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The two biggest economies and largest carbon polluters in the world announced separate financial attacks on climate change Tuesday. 

Chinese President Xi Jinping said his country will no longer fund coal-fired power plants abroad, surprising the world on climate for the second straight year at the U.N. General Assembly. That came hours after U.S. President Joe Biden announced a plan to double financial aid to poorer nations to $11.4 billion by 2024 so those countries could switch to cleaner energy and cope with global warming’s worsening impacts. That puts rich nations close to within reach of its long-promised but not realized goal of $100 billion a year in climate help for developing nations. 

“This is an absolutely seminal moment,” said Xinyue Ma, an expert on energy development finance at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center. 

This could provide some momentum going into major climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, in less than six weeks, experts said. Running up to the historic 2015 Paris climate deal, a joint U.S.-China agreement kickstarted successful negotiations. This time, with China-U.S. relations dicey, the two nations made their announcements separately, hours and thousands of miles apart. 

“Today was a really good day for the world,” United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the upcoming climate negotiations, told Vice President Kamala Harris. 

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has made a frenetic push this week for bigger efforts to curb climate change called the two announcements welcome news, but said “we still have a long way to go” to make the Glasgow meeting successful. 

Depending on when China’s new coal policy goes into effect, it could shutter 47 planned power plants in 20 developing countries that use the fuel that emits the most heat-trapping gases, about the same amount of coal power as from Germany, according to the European climate think-tank E3G. 

“It’s a big deal. China was the only significant funder of overseas coal left. This announcement essentially ends all public support for coal globally,” said Joanna Lewis, an expert on China, energy and climate at Georgetown University. “This is the announcement many have been waiting for.”

From 2013 to 2019, data showed that China was financing 13% of coal-fired power capacity built outside China – “far and away the largest public financier,” said Kevin Gallagher, who directs the Boston University center. Japan and South Korea announced earlier this year that they were getting out of the coal-financing business. 

With all three countries pulling out of financing coal abroad “that sends a signal to the global economy. This is a sector that’s fast becoming a stranded asset,” Gallagher said. 

While this is a big step it is not quite a death knell for coal, said Byford Tsang, a policy analyst for E3G. That’s because China last year added as much new coal power domestically as was just potentially cancelled abroad, he said. 

Tsang cautioned that the one-sentence line in Xi’s speech that mentioned this new policy lacked details like effective dates and whether it applied to private funding as well as public funding. 

What also matters is when China stops building new coal plants at home and shutters old ones, Tsang said. That will be part of a push in the G-20 meetings in Italy next month, he said. “The Chinese are going to respond to international pressure, rather than just American bilateral pressure right now,” said Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China’s politics and energy at Villanova University. 

“A coal-free energy mix is still decades in the future” because coal power plants typically operate for 50 years or more, said Stanford University environment director Chris Field. 

Many nations that are trying to build their economies — including top polluters China and India — have long argued they needed to industrialize with fossil fuels, like developed nations had already done. Starting in 2009 and then with “a grand bargain” in 2015 in Paris, richer nations promised $100 billion a year in financial help to poorer nations to make the switch from dirty to clean fuel, World Resources Institute climate finance expert Joe Thwaites said. 

But as of 2019, the richer nations were only providing $80 billion a year, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. So, when rich nations like the United States asked poorer ones to do more “it gives any other country a very easy retort,” Thwaites said: “‘You took out commitments and you haven’t delivered on those either.” 

In April, Biden announced he would double the Obama era financial aid pledge of $2.85 billion a year to $5.7 billion. On Tuesday he announced that he hopes to double that to $11.4 billion a year starting in 2024, but he does need passage from Congress. 

The European Union has been doling out $24.5 billion a year with the European Commission recently upping that to more than $4.7 billion over seven years. “The Europeans are doing a lot more and the Americans are lagging behind,” Thwaites said. 

He said several studies calculate that based on the U.S. economy, population and carbon pollution, it should be contributing 40% to 47% of the $100 billion fund to be doing its fair share. 

But Congressional Republicans aren’t convinced. “We shouldn’t be contributing to a fund that picks winners and losers and further subsidizes China in the process,” said Rep. Garret Graves, R-Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the House Climate Committee. 

The time for global grandstanding is over, said Princeton University climate science and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer said. “It’s what’s happening on the ground that matters.” 

“Accelerating the global phase out of coal is the single most important step” to keeping the Paris agreement’s key warming limit within reach, said U.N. chief Guterres. 
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Changes to the main U.S. flood insurance program will raise rates for 77% of policyholders, according to a new study issued on Tuesday, although property owners in some poorer neighborhoods will see premiums decrease. 

The study by the QuoteWizard unit of financial services provider LendingTree, Inc. reviewed price changes due for the roughly 5 million participants in the National Flood Insurance Program, set up in 1968. 

