the VVBHC is the first stop in the United States for migrants after being released by the Border Patrol. In 2023, VVBHC had 57,139 individuals walk through their door. During their brief stays at the center, migrants are offered small snacks, water, and hygiene kits. “Our mission is to help others in their time of need,” Burrow says. “If individuals are going to spew whatever they want without validating it, that’s a way bigger problem than one person is able to deal with.”  

Another hot topic in Del Rio is crime—and the notion that it’s on the rise. For example, an anonymous Facebook account called Rio del Rio listens to the police scanner to post daily about incidents in the city. The posts often feature fear-mongering headlines, including one that claimed the Biden administration was letting ISIS-linked migrants into the country. “I don’t see myself as a journalist, more like a community activist trying to make their hometown better…having an impact on local government by bringing things to people’s attention is quite rewarding, as well,” the person behind the Rio del Rio account told me via Facebook messenger. The account holder believes maintaining anonymity is important “in order to post the things I post and get away with it.”

According to a study co-led by Northwestern University economist Elisa Jacome, there is no data to show that immigrants contribute to a higher crime rate. In fact, her study found that over a 150-year period, immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than those born in the United States. 

For a city like Del Rio, and other news deserts across the country, there is a lot at stake when it comes to this type of misinformation and disinformation. What we saw weeks before the 2024 presidential elections far surpassed anything we have seen before, according to disinformation researchers. As Americans tuned into one of the most closely followed elections in history, limited options for local news, advancements in Artificial Intelligence, and a lack of oversight on platforms like X left many voters vulnerable to falsehoods and smear campaigns. “If people don’t do their own fact-checking from serious, and from really solid resources…it’s going to be really hard to go forward,” Burrow says. 

While traditional media–once the bedrock of how Americans stayed informed–continues to shift, legacy and start-up news outlets, with different business models and platforms, have new opportunities to enter the news industry.

Gleason, who was a long-time employee of the Del Rio News-Herald, now works for a weekly tabloid-sized newspaper started by a veteran, Joel Langton. The newspaper operates out of Langton’s home. They meet in his living room, sip sparkling water and eat cookies while discussing the most important stories Gleason should dig into. Langton then personally delivers the newspaper every Friday morning to local establishments.

While Gleason makes a fraction of what she once made at the Del Rio News-Herald, since the 1980s, she has believed strongly in her mission as a journalist and keeping the people of Del Rio informed. Her role has not changed, and perhaps, has become even more vital.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Changes in polar bear DNA that could help the animals adapt to warmer climates have been detected by researchers, in a study thought to be the first time a statistically significant link has been found between rising temperatures and changing DNA in a wild mammal species.

Climate breakdown is threatening the survival of polar bears. Two-thirds of them are expected to have disappeared by 2050 as their icy habitat melts and the weather becomes hotter.

Now scientists at the University of East Anglia have found that some genes related to heat stress, ageing, and metabolism are behaving differently in polar bears living in southeast Greenland, suggesting they may be adjusting to warmer conditions.

The researchers analysed blood samples taken from polar bears in two regions of Greenland and compared “jumping genes”: small, mobile pieces of the genome that can influence how other genes work. Scientists looked at the genes in relation to temperatures in the two regions and at the associated changes in gene expression.

“DNA is the instruction book inside every cell, guiding how an organism grows and develops,” said the lead researcher, Dr Alice Godden. “By comparing these bears’ active genes to local climate data, we found that rising temperatures appear to be driving a dramatic increase in the activity of jumping genes within the south-east Greenland bears’ DNA.”

As local climates and diets evolve as a result of changes in habitat and prey forced by global heating, the genetics of the bears appear to be adapting, with the group of bears in the warmest part of the country showing more changes than the communities farther north. The authors of the study have said these changes could help us understand how polar bears might survive in a warming world, inform understanding of which populations are most at risk and guide future conservation efforts.

This is because the findings, published on Friday in the journal Mobile DNA, suggest the genes that are changing play a crucial role in how different polar bear populations are evolving.

Godden said: “This finding is important because it shows, for the first time, that a unique group of polar bears in the warmest part of Greenland are using ‘jumping genes’ to rapidly rewrite their own DNA, which might be a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice.”

