There’s a joke you’ll hear while driving through Iowa in the late spring. When someone sniffs something pungent wafting up from the fields, they’ll turn to you with a grin on their face. Then comes the joke: Smells like money!
Heh, I used to say in response, but no more than that, for it’s not a very good joke. It’s just one of those things some Midwestern folks say out of habit, like aw damn it or just gonna sneak on by ya. But more and more, I’ve become uncomfortable entertaining the premise of the joke — that is, the tacit equation of hog manure with profit. So now: Smells like money! someone’ll say. Nah, I’ll respond, that’s just hog shit.
I’m not opposed to the smell of hog manure per se. After all, I grew up with that smell. When I was born, my family had been raising hogs in Washington County, Iowa for generations. They’d been farming corn for even longer, right on back to when the state government first decreed, illegally, that parcel of Meskwaki land open for white folks to claim as their own.
Generation after generation, right on down to me, came the wisdom derived from living intimately with animals.
From a very young age, I could sense where to stand among hogs to stay in their line of sight. I knew rudimentary veterinary medicine. I understood how to herd hogs back into the pen from the corn fields into which they would occasionally romp. I also learned — through ample practice — how to scoop hog shit from one spot to another. All of this taught me that although some folks think manure smells like money from afar, when it’s on your hands, it just smells like shit.
And so it went, until 2007, when the herd was sold off. At the time, my family explained to me that this was a good thing — one less responsibility, one less concern. But as I would later learn, the real reason was corn. The ethanol boom drove the price of corn skyward, raising all other costs except for the price of pork. It was no longer financially viable for a farm of my family’s size to use corn for hog feed. We did not have the herd size of other farmers, whose magnitude granted them a certain degree of protection.
My family was not the only ones to sell their hogs, though. Between 1992 and 2017, the number of farms raising pigs dwindled from 561 to 167. But this didn’t mean that there were fewer pigs in Washington County. Rather, during that same time, the pig population ballooned from 344,170 to 1,332,048 — 60 pigs for every human being in the county. Taken on average, that’s 8,000 pigs per farm, granting Washington County the third largest pig population of any county in the nation. The demographics of farm workers has also changed in the past three decades. Though actual statistics are difficult to gather, migrants, immigrants, and BIPOC workers make up an increasing share — if not majority — of actual Iowa farm labor.
There are other facts, too — ones that the state Pork Board isn’t as proud of. Iowans now experience the second highest rates of cancer in the nation, largely due to nitrates from manure runoff.
In 2018, 700 Iowa waterways were found to be polluted, largely owing to nitrates from manure runoff. Research has also directly linked the intensification of the livestock industry to increased reports of cyanobacteria content in drinking water near livestock operations. Humans and non-humans who live near CAFOs are more likely to experience a range of adverse health effects, too, including respiratory disease, hypertension, bacterial infection, and cognitive impairments — and in Iowa, these folks tend to be already marginalized. And what of all the money assumed in the hog shit smell? Into the hands of just a few individuals.
Rob Nixon calls this “slow violence” — the gradual accretion of ecological harm over time, which disproportionately impacts BIPOC, poor, and other historically marginalized communities. I’d also call it a quiet or hidden violence. Tucked back away from cities and interstates, the damage is hard to identify for those not actively living in it.
And this, now, includes me. I have been off the farm for more than ten years. That time has granted me a generative distance from the daily minutiae of living among the pigs. In that space between now and then, between me and the pigs, I have had time to reflect. I see that the systems and attitudes that drive the monstrous growth of the pork industry are those that drive the climate crisis: maximization, extraction, acceleration, consolidation, inequality, producerism, neoliberalism, capitalism, objectification of our nonhuman kin (and, for that matter, our human kin), and the pursuit of profit.
What to do? What to do in the face of pork propaganda? In the face of the state government’s blatant disregard for the living world? When Governor Kim Reynolds actively stymies local requests for already allocated federal funds to support greater environmental protections? When environmental scientists are gagged by politicians? When the MAGA movement has made meat a political issue — a key component of their concept of masculinity? Can we imagine, in the face of so much resistance, an Iowa without pigs?