Under the new “Risk Rating 2.0” system from the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) taking effect October 1, new premiums will be based on a property’s value, risk of flooding and other factors, rather than simply on a home’s elevation. 

Meant to account for climate-change-driven shifts like increasing flood frequency, the new plans also will make the program more equitable, said Nick VinZant, QuoteWizard senior research analyst. 

“Now the smaller, lower-value homes and neighborhoods aren’t going to be funding the mansions anymore,” VinZant said in an interview. 

With the weather impact of climate change worsening, flooding losses are expected to rise.

Recent storms, including Hurricane Ida, have caused massive flooding from Louisiana and Tennessee to New York City. FEMA said it aimed to “equitably distribute premiums across all policyholders” with the changes. Of the roughly 5 million policyholders in the program, 3.3 million will see monthly payments rise up to $10, and 3,199 will see an increase of $100 or more per month, VinZant said.

Meanwhile, 196,000 people will see their monthly premiums fall $100 or more, he added. 

FEMA representatives did not immediately comment on the study. As of April, its flood insurance program provided $1.3 trillion in coverage but has been losing money. 

The proposed changes have drawn concerns in the U.S. Congress, including from representatives from Louisiana and Texas, who have asked FEMA to delay the new rates to avoid higher bills for some policyholders. 
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The Caesars Superdome, a professional football arena located in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the U.S. South, caught fire Monday afternoon, leaving at least one person injured. 

Local news reported that roughly 70 employees were evacuated from the arena, home to the New Orleans Saints football team.

NOLA Ready, the city’s emergency preparedness agency, said at 1:20 p.m. Central time that the fire was under control but advised residents to continue to avoid the area.

According to the city’s Emergency Medical Services, one person was taken to the hospital to be treated for “minor” burns.

Photos from the scene show dark plumes of smoke rising from the roof of the arena. 

Authorities in New Orleans have not disclosed how the fire started. 

In addition to being home to the city’s football team, the Superdome is well known for housing thousands of New Orleans residents during Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city in 2005. 

 
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U.S. national security and law enforcement agencies are battling what they describe as a “significant jump” in threats from domestic terrorists, many of whom are acting on their own and motivated by racial animosity or anti-government ideology. 

Officials, testifying before lawmakers Tuesday, echoed warnings from earlier this year that the most lethal threats to the United States are homegrown, with white supremacist ideology and personal grievances driving a growing number of so-called lone actors to action.

“Certainly, the domestic terrorism caseload has exploded,” Christopher Wray, director of the FBI told a Senate committee, calling the prevention of terrorist attacks the bureau’s top priority “now and for the foreseeable future.” 

“We’ve more than doubled our domestic terrorism caseload, from about 1,000 to about 2,700 investigations,” Wray said of the past 16 to 18 months. “We’ve surged personnel to match more than doubling the number of people working that threat from a year before.”

Part of that jump stems from the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in the deaths of five people and has led to more than 600 arrests. 

But in prepared testimony, Wray warned the siege of the Capitol “demonstrates a willingness by some to use violence against the government in furtherance of their political and social goals.” 

He also said that many of the lone actors, whether motivated by domestic grievances or by foreign terrorist groups, are relying heavily on the internet, something he said makes them hard to trace. 

“Because they act alone and move quickly from radicalization to action, often using easily obtainable weapons against soft targets, these attackers don’t leave a lot of dots to connect,” Wray told lawmakers. 

He also warned that in just the past couple of years, the FBI has managed to thwart terror attacks on a number of major U.S. cities, including New York, Las Vegas and Miami. 

Foreign terror threats 

Despite the growing threat from domestic extremists, U.S. officials cautioned that the threat from foreign terror groups, like Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaida, has only somewhat diminished. 

“Foreign terrorist groups continue to place a premium on attacks against the United States,” Christine Abizaid, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center told lawmakers, describing the threat only as “less acute” than it was 20 years ago, when al-Qaida terrorists carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and on the Pentagon. 

“While years of [counterterror] pressure has degraded the al-Qaida network, the group and its affiliates remain intent on using individuals with access to the United States to conduct attacks,” she said. 

Iran 

In addition to groups like al-Qaida and IS, Abizaid warned that counterterrorism officials are concerned about efforts by Iran and by its proxy, Hezbollah, to lash out at the U.S. 

Specifically, she warned that Iranian leaders remain “intent on retaliating in the United States for the January 2020 killing of former IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.” 

Abizaid further warned in written testimony of Tehran’s ongoing efforts to “build operation capacity against U.S.-based organizations and people.” 

China 

More than Iran, however, FBI Director Wray told lawmakers than no country poses quite as grave a threat to the U.S. as Beijing, which has forced the bureau to open up a new counterintelligence investigation, on average, every 12 hours. 

“I think there is no country that presents a greater threat to our innovation, our economic security and our democratic ideas than the People’s Republic of China, which is why we have over 2,000 active investigations tied back to the PRC government across all 56 field offices,” he said. “It is an almost 1,300% increase in economic espionage investigations tied to China from about a decade ago.” 

U.S. officials also accused China of trying to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to “profit from the production of fraudulent PPE [personal protective equipment] and medical supplies.” 

China “continues to engage in intellectual property theft, the exploitation of vulnerable supply chains and use of economic coercion to threaten our economic security,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the lawmakers. 

Ransomware 

Both Wray and Mayorkas also listed ransomware attacks, many linked to Russia, as a persistent threat. 

“Last year, victims paid an estimated $350 million in ransoms, a 311% increase over the prior year, with the average payment exceeding $300,000,” Mayorkas said. 

“We’re now investigating over 100 different types of ransomware, each with scores of victims,” the FBI’s Wray added. 

 
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Top U.S. officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris, on Tuesday condemned the way horse-mounted border agents have corralled Haitian migrants along the Mexican border to keep them from entering the United States. 

“What I saw depicted about those individuals on horseback, treating human beings, the way they were (was) horrible,” Harris told reporters Tuesday. “And I fully support what is happening right now, which is a thorough investigation into exactly what is going on there. But human beings should never be treated that way.” 

Harris said she would talk later with Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas, who has ordered a probe into the actions by U.S. Border Patrol agents. 

Mayorkas told a congressional hearing Tuesday, “I was horrified to see the images. … We do not tolerate any mistreatment or abuse of a migrant.” 

The images, video footage and photographs, showed agents attempting to grab some of the thousands of migrants gathered at the border along the Rio Grande and using their horses to push the migrants back toward Mexico.

“I am going to let the investigation run its course, but the pictures that I observed troubled me profoundly,” Mayorkas told CNN.

An agent is heard on one video shouting an obscenity as a child jumps away from the path of a horse. 

“One cannot weaponize a horse to aggressively attack a child,” Mayorkas said. “That is unacceptable. That is not what our policies and our training require. … Let me be quite clear: That is not acceptable.” 

Earlier reports appeared to show agents using whips to control the migrants. But they were swinging their horses’ reins and did not appear to strike anyone. 

Mayorkas said, “Any mistreatment or abuse of a migrant is unacceptable, is against border control policy, training and our department’s values.” He said the investigation would be conducted “swiftly.” 

“The public needs and deserves to know its results,” Mayorkas said. 

Another top Democrat, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor, said, “This behavior must be addressed, and we must provide accountability. The images turn our stomach. It must be stopped.” 

A Republican critic of President Joe Biden, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, criticized Mayorkas for immigration policies he said encouraged the migration of nearly 15,000 Haitians to the border. The Haitians mostly escaped the rubble of a 2010 earthquake on the Caribbean island-nation and have since then been living in South American countries. 

At a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, Hawley told Mayorkas, “This is a humanitarian crisis in Del Rio. You can spin it whichever way that you want, but … we should not minimize the humanitarian conditions for which, frankly, you’re responsible. … tens of thousands of people living in conditions that are startling, startling, brought here because of your policies.” 

Hawley and other Republicans have blamed the Biden administration for easing tough-on-immigration policies that had been championed by former President Donald Trump. 

Biden officials have repeatedly told migrants to stay in their homelands, but the U.S. has been witnessing streams of migrants heading to the country’s southwestern border with Mexico, the biggest numbers in two decades, in the belief that they will be allowed to enter the U.S. and stay. 

 
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The U.S. Treasury Department says it is sanctioning a cryptocurrency exchange for its alleged role in processing illicit proceeds from ransomware attacks.

The move, the department says, is part of a larger effort to crack down on the use of cryptocurrency by illicit actors.

The exchange sanctioned is Czech Republic-based Suex OTC, S.R.O., and it is the first of its kind move against an exchange.

“Exchanges like Suex are critical to attackers’ ability to extract profits from ransomware attackers,” Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a call with reporters previewing the announcement. “Today’s action is a signal of our intention to expose and disrupt the illicit infrastructure using these attacks.”

The Treasury said more than 40% of transactions on Suex involved illicit actors.

Ransomware attacks are becoming more common, the Treasury reports, noting that in 2020, payments over ransomware attacks totaled more than $400 million, up four times from 2019.

One recent, high-profile ransomware attack happened in May when hackers shut down a major fuel pipeline and demanded $4 million worth of Bitcoin to allow operations to resume. The hack led to nationwide gas shortages.

Sanctions on Suex will prevent the company from accessing any U.S.-based assets and will prevent Americans from using the company.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
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