Temperatures in northeast Greenland are colder and less variable, while in the south-east there is a much warmer and less icy environment, with steep temperature fluctuations.

DNA sequences in animals change over time, but this process can be accelerated by environmental stress such as a rapidly heating climate.

There were some interesting DNA changes, such as in areas linked to fat processing, that could help polar bears survive when food is scarce. Bears in warmer regions had more rough, plant-based diets compared with the fatty, seal-based diets of northern bears, and the DNA of southeastern bears seemed to be adapting to this.

Godden said: “We identified several genetic hotspots where these jumping genes were highly active, with some located in the protein-coding regions of the genome, suggesting that the bears are undergoing rapid, fundamental genetic changes as they adapt to their disappearing sea ice habitat.”

The next step will be to look at other polar bear populations, of which there are 20 around the world, to see if similar changes are happening to their DNA.

This research could help protect the bears from extinction. But the scientists said it was crucial to stop temperature rises accelerating by reducing the burning of fossil fuels.

Godden said: “We cannot be complacent, this offers some hope but does not mean that polar bears are at any less risk of extinction. We still need to be doing everything we can to reduce global carbon emissions and slow temperature increases.”

The Transportation Security Administration is forwarding passenger lists to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in order to detain and deport travelers while denying them the chance to challenge the process, according to documents obtained by the New York Times.

A Times report Friday revealed that information furnished by TSA provided the basis of ICE’s high-profile detention of university student Any Lucía López Belloza, who was deported following her arrest at Boston’s Logan airport en route to visit her family for Thanksgiving.

On a near-daily basis since March, the agency has been sending files to ICE that include photographs of the person targeted for deportation, and flight information that ICE employs to detain people before they board. 

The TSA’s participation in immigration enforcement is unprecedented, as is that of ICE with domestic travel; the program, kept secret until Friday’s report, represents yet another means of inducing collective fear en masse in travelers and other residents.

It’s a widespread problem—other travelers have been detained at airports. 

In the case of many immigrants like López, a student with no criminal record, those attacks defy orders by federal judges not to deport the people targeted—defiance facilitated by ICE’s collaboration with TSA, which prevents timely challenges.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the TSA’s collaboration with ICE and the secrecy around it.

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote earlier this week about the second Trump administration’s immigration policy, “the US government is using its prosecutorial discretion—it is choosing—to normalize casual cruelty and overt racism. And it’s doing so ostensibly in the name of “protecting” the American people.”

The Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to place a “black-box” warning—a high-danger label only used to flag risk of death, severe harm, or incapacitation—on Covid vaccines, CNN has reported. 

According to the Friday CNN report, the initiative to include the warning—part of a range of efforts by Trump administration health officials to limit access to, public support for, and uptake of Covid shots and other vaccinations—is being led by FDA chief medical and scientific officer Vinay Prasad, who is also director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. The plan to implement the warnings is expected to be made public by the end of December.

Prasad has a long history of dismissing the pandemic, claiming in 2021 that Covid was not more harmful to children than the common flu.

Health experts have continued to voice concerns that adding such a warning label may further reduce access to Covid vaccines by making clinicians more hesitant to recommend shots to groups who are at risk for severe Covid. Vaccines with black box warnings are particularly rare because vaccines are only approved after especially extensive safety and efficacy checks. 

The news follows reporting earlier this week that the FDA is investigating whether Covid vaccines are linked to deaths in adults, continuing a campaign public health experts have viewed with extreme skepticism. Prasad wrote to FDA staffers in a November letter that “at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” without specific evidence.

A CDC study released Thursday found that the 2024-2025 Covid vaccine was approximately 76 percent effective against emergency and urgent care visits in children aged 9 months to 4 years, and 56 percent effective for children 5-17 years old, compared to those who didn’t get the updated vaccine. 

But since June, CDC recommendations have stated that “parents of children ages 6 months to 17 years should discuss the benefits of vaccination with their doctor.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s FDA has already reversed previous federal policy on Covid vaccines, restricting the most recent vaccineto people who are at elevated risk due to age or an underlying health condition. Kennedy said in November that he instructed CDC to retract its long-held public stance that vaccines do not cause autism despite evidence to the contrary. (CDC’s website now claims that the assertion that vaccines do not cause autism is not “evidence-based.”)

Health experts told my colleagues Kiera Butler and Anna Merlan earlier this year that RFK and his allies’ anti-vaccine decisions open the door to taking essential drugs off the market.

“Kennedy’s crusade will create even more doubt over vaccines’ effectiveness, as he uses his position to broadcast and legitimize debunked ideas about their risks,” they wrote. “In the end, experts warn, it will be patients who suffer.”

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If you’re reading this, chances are you care a lot about fighting climate change, and that’s great. The climate emergency threatens all of humanity. And although the world has started to make some progress on it, our global response is still extremely lacking.

The trouble is, it can be genuinely hard to figure out how to direct your money wisely if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a glut of environmental organizations out there—but how do you know which are the most impactful?

To help, here’s a list of eight of the most high-impact, cost-effective, and evidence-based organizations. We’re not including bigger-name groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, or the Natural Resources Defense Council, because most big organizations are already relatively well-funded.

The groups we list below seem to be doing something especially promising in the light of criteria that matter for effectiveness: importance, tractability, and neglectedness.

Important targets for change are ones that drive a big portion of global emissions. Tractable problems are ones where we can actually make progress right now. And neglected problems are ones that aren’t already getting a big influx of cash from other sources like the government or philanthropy, and could really use money from smaller donors.

Founders Pledge, an organization that guides entrepreneurs committed to donating a portion of their proceeds to effective charities, and Giving Green, a climate charity evaluator, used these criteria to assess climate organizations. Their research informed the list below. As in the Founders Pledge and Giving Green recommendations, we’ve chosen to look at groups focused on mitigation (tackling the root causes of climate change by reducing emissions) rather than adaptation (decreasing the suffering from the impacts of climate change). Both are important, but the focus here is on preventing further catastrophe.

And this work is particularly important right now, in a world where “climate attention has collapsed, political support has evaporated, and policy gains are under sustained assault,” Founders Pledge stressed in its assessment of today’s politically charged atmosphere. Just last month, the prominent environmental group 350.org was forced to “temporarily suspend” its US operations because of severe funding challenges, according to a letter obtained by Politico. They are among the many groups in the climate movement now buckling under existential funding cuts.

At the same time, Founders Pledge argues that the climate community massively underinvested “outside the progressive bubble,” creating a movement that was not resilient to the shakeup that would come under President Donald Trump. “One of the main ways we were underprepared was the fact that climate philanthropy invested overwhelmingly on one side of the political spectrum,” the organization writes. Now, the experts say, it’s particularly important to invest in nonpartisan organizations dedicated to defending and expanding upon all of the progress made so far.

Arguably, the best move is to donate not to an individual charity, but to a fund—like the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund or the Giving Green Fund. Experts at those groups pool together donor money and give it out to the charities they deem most effective, right when extra funding is most needed. That can mean making time-sensitive grants to promote the writing of an important report, or stepping in when a charity becomes acutely funding-constrained.

That said, some of us like to be able to decide exactly which charity our money ends up with—maybe because we have especially high confidence in one or two charities relative to the others—rather than letting experts split the cash over a range of different groups.

With that in mind, we’re listing below a mix of individual organizations where your money is likely to have an exceptionally positive impact.

Clean Air Task Force

What it does: The Clean Air Task Force is a US-based nongovernmental organization that has been working to reduce air pollution since its founding in 1996. It led a successful campaign to reduce the pollution caused by coal-fired power plants in the US, helped limit the US power sector’s CO2 emissions, and helped establish regulations of diesel, shipping, and methane emissions. CATF also advocates for the adoption of neglected low- and zero-carbon technologies, from advanced nuclear power to super-hot rock geothermal energy.

Why you should consider donating: In addition to its seriously impressive record of success and the high quality of its research, CATF does well on the neglectedness criterion: It often concentrates on targeting emissions sources that are neglected by other environmental organizations, and on scaling up deployment of technologies that are crucial for decarbonization, yet passed over by NGOs and governments. For example, it was one of the first major environmental groups to publicly campaign against overlooked superpollutants like methane.

In recent years, CATF has been expanding beyond the US to operate in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. This is crucial: About 35 percent of climate philanthropy goes to the US and about 10 percent to Europe, which together represent only about 15 percent of future emissions, according to Founders Pledge. And this year, CATF has refocused its strategy to zero in on programs with broad nonpartisan political support to ensure those global efforts have staying power. This is part of why Founders Pledge is supporting CATF’s efforts and recommends giving to that organization. CATF is also one of Giving Green’s top picks.

You can donate to CATF here.

Future Cleantech Architects

What it does: This Germany-based organization aims to promote innovation in Europe’s hard-to-decarbonize sectors by running key programs in, for example, zero-carbon fuels, industry, and carbon removal technologies.

Why you should consider donating: You might be wondering if this kind of innovation really meets the “neglectedness” criterion—don’t we already have a lot of innovation? In the US, yes. But in Europe, this kind of organization is much rarer. And according to Founders Pledge, it’s already exceeded expectations at improving the European climate policy response. Most notably, it has helped shape key legislation at the EU level and advised policymakers on how to get the most bang for their buck when supporting research and development for clean energy tech. Giving Green recommends this organization, too.

You can donate to Future Cleantech Architects here.

Good Food Institute

What it does: The Good Food Institute works to make alternative proteins (think plant-based burgers) competitive with conventional proteins like beef, which could help reduce livestock consumption. It engages in scientific research, industry partnerships, and government advocacy that improves the odds of alternative proteins going mainstream.

Why you should consider donating: Raising animals for meat is responsible for more than 10 percent and perhaps as much as 19 percent of global emissions. These animals belch the superpollutant methane. Plus, we humans tend to deforest a lot of land for them to graze on, even though we all know the world needs more trees, not less. Yet there hasn’t been very much government effort to substantially cut agricultural emissions. Giving Green recommends the Good Food Institute because of its potential to help with that, noting that “GFI remains a powerhouse in alternative protein thought leadership and action. It has strong ties to government, industry, and research organizations and continues to achieve impressive wins. We believe donations to GFI can help stimulate systemic change that reduces food system emissions on a global scale.”

You can donate to the Good Food Institute here.

Innovation Initiative at the Clean Economy Project

What it does: When Bill Gates shuttered the policy arm of his climate philanthropy Breakthrough Energy earlier this year, the US lost a unique advocate for innovation at a pivotal moment in the country’s energy transition. Or did it? A group of veteran Breakthrough Energy staff recently launched the Innovation Initiative—part of a new organization called the Clean Economy Project—as part of a push to ensure the US continues on the right path in its energy transition, regardless of which party is in power.

Why you should consider donating: This newly formed project may still be in its infancy, but its work builds upon years of deep experience advocating for clean energy innovation across the political spectrum. Founders Pledge helped seed the new organization with an early grant because “we see the Innovation Initiative as the best bet for donors who want to support federal energy innovation policy advocacy at a moment when this ecosystem needs coordination and strategic leadership,” they said, noting that even small-scale support for such efforts can spur massive payoffs in the space: “Relatively modest advocacy investments can influence billions” in federal spending for research and development “that accelerates breakthrough technologies with global spillover effects.”

You can learn more about the Innovation Initiative here. To donate, send an email to giving@cleanecon.org, with the subject line “Donating to Innovation Initiative.”

DEPLOY/US

What it does: This nonpartisan nonprofit works with American conservatives to enact decarbonization policies, with the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. DEPLOY/US partners with philanthropic, business, military, faith, youth, policy, and grassroots organizations to shape a decarbonization strategy and generate policy change.

Why you should consider donating: In case you haven’t heard of the eco-right, it’s important to know that there are genuine right-of-center climate groups that want to build support for decarbonization based on conservative principles. These groups have a crucial role to play; they can weaken political polarization around climate and increase Republican support for bold decarbonization policies, which are especially important now, with Republicans in control of the White House and Congress. Right now, these right-of-center groups remain “woefully underfunded compared to both the opportunity and necessity of correcting a large ideological blindspot of the climate movement that has come to bite in 2025,” Founders Pledge writes, adding that DEPLOY/US is uniquely positioned to insulate climate policy against the shifting winds of politics.

You can donate to DEPLOY/US here.

Energy for Growth Hub

What it does: Founded by Todd Moss in 2013, Energy for Growth Hub aims to make electricity reliable and affordable for everyone. The organization hopes to end energy poverty through climate-friendly solutions.

Why you should consider donating: While Energy for Growth Hub is not a strictly climate-focused organization—ending energy poverty is its main goal—it’s still a leader in the clean energy space. The organization will use your donation to fund projects that produce insight for companies and policymakers on how to create the energy-rich, climate-friendly future they’re dreaming of. In June, the World Bank announced an end to its ban on funding nuclear power projects after a sustained lobbying effort from Energy for Growth Hub alongside other think tanks and policy wonks. “We all know that Washington is broken. People complain that it’s impossible to get stuff done,” Moss wrote in his Substack in response. “But then, actually quite often, stuff does get done. And sometimes, just sometimes, things happen because people outside government come together to push a new idea inside government.”

You can donate to Energy for Growth Hub here.

Project InnerSpace

What it does: This US-based nonprofit hopes to unlock the power of heat — geothermal energy—lying beneath the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2022, Project InnerSpace seeks to expand global access and drive down the cost of carbon-free heat and electricity, particularly to populations in the Global South. The organization maps geothermal resources and identifies geothermal projects in need of further funding.

Why you should consider donating: Most geothermal power plants are located in places where geothermal energy is close to the Earth’s surface. Project InnerSpace will use your donation to add new data and tools to GeoMap, its signature map of geothermal hot spots, and drive new strategies and projects to fast-track transitions to geothermal energy around the world. The group also began funding community energy projects through its newly launched GeoFund earlier this year, starting with a geothermal-powered food storage facility in Tapri, India, which will offer local farmers more power to preserve their crops.

You can donate to Project InnerSpace here.

Opportunity Green

What it does: Opportunity Green aims to cut aviation and maritime shipping emissions through targeted regulation and policy initiatives. The UK-based nonprofit was founded in 2021, and since then has aimed to encourage private sector adoption of clean energy alternatives.

Why you should consider donating: Aviation and maritime shipping are an enormous source of global emissions, but receive little attention because international coordination is difficult around the issue, and there are few low-carbon fleets and fuels readily available. Even so, in a few short years, Opportunity Green has managed to gain significant influence in EU and international policy discussions around shipping emissions, while also helping to bring the perspective of climate-vulnerable countries into the fray. In 2024, the group launched a major legal filing against the EU to challenge its green finance rules. “We think Opportunity Green is a strategic organization with broad expertise across multiple pathways of influence to reduce emissions from aviation and shipping,” Giving Green notes. “We are especially excited about Opportunity Green’s efforts to elevate climate-vulnerable countries in policy discussions.”

You can donate to Opportunity Green here.

The past several years have seen an explosion of grassroots activism groups focused on climate—from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future to the Sunrise Movement to Extinction Rebellion. Activism is an important piece of the climate puzzle; it can help change public opinion and policy, including by shifting the Overton window, the range of policies that seem possible.

Social change is not an exact science, and the challenges in measuring a social movement’s effectiveness are well documented. While it would be helpful to have more concrete data on the impact of activist groups, it may also be shortsighted to ignore movement-building for that reason.

The environmentalist Bill McKibben told Vox that building the climate movement is crucial because, although we’ve already got some good mitigation solutions, we’re not deploying them fast enough. “That’s the ongoing power of the fossil fuel industry at work. The only way to break that power and change the politics of climate is to build a countervailing power,” he said in 2019. “Our job — and it’s the key job — is to change the zeitgeist, people’s sense of what’s normal and natural and obvious. If we do that, all else will follow.”

Of course, some activist groups are more effective than others. And it’s worth noting that a group that was highly effective at influencing climate policy during the Biden administration, such as the Sunrise Movement, will not necessarily be as effective today.

“Overall, our take on grassroots activism is that it has huge potential to be cost-effective, and we indeed think that grassroots movements like Sunrise have had really meaningful effects in the past,” Dan Stein, the director of Giving Green, told Vox. But, he added, “It takes a unique combination of timing, organization, and connection to policy to have an impactful grassroots movement.”

One umbrella charity that’s more bullish on the ongoing impact of activism is the Climate Emergency Fund. It was founded in 2019 with the goal of quickly regranting money to groups engaged in climate protests around the globe. Its founders believe that street protest is crucially important to climate politics and neglected in environmental philanthropy. Grantees include Just Stop Oil, the group that made international headlines for throwing soup on a protected, glassed-in Van Gogh painting, and Extinction Rebellion, an activist movement that uses nonviolent civil disobedience like filling the streets and blocking intersections to demand that governments do more on climate.

If you’re skeptical that street protest can make a difference, consider Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research. She’s found that if you want to achieve systemic social change, you need to mobilize 3.5 percent of the population, a finding that helped inspire Extinction Rebellion. And in 2022, research from the nonprofit Social Change Lab suggested that, in the past, groups like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion may have cost-effectively helped to win policy changes (in the US and UK, respectively) that avert carbon emissions.

But the words “in the past” are doing a lot of work here: While early-stage social movement incubation might be cost-effective, it’s unclear whether it’s as cost-effective to give to an activist group once it’s already achieved national attention. The same research notes that in countries with existing high levels of climate concern, broadly trying to increase that concern may be less effective than in previous years; now, it might be more promising to focus on climate advocacy in countries with much lower baseline support for this issue.

There are plenty of ways to use your skills to tackle the climate emergency. And many don’t cost a cent.

If you’re a writer or artist, you can use your talents to convey a message that will resonate with people. If you’re a religious leader, you can give a sermon about climate and run a collection drive to support one of the groups above. If you’re a teacher, you can discuss this issue with your students, who may influence their parents. If you’re a good talker, you can go out canvassing for a politician you believe will make the right choices on climate.

If you’re, well, any human being, you can consume less. You can reduce your energy use, how much stuff you buy, and how much meat you consume. Individual action alone won’t move the needle that much—real change on the part of governments and corporations is key—but your actions can influence others and ripple out to shift social norms, and keep you feeling motivated rather than resigned to climate despair.

You can, of course, also volunteer with an activist group and put your body in the street to nonviolently disrupt business as usual and demand change.

The point is that activism comes in many forms. It’s worth taking some time to think about which one (or ones) will allow you, with your unique capacities and constraints, to have the biggest positive impact. But at the end of the day, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good: It’s best to pick something that seems doable and get to work.

At least 15 people were killed, and more than three dozen hospitalized, in a shooting at Australia’s famous Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday in what authorities are calling a terrorist attack at a Jewish holiday celebration. 

One gunman has been killed and a second suspect, his 24-year-old son, is in custody and in critical condition, police said.

The attack comes amid a surge in antisemitic violence in Australia, home to the largest proportion of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel. It is Australia’s worst mass shooting in three decades, a rare occurrence in a country with one of the lowest rates of gun-related deaths in the developed world.

“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said, adding, “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”

At about 6:45 p.m. on Sunday, police began receiving reports that multiple people had been shot. “The gunmen emerged from a small silver hatchback parked by a footbridge near the beach and began firing into the crowd celebrating Hanukkah,” according to the New York Times. 

A video showing a bystander—identified by Australian media reports as Ahmed al Ahmed, a 43-year-old Sydney man—tackling and disarming an assailant has gone viral. “That man is a genuine hero,” said Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, “and I’ve got no doubt there are many many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.”

Mal Lanyon, police commissioner for New South Wales, said there were also two improvised explosive devices found at the scene that were “active,” the Times reported. He described them as “rudimentary” and “fairly basic” in construction.

Police departments around the world, from New York to London, said they would increase security presences in their cities following the attack. “We are deploying additional resources to public Hanukkah celebrations and synagogues out of an abundance of caution,” the NYPD said in a statement, adding that they “see no nexus to NYC.” 

The rise in antisemitic attacks in the country began after the October 7, 2023 massacre and Israel’s offensive in Gaza. In May 2024, one of Australia’s largest and oldest Jewish schools in Melbourne was spray-painted with the phrase “Jew die.” In a series of incidents in October 2024, a Jewish‑owned bakery in Sydney was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, two men set fire to a brewery near Bondi Beach, and a kosher deli was deliberately set on fire.

One of the most serious incidents occurred this past July, when about 20 worshipers attending a Shabbat dinner at the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation “were forced to evacuate through a rear exit after a man poured flammable liquid on the front door and set it alight,” as reported by Time. 

These incidents, said Daniel Aghion, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, are at “a level that we’ve never seen in the more than 30 years that we’ve been monitoring and collecting data.” 

According to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, the Bondi Beach shooting is the deadliest assault on Jews in the diaspora since the October 27, 2018, attack at the Tree of Life building in that city killed 11 people. This past October, two people were stabbed to death at a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur.

Sunday’s shooting is also the worst in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 23 more. As the New York Times detailed, following that shooting—in which a gunman killed 12 of the victims in just 15 seconds—the country essentially banned assault rifles, many other semiautomatic rifles, and shotguns. Authorities also imposed mandatory gun buybacks, melted down as many as 1 million guns, and imposed new registration requirements and restrictions on gun purchases. 

Over the next two decades, there were no mass shootings in Australia.

In an investigation published this past August, the Guardian warned that the gun landscape in Australia was shifting. “Gun numbers are on the rise,” the investigation noted, and, while the number of gun-license holders per capita has gone down, “there is now a larger number of guns in the community per capita than there was in the immediate aftermath of the [Port Arthur] crackdown.” 

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, said on X that one of the people killed in the attack, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, had deep ties to the neighborhood of Crown Heights. Mamdani called the attack a “vile act of antisemitic terror” and said it was “merely the latest, most horrifying iteration in a growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world.” Schlanger organized the Sydney celebration.

The Hanukkah celebrations at Bondi Beach on Sunday were being hosted by a local chapter of Chabad, a global organization based in Brooklyn. An invitation to the event highlighted free donuts, crafts, face-painting, a “Grand Menorah Lighting,” music, games, and ice cream.

This is a developing story. This post has been updated with information about the alleged suspects. Check back for additional updates.

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar said Sunday that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled over her son this weekend and asked him to prove his citizenship. 

In an interview with WCCO, a CBS affiliate based in Minneapolis, the Somali-born congresswoman said she’s feared for her 20-year-old son since President Donald Trump and ICE began targeting Somali immigrants in the Twin Cities area earlier this month. 

“Yesterday, after he made a stop at Target, he did get pulled over by ICE agents, and once he was able to produce his passport ID, they did let him go,” Omar, a refugee from Somalia, told WCCO’s Esme Murphy. 

Since descending on Minnesota, home of the largest Somali community in the the country, ICE agents have detained several US citizens, according to local officials and video evidence. The operation, “Metro Surge,” has prompted area residents to begin carrying around their passports and even avoid going outside, according to The New York Times. This includes Omar’s son, who “always carries” his passport with him, the four-term congresswoman told Murphy. 

The incident described by Omar occurred one day after she announced that she was launching two formal inquiries into the Trump administration’s “escalating attacks on Somali communities in Minnesota and across the country,” her website reads. In a December 12 letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE acting director Todd Lyons, Omar wrote that “constituents, advocates, and local officials have documented blatant racial profiling, an egregious level of unnecessary force, and activity that appears designed for social media rather than befitting a law enforcement agency.”

Among other questions, Omar wants Noem and Lyons to answer: “How many arrests were the result of judicial warrants?” “How can the public report potential violations of constitutional rights, and how will those be investigated?” and “How is ICE ensuring due process protections while a large volume of new officers are on the ground?”

Amid a barrage of xenophobic remarks about Somali people in recent weeks, President Trump has repeatedly targeted Omar, who arrived in the US as a refugee in the 1990s and became a citizen in 2000. These attacks go back to Trump’s first term, when Omar was first elected to Congress.

“She’s garbage,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting December 2. “Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.” In that meeting, the president also said that Somalia “stinks” and that immigrants from the country “come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch.” “We don’t want them in our country,” he said multiple times.

At a Pennsylvania rally this past Tuesday night, Trump called Somalia “about the worst country in the world” and mocked Omar. “I love this Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is, with the little turban. I love her, she comes in, does nothing but bitch,” he said. “She should get the hell out, throw her the hell out,” Trump continued as his supporters chanted “GET HER OUT!” 

In her interview on Sunday, Omar said ICE had previously entered a local mosque where her son prays, before leaving without making any arrests last Friday. Omar said that throughout that day she was watching videos of ICE stops in the same neighborhood as the mosque.

“I kept calling to see if he was okay, if he had any run-ins, and he wasn’t answering,” Omar told WCCO. “Eventually, that night I did get a chance to talk to him and I had to remind him just how worried I am.”