John Kerry helped bring the world into the Paris climate agreement and expanded America’s reputation as a climate leader. That reputation is now in tatters, and President-elect Joe Biden is asking Kerry to rebuild it again – this time as climate envoy, a position Biden plans to include in the National Security Council. It won’t be easy, but Kerry’s decades of experience and the international relationships he developed as a senator and secretary of state may give him a chance of making real progress.

We might talk about what makes a great American. Great ones we’ve known. Teachers would be thick among them, and older people of integrity we’ve been lucky to know. My grandfather. My parents. Artists are my heroes, too. I’d talk about Berger, and Merwin’s poem “Thanks.” We’d stay up late. I’d plug in the porch lights.The pie would be pretty great. And after we caught up on her last ten thousand years — Say what you want about global warming, she’d laugh, but I was pretty excited at first, when that last ice sheet started to go away — she might ask what I’ve been up to.

To ensure global food security and sustainable food practices in an ever-growing world, we need to reexamine our food systems and take regional resources, such as land and water availability, as well as local economies and culture into account.  To start, the United States and other developed countries must encourage food companies to produce more sustainable food, including more plant-based options, and educate consumers and retailers about healthy and sustainable diets.

Meanwhile in Indonesia, the two presidential candidates – incumbent Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi) and ex-army officer Prabowo Subianto – have given vague promises of environmental protection but few details. That said, Jokowi, who won as an outsider populist in 2014, has done more than some expected to tackle deforestation. As of 2015, Brazil was home to 12 percent of total forest global cover, the DRC nearly 4 percent and Indonesia 2 percent, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. 

The alliance of rich, emerging and poor economies that sealed the Paris climate deal is falling apart. In 2015, the world’s top two emitters, the US and China, joined with Brazil, some small island countries and the European Union, led by Germany, France and the UK, to land the agreement. But climate change politics have shifted significantly since then, with two more big tilts this week. Brazil elected a staunch and radical anti-environmentalist president, while Germany’s Angela Merkel confirmed her exit plans

Both Bolsonaro and Mourão have defended the excesses of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which displaced and killed (intentionally or through diseases) thousands of Indians in the Amazon, amid an effort to build roads and hydroelectric dams in the forest. The armed forces have never recognized any wrongdoing. “If he wins, he will institutionalize genocide,” says Dinamam Tuxá, the national coordinator of Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples, in a phone interview with Climate Home News. 

In a report released this week, the ‘task force on displacement’ called for better data collection and analysis on climate migration trends, and finance to help those hardest hit. “The UN currently lacks a systemwide lead, coordination mechanism, or strategy on disaster displacement, including related to climate change,” wrote the authors, who mostly represent UN agencies. They called on Secretary General Antonio Guterres to develop a response.

As the national broadcaster, the BBC reaches a lot of people. “As far as the public is concerned the BBC is the number-one source of information on climate change,” said Richard Black, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and former BBC science and environment correspondent. “With this heatwave, the questioning has started a little bit earlier than it has done in previous years. One of the reasons is that this heatwave covers a pretty large area,” added Black.

“[Climate change] is the single greatest threat to anything anyone holds dear,” said Max Wakefield, one of the self-appointed ‘Trump babysitters’. “We have enough on our plate dealing with the racism, sexism, so we could do without piling ecological collapse on that.” Trump’s administration has stripped regulations designed to slow global warming and the president intends to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement as soon as legally possible.

The sea level rise it could cause may total five or six feet by the end of this century, twice the worst-case United Nations scenario of three years ago – “so high,” according to the front-page New York Times story quoting Pollard, “it would likely provoke a profound crisis within the lifetimes of children being born today.” Think of it: Along all 95,000 miles of American coastline – not to mention coastlines all over the earth – “immense areas will most likely have to be abandoned to the rising sea.”