I am still trying to find ways to respond to these questions. As an educator, I’ve been working to help students build their capacity to read critically, to learn to see what’s not immediately visible on the page, to look for the unpalatable ecological harm that writers cannot or will not depict. But identifying the harm is only one step in what I now know as a much larger endeavor: to empathize with those nonhumans and humans whom we’ve never met, to actively care for those whom we’ll never see, hear, or touch. The trick, as I see it, is to be able to imagine the smell of hog manure in the air but reject the compulsion to say it smells like money.
In my decade as an educator, I have been fortunate to work with young people who understand the precariousness of the moment we are in. Even the most privileged among them know that the climate crisis is not an abstraction. They know their futures hinge on our collective willingness to care — to dream beyond convention. These young people — their energy, their anger, their diligence, their concern, their care for one another — give me hope. Across generations and geographies, there are communities working together to reverse the slow violence status quo. How fortunate I am to have found myself among them.
Nick is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP29. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation, support our delegates, and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.
Nick Kleese is an Iowa farm kid turned literacy educator. Nick serves as the Associate Director of Community Engagement at the Center for Climate Literacy at the University of Minnesota, Managing Editor for Climate Literacy in Education, and Editor at Climate Lit. He is also Co-Founder of KidLitLab! He has taught middle school and high school English, undergraduate children’s literature courses, and outdoor immersion experiences for kindergarteners. His current research explores the role young people’s literature and media could play in advancing an interspecies democracy.
The post Out of Iowa appeared first on Climate Generation.
Governments at the COP17 nature summit in Armenia agreed on Saturday to scale up their policies to protect the planet’s shrinking biodiversity, and for the first time invited large emerging economies like China and Gulf states to take on donor responsibilities to help fund those efforts.
For the past two weeks, countries held talks in Yerevan under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to outline a plan to ramp up currently “insufficient” policies to conserve land and marine ecosystems. A recent UN progress report found the world is off track to meet 22 out of 23 global targets aimed at reversing species loss and protecting 30% of land and seas by 2030.
While a response plan, called the “Global Review of Collective Progress”, was expected to be the main outcome of COP17, negotiations struggled to advance amid a deadlock over the controversial subject of how to finance the boost in conservation measures needed.
After an all-night session on Friday, delegates agreed to invite developing countries to voluntarily signal their interest in assuming donor funding obligations alongside developed nations. Negotiators repeatedly warned that any stronger provisions on expanding the donor base would collapse the deal.
COP president: Results beat expectations
An exhausted COP17 president Hambardzum Matevosyan, Armenia’s environment minister, told journalists in the early hours of Saturday that “we’ve achieved more than we could’ve expected” given the “importance” of the decisions being taken.
“It was 100% possible that those items did not made it through. 100% possible,” he said, adding that the conference had made progress on “all the most important items”.
Speaking at the closing plenary, the group of Pacific Islands said that, while the summit had achieved “great outcomes”, delegates are also departing Yerevan “with realities not reflected in the official text”, such as the low replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a key funder of nature projects.
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Lula’s election win in Brazil raises hopes for zero deforestation drive
Lula’s re-election makes it more likely Brazil can meet a key goal to end forest loss in the Amazon and builds confidence in a new fund to protect the world’s rainforests, experts say
Some observers also said the deal did not go far enough. Steven Guilbeault, a former Canadian environment minister who helped broker the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), said the Yerevan package of action is “an important step forward”, but still “falls short of what is needed to meet our 2030 commitments”.
An Lambrechts, biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said COP17 had kept things moving forward and set well-intentioned promises, but added that these “won’t remove major roadblocks to implementation” such as insufficient finance and debt constraints in developing countries.
WWF chief conservation officer Daudi Sumba noted that financial issues were not fully resolved. Despite the deal in Yerevan, “I fear finance will remain the key issue that continues to haunt the UN biodiversity summits,” he said in a statement.
‘Yerevan Pathway’ tackles nature plans and subsidies
In the lead-up to the summit, the UN assessment report showed countries are falling short on virtually all targets in the GBF, the 2022 global deal often referred to as the ‘Paris Agreement for nature’.
They include a landmark target to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and sea by 2030. If countries all stick to their current national goals, about 26% of land would be protected and only about 12% of marine ecosystems would be under conservation measures.
The main COP17 decision – named the Yerevan Pathway by the presidency – calls for countries to revise their biodiversity plans, subject to available funding, with a particular focus on addressing the gap in coverage of “marine, coastal and inland water ecosystems”.
It also urges the over 60 countries who have not submitted a biodiversity plan yet to finalise them “as soon as possible” and taking into account the gaps identified by the UN progress report.
Countries also agreed to tackle the drivers of biodiversity loss by “accelerating” the reduction of subsidies for activities that damage nature. Subsidy reform, covered by Target 18 of the GBF, is where countries have made the least progress so far, according to the assessment report.
Jill Hepp, director of nature and marine policy and incentives at green group Conservation International, said singling out subsidies in the Yerevan Pathway “gives a strong signal” that closing the gap for biodiversity action requires “more urgent efforts to reform harmful incentives and scale up positive incentives”.
“Timid” steps to expand base of donors
Having failed to meet a target to channel $20 billion for biodiversity conservation by 2025 and faced with shrinking aid budgets, the EU pushed a proposal to expand the list of which countries count as donors, so that wealthy emerging economies like China and Saudi Arabia could also voluntarily contribute. The group of Arab nations strongly opposed this.
During the talks, Irish minister of state for nature, Christopher O’Sullivan, whose country holds the EU presidency, said the bloc wanted the world’s “new realities” to be reflected in the donor list.
Negotiations remained gridlocked for most of the two-week talks, until a last-day compromise was struck to invite developing countries that may want donor status “to indicate to the [Convention on Biological Diversity] secretariat their interest in being included in the corresponding list”.
Countries also asked the secretariat to send an invitation to emerging economies wanting donor status at each subsequent COP, and requested a technical report on “the implications of inclusion in the list” for emerging economies.
Swiss lead negotiator Gabriela Blatter said during one of the sessions that her country had expected greater steps towards expanding the base of contributing countries, but added that “if we’re mutually unhappy, it’s probably the closest we can get on these very delicate political compromises”. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, also noted their dissatisfaction but said it had expected “a lot less”.
The fragile deal was approved in a package of decisions together with the Global Review, after some delegations including Brazil and China appealed to the plenary not to make further changes to the text at the risk of collapsing the whole agreement.
In a statement delivered to the closing plenary, the EU said the finance outcome had delivered “timid” progress towards fully broadening the base of donors.
Cali Fund still not operational
Adopted two years ago at COP16, the Cali Fund was seen by some observers as a way to channel private-sector finance into biodiversity conservation, as governments struggle to find public funds. But it is still struggling to get up on its feet.
The fund allows big corporations to access certificates for the use of genetic material found in biodiversity in return for a financial contribution, which experts estimate has the potential to raise up to $6.9bn for biodiversity. While voluntary, companies are encouraged to pay 1% of their profits or 0.1% of revenue into the fund.
But since its creation, the fund has received little more than $10,000, which Guilbeault argued is because the rules for disbursements to local communities and the operation of the fund had yet to be fleshed out. This was due to happen at COP17.
Yet, while the final decision on the fund laid out some of the rules – including how companies can earn “Cali Fund certificates” – some key technical details were left to the next COP in 2028 in Ecuador. This includes the issue of whether companies can pay a lower rate if they use genetic data for only a small portion of their products.
“By punting essential decisions to two years from now, parties have all but ensured the fund remains empty until then,” said Pakhi Das, a public policy advisor at NGO Plant-for-the-Planet.
The post COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP17 delivers fragile deal to boost conservation and funding for nature
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Just 77 heads of state or government are scheduled to address the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, a third less than the COP28 peak -
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
COP31 presidency announces AI pledge as UN climate chief says Big Tech ‘on thin ice’
None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom