LONDON — The U.K.’s Energy Secretary Ed Miliband hit back at Donald Trump’s Davos jibe that offshore wind is for “losers,” telling a European energy summit that wind turbines are “for winners.” Speaking in Hamburg, Germany, at a meeting focused on boosting Europe’s offshore wind capacity, Miliband said it was “important to be diplomatic,” when asked for his response to Trump’s remarks. But, he added: “For us in the U.K., offshore wind is absolutely critical for our energy security. This is a hard-headed, not a soft-hearted, view that we have. We think it’s the right thing for the climate crisis but we think it’s absolutely the right thing for energy security. “I think offshore wind is for winners.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Trump reiterated his deep-seated loathing for wind energy, saying: “There are windmills all over Europe. … They are losers.” Trump also claimed, falsely, that China, despite making most of the world’s wind turbines, don’t use them and only “sell them to the stupid people that buy them.” China has by far the world’s largest wind power generation capacity. Energy ministers from the U.K., Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed a deal Monday at the third North Sea Summit to deliver 100 gigawatts of joint offshore wind projects. Miliband said that there was still “common ground” to be found with the Trump administration on energy, including around the development of new nuclear technology. But he added: “Different countries will pursue their own national interests. But we are very clear about where our national interest lies.” Frederike Holewik contributed reporting from Hamburg.

Europe has a chance Monday to flex its independence from the United States by embracing the energy technology that President Donald Trump hates the most. After a fortnight spent staring into the abyss of conflict with America, ministers from across the continent will meet in Hamburg to agree to massively boost the North Sea’s production of wind energy. The Hamburg Declaration — to be signed by Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Norway — will pledge to build 100 gigawatts of joint offshore wind projects. That’s more than the current total electricity generation capacity of the U.K. The summit has taken on new meaning since Trump’s attempts to coerce his NATO allies to hand over Greenland pushed the transatlantic alliance to — perhaps beyond —breaking point. “Homegrown clean power,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen wrote in POLITICO on Monday, offers an alternative to the EU’s deepening reliance on imported liquefied natural gas, much of which now comes from the U.S. “Relying so heavily on fossil fuels, whether they come from Russia or anywhere else, cannot give us the energy security and prosperity we need. It leaves us incredibly vulnerable to the volatility of international markets and pressure from external actors,” they said. Harnessing the North Sea’s gusty winds requires political cooperation that bridges national differences, the Brexit divide and political backlash to the expansion of renewables. While the offshore industry in the U.K. has recently seen strong interest, countries such as Germany and France are struggling to get companies to bid for new projects. And clean energy boosterism cannot mask the fact that gas, while slowly declining, is still almost one quarter of Europe’s energy supply and central to Europe’s heavy industry. Nor are all European countries and companies convinced there is any need to stop the boats pouring in from Texas. Trump knows he has Europe over a barrel. Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he derided wind turbines and the Europeans that install them as “losers.” His self-interest was barely veiled. The U.S. is the world’s biggest exporter of LNG and since the EU began shutting off Russian pipeline gas, the bloc’s imports from the U.S. have risen fourfold, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a non-profit climate group. Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, boasted in Davos that U.S. exports had been able to “displace most all of the Russian gas” and foresaw “robust energy trade” going forward; trade that would be, “in the short run … dominated by exports from the United States into Europe.” He called for the EU to remove “barriers” to the new era of transatlantic gas exports, namechecking Europe’s carbon border tax and its corporate environmental regulations. The U.S., he said, is “working with our colleagues here in Europe to remove those barriers.” U.S. gas was celebrated by European officials as key part of their strategy for ditching Russian energy, a savior from across the seas — alongside, of course, the growing the use of renewables like wind and solar. But the growing reliance has taken on an entirely new geopolitical significance under Trump. “The big weakness was and is that fossil fuel supply was moving from one unreliable supply source (Russia) to a set of other potentially unreliable supply sources and that over-dependency on any one of them risked a repeat of previous problems,” said a European Commission official involved in the EU’s efforts to cut dependence on Russian gas, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I just didn’t think we’d have to worry about the U.S. — that was before Trump,” they added. The North Sea summit was first set up in 2022 as an antidote to Russian energy dependence. Its third edition will be overshadowed by fears — voiced by energy analysts, if not necessarily by some European leaders still eager to appease Trump — that the U.S. could weaponize gas in the way Vladimir Putin did against the Europeans before and after his invasion of Ukraine. This year several heads of state, energy ministers as well as the biggest industry players are expected to attend, the German hosts said. The goal is to strengthen the cooperation between neighboring states along the North Sea. Three declarations are set to be signed, according to German government officials familiar with the matter. The heads of states will sign the Hamburg Declaration pledging close cooperation and united efforts to secure critical infrastructure. The energy ministers will also sign their own declaration focusing on the necessary grid infrastructure for offshore wind parks including financing measures and accelerating planning measures. And lastly there will be the Joint Offshore Wind Investment Pact for the North Sea, signed by the energy ministers and key industry players. Both sides are promising to do everything in their power to bring offshore wind back on track. “This is a great opportunity to remind us why the transformation of the energy system matters,” Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s Executive Vice President told POLITICO after Trump’s attack on green energy in Davos. Renewable sources of energy “mean freedom, lower dependence and vulnerabilities.” CAN’T STOP GUZZLING   While pivoting to clean power is an obvious priority, “you cannot dream away the existing dependence on oil and gas imports,” said Thijs Van de Graaf, a specialist in the geopolitics of energy at the Ghent Institute for International and European Studies. The Commission has limited power to dictate where companies obtain their LNG supplies, and the dizzying pace of growth in purchases of the U.S. product will be difficult to reverse. “Unilateral action from the EU to limit its purchases is … unlikely,” argued Jack Reid, a lead economist at economic advisory firm Oxford Economics in a note published last week. He pointed out that for all the EU’s efforts to diversify, Russia remains the bloc’s second largest supplier of LNG. On top of that, the importers themselves are hesitant to curb such a roaring trade. POLITICO asked several German companies and received a range of responses. Some foresaw no change in the U.S. trade, while others, including Uniper, said flexibility may be needed. “This is not a relationship we are stepping back from, on the contrary, we are deepening cooperation with U.S. partners at pace,” said Alexandros Exarchou, the CEO of Atlantic See, a Greek LNG import venture that recently struck a 20-year deal with U.S. firm Venture Global to import half a million tons of LNG annually. Others have more pressing energy challenges to address. For Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, reassessing the U.S. trade relationship is unthinkable as war with Russia rages on. “We have no plans to reduce our engagement with U.S. suppliers,” James O’Brien, the head of trading at DTEK’s trading unit, D.Trading, told POLITICO. “In fact, we are actively seeking to expand our volumes to cover the critical supply gap in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe from 2026/27.” The U.S. LNG market remains “the most liquid and flexible in the world,” he said, adding that for Ukraine, U.S. LNG “is not a risk, it is a lifeline.” Many European officials “are still living that old liberal world,” said Van de Graaf, and expect a return to normalcy and stability in EU-U.S. trade. “That ideological position is no longer tenable in light of all of what is transpiring.”

Ed Miliband is the U.K. energy secretary and Dan Jørgensen is the EU commissioner for energy. The world has entered an era of greater uncertainty and instability than at any other point in either of our lifetimes, and energy is now central to this volatile age we find ourselves in. In recent years, both Britain and Europe have paid a heavy price for our exposure to the roller coaster of international fossil fuel markets. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sent global gas prices soaring — driving up bills for families and businesses across the continent and leading to the worst cost-of-living crisis our countries have faced in a generation. Even as Europe rapidly cut its dependence on Russian gas and is now swiftly moving toward a complete phaseout, exposure to fossil fuels remains the Achilles’ heel of our energy systems. The reality is that relying so heavily on fossil fuels — whether from Russia or elsewhere — can’t give us the energy security and prosperity we need. It leaves us incredibly vulnerable to international market volatility and pressure from external actors. Like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said: “As our energy dependency on fossil fuels goes down, our energy security goes up.” This is why Britain and the EU are committed to building Europe’s resources of homegrown clean power, looking to increase our energy security, create well-paid jobs, bring down bills and boost our industrial competitiveness, all while tackling the climate crisis to protect future generations. Today, nine European countries, alongside representatives from NATO and the European Commission, are meeting in Hamburg for the third North Sea Summit to act on this shared understanding. Together, we can seize the North Sea’s vast potential as a clean energy powerhouse — harness its natural resources, skilled workforce and highly developed energy industries to lead the world in offshore wind, hydrogen and carbon capture technologies.   Three years ago in Ostend, our countries united behind a pioneering goal to deliver 300 gigawatts of offshore wind in the North Sea by 2050. Today in Hamburg, we will double down on those commitments and pledge to jointly deliver shared offshore wind projects. With around $360 billion invested in clean energy in the EU just last year, and wind and solar overtaking fossil-fuel-generated power for the first time, this is an historic pact that builds on the clean power momentum we’re seeing all across Europe. And this unprecedented fleet of projects will harness the abundant energy waiting right on our doorstep, so that we can deliver cheap and secure power to homes and businesses, cut infrastructure costs and meet rising electricity demand. Everything we’re seeing points to a clean energy economy that is booming. Indeed, earlier this month Britain held the most successful offshore wind auction in European history, delivering enough clean energy to power 12 million homes — a significant vote of confidence in Britain and Europe’s drive to regain control of our energy supplies. We believe there is huge value in working together, with our neighbors and allies, to build this future — a future that delivers on shared energy infrastructure, builds strong and resilient supply chains, and includes talks on the U.K.’s participation in the European electricity market. Strengthening such partnerships can help unlock investment, reduce our collective exposure to fossil fuels and bring down energy costs for our citizens. This speaks to a wider truth: An uncertain age makes cooperating on the basis of our shared interests and values more important — not less. By accelerating our drive to clean energy, today’s summit will be fundamental in delivering the energy security and prosperity Europe desperately needs.

Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and host of the weekly podcast “World Review with Ivo Daalder.” He writes POLITICO’s From Across the Pond column In justifying his military operation against Venezuela, U.S. President Donald Trump reached back in time over two centuries and grabbed hold of the Monroe Doctrine. But it’s another 19th-century interest that propelled his extraordinary gambit in the first place — oil. According to the New York Times, what started as an effort to press the Venezuelan regime to cede power and end the flow of drugs and immigrants into the U.S., began shifting into a determination to seize the country’s oil last fall. And the president was the driving force behind this shift. That’s hardly surprising though — Trump has been obsessed with oil for decades, even as most of the world is actively trying to leave it behind. As far back as the 1980s, Trump was complaining about the U.S. protecting Japan, Saudi Arabia and others to secure the free flow of oil. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” he wrote in a 1987 newspaper ad. Having supported the Iraq War from the outset, he later complained that the U.S. hadn’t sufficiently benefited from it. “I would take the oil,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2011. “I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.” That same year, he also dismissed humanitarian concerns in Libya, saying: “I am only interested in Libya if we take the oil.” In justifying his military operation against Venezuela, U.S. President Donald Trump reached back in time over two centuries and grabbed hold of the Monroe Doctrine. | Henry Chirinos/EPA Unsurprisingly, “take the oil” later became the mantra for Trump’s first presidential campaign — and for his first term in office. Complaining that the U.S. got “nothing” for all the money it spent invading Iraq: “It used to be, ‘To the victor belong the spoils’ … I always said, ‘Take the oil,’” he griped during a Commander in Chief Forum in 2016. As president, he also insisted on keeping U.S. forces in Syria for that very reason in 2019. “I like oil,” he said, “we’re keeping the oil.” But while Iraq, Libya and even Syria were all conflicts initiated by Trump’s predecessors, Venezuela is quite another matter. Weeks before seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump made clear what needed to happen: On Dec. 16, 2025, he announced an oil blockade of the country “until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Then, after capturing Maduro, Trump declared the U.S. would “run the country” in order to get its oil. “We’re in the oil business,” he stated. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money.” “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Trump insisted. “It goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.” On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced that Venezuela would ship its oil to the U.S. “and then infinitely, going forward, we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace,” effectively declaring the expropriation of Venezuela’s most important national resources. All of this reeks of 19th-century imperialism. But the problem with Trump’s oil obsession goes deeper than his urge to steal it from others — by force if necessary. He is fixated on a depleting resource of steadily declining importance. And yet, this doesn’t seem to matter. Throughout his reelection campaign, Trump still emphasized the need to produce more oil. “Drill, baby, drill” became as central to his energy policy as “take the oil” was to his views on military intervention. He called on oil executives to raise $1 billion for his campaign, promising his administration would be “a great deal” for their industry. And he talked incessantly of the large reservoirs of “liquid gold” in the U.S., claiming: “We’re going to make a fortune.” But these weren’t just campaign promises. Upon his return to office, Trump unleashed the full force of the U.S. government to boost oil production at home and exports abroad. He established a National Energy Dominance Council, opened protected lands in Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas exploration, signed a mandate for immediate offshore oil and gas leases into law, and accelerated permitting reforms to speed up pipeline construction, refinery expansion and liquid natural gas exports. At the same time, he’s been castigating efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of a climate change “hoax,” he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement once again, and he took a series of steps to end the long-term transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. He signed a law ending credits and subsidies to encourage residential solar and electric vehicle purchases, invoked national security to halt offshore wind production and terminated grants encouraging renewable energy production. Then, after capturing Nicolás Maduro, Trump declared the U.S. would “run the country” in order to get its oil. | Henry Chirinos/EPA The problem with all these efforts is that the U.S. is now banking on fossil fuels, precisely as their global future is waning. Today, oil production is already outpacing consumption, and global demand is expected to peak later this decade. Over the last 12 months, the cost of oil has decreased by over 23 percent, pricing further exploration and production increasingly out of the market. Meanwhile, renewable energy is becoming vastly more cost-effective. The future, increasingly, lies in renewables to drive our cars; heat, cool and light up our homes; power our data centers, advanced manufacturing factories and everything else that sustains our lives on Earth. By harnessing the power of the sun, the force of wind and the heat of the Earth, China is building its future on inexhaustible resources. And while Beijing is leading the way, many others are following in its footsteps. All this, just as the U.S. goes back to relying on an exhaustive fossil fuel supply. What Trump is betting on is becoming the world’s largest — and last — petrostate. China is betting on becoming its largest and lasting electrostate. Which side would you rather be on?

It’s been a decade since the U.S. and Europe pushed the world to embrace a historic agreement to stop the planet’s runaway warming. The deal among nearly 200 nations offered a potential “turning point for the world,” then-U.S. President Barack Obama said. Eventually, almost every country on Earth signed the 2015 Paris Agreement, a pact whose success would rest on peer pressure, rising ambition and the economics of a clean energy revolution. But 10 years later, the actions needed to fulfill those hopes are falling short. The United States has quit the deal — twice. President Donald Trump is throttling green energy projects at home and finding allies to help him undermine climate initiatives abroad, while inking trade deals that commit countries to buying more U.S. fossil fuels. Europe remains on track to meet its climate commitments, but its resolve is wavering, as price-weary voters and the rise of far-right parties raise doubts about how quickly the bloc can deliver its pledge to turn away from fossil fuels. Paris has helped ingrain climate change awareness in popular culture and policy, led countries and companies to pledge to cut their carbon pollution to zero and helped steer a wave of investments into clean energy. Scientists say it appears to have lessened the odds of the most catastrophic levels of warming. On the downside, oil and gas production hasn’t yet peaked, and climate pollution and temperatures are still rising — with the latter just tenths of a degree from the tipping point agreed in Paris. But the costs of green energy have fallen so much that, in most parts of the world, it’s the cheapest form of power and is being installed at rates unthinkable 10 years ago. World leaders and diplomats who are in Brazil starting this week for the United Nations’ annual climate talks will face a test to stand up for Paris in the face of Trump’s opposition while highlighting that its goal are both necessary and beneficial. The summit in the Amazonian port city of Belém was supposed to be the place where rich and poor countries would celebrate their progress and commit themselves to ever-sharper cuts in greenhouse gas pollution. Instead, U.S. contempt for global climate efforts and a muddled message from Europe are adding headwinds to a moment that is far more turbulent than the one in which the Paris Agreement was adopted. Some climate veterans are still optimists — to a point. “I think that the basic architecture is resistant to Trump’s destruction,” said John Podesta, chair of the board of the liberal Center for American Progress, who coordinated climate policy under Obama and former President Joe Biden. But that resistance could wilt if the U.S. stays outside the agreement, depriving the climate movement of American leadership and support, he said. “If all that’s gone, and it’s gone for a long time, I don’t know whether the structure holds together,” Podesta added. Other climate diplomats say the cooperative spirit of 2015 would be hard to recreate now, which is why acting on Paris is so essential. “If we had to renegotiate Paris today, we’d never get the agreement that we had 10 years ago,” said Rachel Kyte, the United Kingdom’s special climate representative. “But we can also look to these extraordinary data points, which show that the direction of travel is very clear,” she said, referring to growth of clean energy. “And most people who protect where their money is going to be are interested in that direction of travel.” THE PARIS PARADOX One thing that hasn’t faded is the business case for clean energy. If anything, the economic drivers behind the investments that Paris helped unleash have surpassed even what the Paris deal’s authors anticipated. But the political will to keep countries driving forward has stalled in some places as the United States — the world’s largest economy, sole military superpower and historically biggest climate polluter — attacks its very foundation. Trump’s attempts to undermine the agreement, summed up by the 2017 White House slogan “Pittsburgh, not Paris,” has affected European ambitions as well, French climate diplomat Laurence Tubiana told reporters late last month. “I have never seen such aggressivity against national climate policy all over because of the U.S.,” said Tubiana, a key architect of the Paris Agreement. “So we are really confronted with an ideological battle, a cultural battle, where climate is in that package the U.S. government wants to defeat.” The White House said Trump is focused on developing U.S. oil and engaging with world leaders on energy issues, rather than what it dubs the “green new scam.” The U.S. will not send high-level representatives to COP30. “The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda,” said Taylor Rogers, a spokesperson. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” Trump is not the only challenge facing Paris, of course. Even under Obama, the U.S. insisted that the Paris climate pollution targets had to be nonbinding, avoiding the need for a Senate ratification vote that would most likely fail. But unlike previous climate pacts that the U.S. had declined to join, all countries — including, most notably, China — would have to submit a pollution-cutting plan. The accord left it up to the governments themselves to carry out their own pledges and to push laggards to do better. An unusual confluence of political winds helped drive the bargaining. Obama, who was staking part of his legacy on getting a global climate agreement, had spent the year leading up to Paris negotiating a separate deal with China in which both countries committed to cutting their world-leading pollution. France, the host of the Paris talks, was also determined to strike a worldwide pact. In the year that followed, more than 160 countries submitted their initial plans to tackle climate change domestically and began working to finish the rules that would undergird the agreement. “The Paris Agreement isn’t a machine that churns out ambition. It basically reflects back to us the level of ambition that we have agreed to … and suggests what else is needed to get back on track,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and a negotiator for the United Kingdom during the Paris talks. “Whether countries do that or not, it’s essentially then a matter for them.” Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former environment minister and a lead negotiator of the Paris Agreement’s carbon crediting mechanism, called the deal an “incredible feat” — but not a self-executing one. “The problem is now it’s really up to countries as well as cities, regions, companies and financial institutions to act,” she said. “It’s not a treaty thing anymore — it’s now, ‘Do the work.’” WHEN GREEN TURNS GRAY Signs of discord are not hard to find around the globe. China is tightening its grip on clean energy manufacturing and exports, ensuring more countries have access to low-cost renewables, but creating tensions in places that also want to benefit from jobs and revenue from making those goods and fear depending too much on one country. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former United Nations climate envoy, eliminated his country’s consumer carbon tax and is planning to tap more natural gas to toughen economic defenses against the United States. The European Union spent the past five years developing a vast web of green regulations and sectoral measures, and the bloc estimates that it’s roughly on track to meet those goals. But many of the EU’s 27 governments — under pressure from the rising far right, high energy prices, the decline of traditional industry and Russia’s war against Ukraine — are now demanding that the EU reevaluate many of those policies. Still, views within the bloc diverge sharply, with some pushing for small tweaks and others for rolling back large swaths of legislation. “Europe must remain a continent of consistency,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after a meeting of EU leaders in October. “It must step up on competitiveness, but it must not give up on its [climate] goals.” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in contrast, said after the same meeting that he felt vindicated about his country’s long-standing opposition to the EU’s green agenda: “In most European capitals, people today think differently about these exaggerated European climate ambitions.” Worldwide, most countries have not submitted their latest carbon-cutting plans to the United Nations. While the plans that governments have announced mostly expand on their previous ones, they still make only modest reductions against what is needed to limit Earth’s warming since the preindustrial era to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Exceeding that threshold, scientists say, would lead to more lives lost and physical and economic damage that would be ever harder to recover from with each tenth of a degree of additional warming. The U.N.’s latest report showing the gap between countries’ new pledges and the Paris targets found that the world is on track for between 2.3 and 2.5 degrees of warming, a marginal difference from plans submitted in 2020 that is largely canceled out when the U.S. pledge is omitted. Policies in place now are pointing toward 2.8 degrees of warming. “We need unprecedented cuts to greenhouse gas emissions now in an ever-compressing timeframe and amid a challenging geopolitical context,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme. But doing so also makes sense, she added. “This where the market is showing that these kind of investments in smart, clean and green is actually driving jobs and opportunities. This is where the future lies.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message Tuesday that overshooting the 1.5-degrees target of Paris was now inevitable in the coming years imploring leaders to rapidly roll out renewables and stop expanding oil, gas and coal to ensure that overshoot was short-lived. “We’re in a huge mess,” said Bill Hare, a longtime climate scientist who founded the policy institute Climate Analytics. Greenhouse gas pollution hasn’t fallen, and action has flat lined even as climate-related disasters have increased. “I think what’s upcoming is a major test for the Paris Agreement, probably the major test. Can this agreement move forward under the weight of all of these challenges?” Hare asked. “If it can’t do that, governments are going to be asking about the benefits of it, frankly.” That doesn’t mean all is lost. In 2015, the world was headed for around 4 degrees Celsius of warming, an amount that researchers say would have been devastating for much of the planet. Today, that projection is roughly a degree Celsius lower. “I think a lot of us in Paris were very dubious at the time that we would ever limit warming to 1.5,” said Elliot Diringer, a former climate official who led the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions’ international program during the Paris talks. “The question is whether we are better off by virtue of the Paris Agreement,” he said. “I think the answer is yes. Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not.” GREEN TECHNOLOGY DEFYING EXPECTATIONS In addition, the adoption of clean energy technology has moved even faster than projected — sparking what one climate veteran has called a shift in global climate politics. “We are no longer in a world in which only climate politics has a leading role and a substantial role, but increasingly, climate economics,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015. “Yes, politics is important; no longer as important as it was 10 years ago.” Annual solar deployment globally is 15 times greater than the International Energy Agency predicted in 2015, according to a recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a U.K. nonprofit. Renewables now account for more than 90 percent of new power capacity added globally every year, BloombergNEF reported. China is deploying record amounts of renewables and lowering costs for countries such as Brazil and Pakistan, which has seen solar installations skyrocket. Even in the United States, where Trump repealed many of Biden’s tax breaks and other incentives, BloombergNEF predicts that power companies will continue to deploy green sources, in large part because they’re often the fastest source of new electricity. Costs for wind and batteries and falling, too. Electric vehicle sales are soaring in many countries, thanks in large part to the huge number of inexpensive vehicles being pumped out by China’s BYD, the world’s largest EV-maker. Worldwide clean energy investments are now twice as much as fossil fuels spending, according to the International Energy Agency. “Today, you can actually talk about deploying clean energy technologies just because of their cost competitiveness and ability to lower energy system costs,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at the research institution Energy Innovation. “You don’t actually even have to say ‘climate’ for a lot of them, and that just wasn’t true 10 years ago.” The economic trends of the past decade have been striking, said Todd Stern, the U.S. climate envoy who negotiated the Paris Agreement. “Paris is something that was seen all over the world, seen by other countries, seen in boardrooms, as the first time in more than 20 years when you finally got heads of government saying, ‘Yes, let’s do this,’” he said. “And that’s not the only reason why there was tremendous technological development, but it sure didn’t hurt.” Still, limits exist to how far businesses can take the clean energy transition on their own. “You need government intervention of some kind, whether that’s a stick or a carrot, to push the economy towards a low-carbon trajectory,” said Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary general of policy at the International Chamber of Commerce. “If governments press the brakes on climate action or seriously start to soft pedal, then it does have a limiting effect.” Brazil, the host of COP30, says it wants to demonstrate that multilateralism still works and is relevant to peoples’ lives and capable of addressing the climate impacts communities around the world are facing. But the goal of this year’s talks might be even more straightforward, said Guilanpour, the former negotiator. “If we come out of COP30 demonstrating that the Paris Agreement is alive and functioning,” he said, “I think in the current context, that is pretty newsworthy of itself.” Nicolas Camut in Paris, Zi-Ann Lum in Ottawa, Karl Mathiesen in London and Zia Weise in Brussels contributed to this report.

NEW YORK — China pledged Wednesday to cut its world-leading levels of climate pollution by up to 10 percent during the next decade — one day after U.S. President Donald Trump urged global leaders to abandon the effort to halt the Earth’s rising temperatures. The move, announced virtually by Chinese President Xi Jinping, also includes plans for increasing electric vehicles sales and ramping up wind and solar power, which Xi said he aimed to grow six times over 2020 levels. That projection, while low according to China’s current trajectory, dwarfs the amount of renewable energy produced in the U.S., and seems to contradict Trump’s assertion Tuesday that China doesn’t use the wind turbines being made in its own industrial plants. Xi said the transition to cleaner energy is the “trend of our time.” In a nod to the U.S., he added, “while some country is acting against it, the international community should stay focused on the right direction.” “These targets represent China’s best efforts based on the requirements of the Paris Agreement,” Xi said, referring to the 2015 climate pact. “Meeting these targets requires both painstaking efforts by China itself, and a supportive and open international environment.” Under the terms of the Paris Agreement, countries are required to submit new emission-cutting plans every five years that should be stronger than the previous targets. Instead, Trump has moved to exit Paris for a second time. Xi’s message of rising determination to stem pollution contrasts with Trump’s remarks made a day earlier on the same stage at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. There, Trump denounced the effort to stem climate change as a “hoax” and a “con job,” and told nations they would lose the global energy race by pursuing wind and solar over fossil fuels. “If you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail,” Trump told the assembled leaders, while asserting — falsely — that China foists wind turbines on the world while not using them at home. “Those windmills are so pathetic and so bad,” Trump said Tuesday. “And most of them are built in China and I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but they have very few wind farms. So why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them?” In fact, China has installed vast amounts of wind power over the past decade. In just the first five months of this year it added 46 gigawatts of new wind energy, enough to power more than 30 million homes. During the same period, Trump’s government has frozen permits for several wind farms proposed or under construction in the Atlantic, where the U.S. has a small fraction of offshore turbines compared with China. China’s support for global climate efforts is notable, said Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “That is a sharp contrast with not only the lack of attention on climate change [globally], but, you know, active backtracking climate policies here in the U.S.” But China’s pledge falls short of what many nations and scientists say is needed to avoid the dangerous effects of climate change. Last year, the U.S. under then-President Joe Biden had pushed China to cut its carbon emissions 30 percent in order to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels. That makes China’s goal of cutting emissions 7 to 10 percent look modest, though the pledge also said the country would be “striving to do better.” A higher number was unrealistic given the receding pressure from the U.S. under Trump and other countries, said Joanna Lewis, an energy and environment professor at Georgetown University and long-time China watcher. “Given the time we’re in and the political realities in the U.S., China could put forward a relatively modest target and still be viewed as taking climate change seriously,” Lewis said. Some green groups were more critical. “Even for those with tempered expectations, what’s presented today still falls short,” Yao Zhe, global policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia, said in a statement. “This 2035 target offers little assurance to keep our planet safe, but what’s hopeful is that the actual decarbonization of China’s economy is likely to exceed its target on paper.”

LONDON — It was June 2019, and the president of the United States was taking tea with the future British king.  The meeting between Donald Trump and then Prince Charles was scheduled to last 15 minutes. It stretched to an hour and a half.   Trump could barely get a word in edgeways. Charles did “most of the talking,” the president told a TV interviewer the day after they met.   One topic dominated. “He is …” Trump said, hesitating momentarily, “… he is really into climate change.”  Without global action on the climate, Charles wrote back in 2010, the world is on “the brink of potential disaster.” At the London royal residence Clarence House during Trump’s first U.K. state visit, face-to-face with its most powerful inhabitant, Charles decided to speak on behalf of the planet.  It was tea with a side of climate catastrophe.   Six years on, the stage is set for Charles — now king — to try to sway the president again. A second term Trump — bolder, brasher, and no less destructive to global efforts to tackle climate change — is heading back to the U.K. for an unprecedented second state visit and to another meeting with the king. They meet at Windsor Castle on Wednesday.  In the years between the two visits — with extreme weather events, wildfires and flooding increasingly attributed to a changing climate — Charles’ convictions have only strengthened, say those who know him well.  “His views have not changed and will not change. If anything I think he feels it, probably, more strongly than ever,” said the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, a friend and biographer of the king. “It seems self-evident to me, therefore, that he would regard President Trump’s attitude towards climate change and the environment as potentially calamitous.”   But stakes are higher for the king in 2025 than in 2019. The meeting represents an extraordinary influencing opportunity for a monarch who has spent his life deploying “soft power” in the service of cherished environmental causes. But now he is head of state, any overtly political conversation about climate change risks stress-testing the U.K.’s constitutional settlement between government and monarch.  Charles has a duty, says constitutional expert Craig Prescott, to “support the [elected] government of the day in what they want to achieve in foreign relations.”  And “in a broad sense,” he added, “that means ‘getting on the good side of Trump.’”  The meeting between Donald Trump and then Prince Charles was scheduled to last 15 minutes. It stretched to an hour and a half. | Pool Photo by Toby Melville via Getty Images Labour’s focus on an ambitious green transition, though, gives the king some leeway to speak in favor of international climate action.  Both Dimbleby and Ian Skelly, a former speechwriter for Charles who co-wrote his 2010 book Harmony, expect him to do exactly that.  “I would be astonished if in this meeting, as at the last meeting , he does not raise the issue of climate change and biodiversity in any chance he has to speak privately to Trump,” said Dimbleby.   The king will be “diplomatic,” Dimbleby added, and would heed his “constitutional duty,” avoiding “saying anything that will allow Trump to think there is a bus ticket between him and the British government. … But he won’t avoid the issue. He cares about it too much.”  “He knows exactly where the limits are,” said Skelly. “He’s not going to start banging the table or anything. … He will outline his concerns in general terms, I have no doubt about that — and perhaps warn the most powerful person in the world about the dangers of doing nothing.”  Buckingham Palace and Downing Street declined to comment when asked whether the king would raise climate with Trump, or whether this has been discussed in preparations for the state visit.  HAVE YOU READ MY BOOK, MR. PRESIDENT?  In the time since that tea at Clarence House, the President has shown no sign that Charles’ entreaties on the part of the planet had any impact. (And they didn’t have much effect at the time, by one insider’s account. Trump complained the conversation “had been terrible,” wrote former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham in her memoir.  “‘Nothing but climate change,’ he groused, rolling his eyes.”)  The U.S. has once again withdrawn from the Paris climate accords. Trump’s Department of Energy has rejected established climate science. America’s fossil fuel firms and investors — some of whom helped Trump get elected — have been invited to “Drill, baby, drill.”  With America out of the fight, the world’s chances of avoiding the direst consequences of climate change have taken a serious blow.  Charles, on the other hand, has only grown more convinced that climate change, unchecked, will cause “inevitable catastrophes,” as he put it in Harmony, his cri-de-coeur on saving the planet.  Dimbleby predicted that, this time around, one subtle way allowing the king to make his point would be to gift Trump a copy of that book — a treatise on environmentalism, traditional wisdom and sustainability that diagnoses “a spiritual void” in modern societies, a void which has “opened the way for what many people see as an excessive personal focus.”  “I’m sure [the king] won’t let [Trump] out of his sight before giving him a copy,” said Dimbleby. Chinese Premier (and Trump’s main geopolitical rival) Xi Jinping already has a copy, said Skelly.  But the meeting comes at a time when Prime Minister Keir Starmer — boxed in politically by the need to keep the U.S. on side for the sake of trade, Ukraine and European security — has avoided openly criticizing the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science or its embrace of fossil fuels.  His government will not want the king to say or do anything that upsets transatlantic relations. Even when the president, sitting next to Starmer, trashed wind energy ­— the main pillar of U.K. decarbonization plans — on a July visit to his Turnberry golf course in Scotland, the prime minister mustered no defense beyond quietly insisting the U.K. was pursuing a “mix” of energy sources.  If Trump starts railing against windmills again in his chat to the king, he might get a (slightly) more robust response, predicted Skelly. “The response to that will be: ‘What else are we going to do without destroying the Earth?’ That’s the question he’ll come back with, I’d imagine.”  HOW TO TALK TO TRUMP ABOUT CLIMATE  Some who have worked with Trump think that, because of the unique place Britain and the royals occupy in his worldview, Charles stands a better chance than most in getting the president to listen.  “President Trump isn’t going to become an environmentalist over a cup of tea with the king. But I think he’ll definitely hear him out — in a way that maybe he wouldn’t with other folks,” said Michael Martins, founder of the firm Overton Advisory, who was a political and economic specialist at the U.S. embassy in London during the last state visit.  “He likes the pageantry. He likes the optics of it. … Engaging with a king, Trump will feel he’s on the same footing. He will give him more of a hearing than if it was, I don’t know … Ed Miliband.”  Trump has even declared his “love” for Charles.  The royal admiration comes from Trump’s mother. Scottish-born Mary Anne Trump “loved the Queen,” Trump said in July. The ratings-obsessed president appears to consider the late monarch the ultimate TV star. “Whenever the queen was on television, [my mother] wanted to watch,” he said during July’s Turnberry visit.    The king could benefit from an emotional link to First Lady Melania Trump, too. She was present at the 2019 meeting and sat next to Charles at the state banquet that year. In her 2024 memoir, Melania says they “engaged in an interesting conversation about his deep-rooted commitment to environmental conservation.”  She and Trump “exchange letters with King Charles to this day,” Melania wrote. TAKING TEA AT THE END OF THE WORLD  The king will have plenty of chances to make his case.   A state visit provides “quite a lot of time to talk” for monarch and president, said one former senior British government official, granted anonymity to discuss the royals and their relationship with government.  There will be a state banquet plus at least one private meeting in between, they said. Charles may also be able to sneak some choice phrases into any speech he gives at the banquet. Trump’s chief U.K. political ally is Nigel Farage, whose anti-net-zero Reform UK currently lead opinion polls. | John Keeble/Getty Images The king receives regular briefing papers from the Foreign Office. As the meeting looms, the same person suggested, he may be preparing thoughts on how to combine a lifetime’s campaigning and reading with those briefings, to shape the opportunity to lobby a president.  “He will be reading his foreign policy material with even more interest than normal. He will probably be thinking about whether there is any way in which he can pitch his arguments to Trump that will shift him — a little bit — toward putting his shoulder to the climate change wheel,” the former senior official said.    “He won’t say: ‘You, America, should be doing stuff.’ He will say, ‘Internationally I think it is important we make progress on this and we need to be more ambitious.’ Or he might express concern about some of the impacts of climate change on global weather and all these extreme weather events.”  However he approaches it, 2019 showed how tough it is to move the dial.  After that conversation, Trump told broadcaster Piers Morgan that he thought Charles’ views were “great” and that he had “totally listened to him.” But then he demonstrated that — on the crucial points of how fossil fuels, carbon emissions and climate change are affecting the planet — he totally hadn’t.    “He wants to make sure future generations have climate that is good climate, as opposed to a disaster,” Trump said. “And I agree,” he added, before promptly pivoting to an apparent non-sequitur about the U.S. having “crystal clean” water. It was a typically Trumpian obfuscation. Asked about the king’s views during the Turnberry visit, Trump said: “Every time I met with him, he talked about the environment, how important it is. I’m all for it. I think that’s great.”  In nearly the same breath, he ranted about wind energy being “a disaster.”  GOOD LUCK, CHARLIE  “It is difficult, if not impossible, to see [Trump] change his views on climate change, because they’re not informed by his understanding of the science or consequences, but rather by naked politics,” said leading U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann in emailed remarks.   And Trump will come to the meeting prepared, said Martins, the former U.S. Embassy official. “Trump will receive the full briefing on the king’s views on environment. He won’t be going into that blind. He’ll know exactly what the king has said over his career and what his views are on it and how it affects American interests. I don’t anticipate him being surprised by anything the king says.”   He added: “Bashing net zero and President Biden … gets [Trump] political wins.”    To Charles’ long-standing domestic critics, it all highlights the pointlessness of his position.  Donald Trump has even declared his “love” for King Charles III. | Pool Photo by Richard Pohle via Getty Images “He is bound by these constitutional expectations that he does nothing that will upset the apple cart [in U.K./U.S. relations],” said Graham Smith, chief executive of campaign group Republic, which calls for the abolition of the monarchy. “If he was elected, he’d have a lot more freedom to say what he actually wants.”  “Soft power is a highly questionable concept,” added Smith. It’s only useful, he argued, when backed by something Charles lacks and Trump has by the bucket-load: “Hard power.”  And time may be running out for Charles to deploy even soft power in the climate fight.   Trump’s chief U.K. political ally is Nigel Farage, whose anti-net-zero Reform UK currently lead opinion polls. If British voters pick Reform at the next election, Charles’ potential advocacy would be restrained by a government opposed to action on climate change.  So how far will Charles go to seize his moment?  He wrote in Harmony: “If we continue to be deluded by the increasingly irresponsible clamour of sceptical voices that doubt man-made climate change, it will soon be too late to reverse the chaos we have helped to unleash.” He feared “failing in my duty to future generations and to the Earth itself” if he did not speak up.   Skelly, the former speechwriter who co-wrote the book, predicted that Charles would walk a fine diplomatic line — but was “not someone to sit on his hands or to remain silent.”   “He was warning about these things 30 years ago and nobody was listening. … He feels increasingly frustrated that time is running out.   “I’d love to be a fly on the wall — because it will be a fascinating conversation.”

CHIATURA, Georgia — Giorgi Neparidze, a middle-aged man from near the town of Chiatura in western Georgia, still has marks on his lips from where he sewed his mouth shut during a hunger strike last year. He says Georgian Manganese, a mining company with close links to the government, has wrought environmental devastation around his home and has ignored the rights of its workers. He is seeking compensation.  Europe, which imports Georgia’s manganese, is partly to blame for the black rivers and collapsing houses in Chiatura district, Neparidze says. The former miner-turned-environmental and civil rights activist claims that in one village, Shukruti, toxic dust from the pits is making people unwell. Filthy black water, laced with heavy metals, periodically spurts out of pumps there. Houses are collapsing as the tunnels underneath them cave in.  Manganese, a black metal traditionally used to reinforce steel, is crucial for Europe’s green energy transition as it is used in both wind turbines and electric car batteries. The metal is also vital for military gear like armor and guns. In 2022, the European Union bought 20,000 metric tons of manganese alloys from Georgia — almost 3 percent of its total supply. A year later the bloc added manganese to its list of critical minerals. But Chiaturans say their lives are being ruined so that Western Europeans can breathe cleaner air. “We are sacrificed so that others can have better lives,” Neparidze says. “There are only 40,000 people in Chiatura. They might feel ill or live in bad conditions but they are sacrificed so that millions of Europeans can have a cleaner environment.” Neparidze says cancer rates in the region are unusually high. Doctors at a hospital in Chiatura back up the observation, but no official study has linked the illnesses to the mines. An aerial view of Chiatura with the polluted Kvirila River running through the town | Olivia Acland Hope that things will improve appears dim. European companies often don’t know where their manganese is sourced from. As ANEV, Italy’s wind energy association, confirms: “There is no specific obligation to trace all metals used in steel production.”  Last year the EU enacted a law that was meant to change that. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive obliges companies to run closer checks on their supply chains and clamp down on any human rights violations, poor working conditions and environmental damage.  But barely a year after it took effect, the European Commission proposed a major weakening of the law in a move to reduce red tape for the bloc’s sluggish industry. EU member countries, motivated by this deregulation agenda, are now pushing for even deeper cuts, while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz want to get rid of the law altogether.  Meanwhile, Europe’s appetite for mined raw materials like manganese, lithium, rare earths, copper and nickel is expected to skyrocket to meet the needs of the clean energy transition and rearmament. Many of these resources are in poorly regulated and often politically repressive jurisdictions, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Indonesia and Georgia. Weakening the EU supply chain law will have consequences for communities like Neparidze’s. “Only an empty shell of the directive remains,” says Anna Cavazzini, a member of the European Parliament’s Green Party, adding that the legislature caved to pressure from businesses seeking to reduce their costs. “Now is not the time to abandon the defense of human rights and give corporations a free hand,” she says.  A resident of Chiatura standing on a collapsed house following a mining-related landslide in Itkhvisi village. | Olivia Acland As Georgia’s government pivots toward Russia and stifles dissent, life is becoming increasingly dangerous for activists in Chiatura. On April 29, four activists including Neparidze were arrested for allegedly assaulting a mine executive. A statement put out by Chiatura Management Company, the firm in charge of staffing Georgian Manganese’s underground operations, says that Tengiz Koberidze, manager of the Shukruti mine, was “verbally abused and pelted with stones.” Supporters call it a staged provocation in which Koberidze tried to incite violence, and say it’s part of a broader campaign to silence resistance. If convicted they face up to six years behind bars. Koberidze did not respond to requests for comment. Chiatura residents are protesting over two overlapping issues. On one side, miners are demanding safer working conditions underground, where tunnel collapses have long been a risk, along with higher wages and paid sick leave. When the mine was temporarily shut in October 2024, they were promised 60 percent of their salaries, but many say those payments never materialized. Workers are also raising concerns about mining pollution in the region. “The company doesn’t raise wages, doesn’t improve safety, and continues to destroy the natural environment. Its profits come not just from extracting resources, but from exploiting both workers and the land,” says one miner, David Chinchaladze. Georgian Manganese did not respond to interview requests or written questions. Officials at Georgia’s Ministry of Mines and the government’s Environment Protection and Natural Resources Department did not respond to requests for comment. A collapsing building in Shukruti. | Olivia Acland.  The second group of protesters comes from the village of Shukruti, which sits directly above the mining tunnels. Their homes are cracking and sinking into the ground. In 2020, Georgian Manganese pledged to pay between 700,000 and 1 million Georgian lari ($252,000 to $360,000) annually in damages — a sum that was meant to be distributed among residents. But while the company insists the money has been paid, locals — backed by watchdog NGO Social Justice — say otherwise. According to them, fewer than 5 percent of Shukruti’s residents have received any compensation.  Their protest has intensified in the last year, with workers now blocking the roads and Shukruti residents barring entry to the mines. But the risks are intensifying too. Since suspending EU accession talks last year amid deteriorating relations with the bloc, Georgia’s ruling party has shuttered independent media, arrested protestors and amplified propaganda. The country’s democracy is “backsliding,” says Irakli Kavtaradze, head of the foreign department of the largest opposition political party, United National Movement. Their tactics “sound like they come from a playbook that is written in the Kremlin,” he adds. ‘KREMLIN PLAYBOOK’ In the capital Tbilisi, around 200 kilometers east of Chiatura, protesters have taken to the streets every night since April 2, 2024 when the government unveiled a Kremlin-style “foreign agents” law aimed at muzzling civil society.  Many demonstrators wear sunglasses, scarfs and masks to shield their identities from street cameras, wary of state retaliation.  A scene from the 336th day of protests in Tbilisi in April 2025. | Olivia Acland. Their protests swelled in October last year after the government announced it would suspend talks to join the EU. For Georgians, the stakes are high: Russia already occupies 20 percent of the country after its 2008 invasion, and people fear that a more profound drift from the EU could open the door to further aggression. When POLITICO visited in April, a crowd strode down Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s main artery. Some carried EU flags while others passed around a loudspeaker, taking it in turns to voice defiant chants. “Fire to the oligarchy!” one young woman yelled, the crowd echoing her call. “Power lies in unity with the EU!” another shouted. They also called out support for protestors in Chiatura, whose fight has become something of a cause célèbre across the country: “Solidarity to Chiatura! Natural resources belong to the people!”  The fight in Chiatura is a microcosm of the country’s broader struggle: The activists are not just taking on a mining company but a corporate giant backed by oligarchs and the ruling elites.  Georgian Manganese’s parent company, Georgian American Alloys, is registered in Luxembourg and counts Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky as a shareholder. He is in custody in Kyiv over allegations that he hired a gang to kill a lawyer who threatened his business interests in 2003. Kolomoisky has also been sanctioned by the United States for his alleged involvement in siphoning billions out of PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank.  Giorgi Kapanadze — a businessman closely connected with the ruling Georgian Dream party of Bidzina Ivanishvili — is listed as general manager of Georgian American Alloys.  Until recently, Kapanadze owned Rustavi TV, a channel notorious for airing pro-government propaganda. The European Parliament has called on the EU to hit Kapanadze with sanctions, accusing him of propping up the country’s repressive regime. Kolomoisky and Kapanadze did not respond to POLITICO’s requests for comment. The government swooped in to help Georgian Manganese in 2016 when a Georgian court fined it $82 million for environmental destruction in the region. The state placed it under “special management” and wrote off the fine. A new government-appointed manager was tasked, on paper, with cleaning up the mess. He was supposed to oversee a cleanup of the rivers that flow past the mines, among other promises. Manganese mining pit in Chiatura region, Georgia. | Olivia Acland But POLITICO’s own tests based on four samples taken in April 2025 from the Kvirila River, which runs through Chiatura, as well as its tributary, the Bogiristiskali, which were examined in a U.K. licensed laboratory, show the manganese levels in both rivers are over 10 times the legal limit. Iron levels are also higher than legally permitted. Locals use the polluted water to irrigate their crops. Fishermen are also pulling in increasingly empty nets as the heavy metals kill off aquatic life, according to local testimonies. The water from the Kvirila River flows out into the Black Sea, home to endangered dolphins, sturgeons, turtles and sharks.  A 2022 analysis by the Georgian NGO Green Policy found even worse results, with manganese in the Kvirila River averaging 42 times the legal limit. The group also detected excessive levels of iron and lead. Chronic manganese exposure can lead to irreversible neurological damage — a Parkinson’s-like condition known as manganism — as well as liver, kidney and reproductive harm. Lead and iron are linked to organ failure, cancer and cardiovascular disease. On Georgian Manganese’s website, the company concedes that “pollution of the Kvirila River” is one of the region’s “ecological challenges,” attributing it to runoff from manganese processing. It claims to have installed German-standard purification filters and claims that “neither polluted nor purified water” currently enters the river. Protesters like Neparidze aren’t convinced. They claim the filtration system is turned on only when inspectors arrive and that for the rest of the time, untreated wastewater is dumped straight into the rivers. BLOCKING EXPORTS Their protests having reaped few results, Chiaturans are taking increasingly extreme measures to make their voices heard.  Gocha Kupatadze, a retired 67-year-old miner, spends his nights in a tarpaulin shelter beside an underground mine, where he complains that rats crawl over him. “This black gold became the black plague for us,” he says. “We have no choice but to protest.” Kupatadze’s job is to ensure that manganese does not leave the mine. Alongside other protesters he has padlocked the gate to the generator that powers the mine’s ventilation system, making it impossible for anyone to work there. Kupatadze says he is only resorting to such drastic measures because conditions in his village, Shukruti, have become unlivable. His family home, built in 1958, is now crumbling, with cracks in the walls as the ground beneath it collapses from years of mining. The vines that once sustained his family’s wine-making traditions have long since withered and died. Gocha Kupatadze, an activist sleeping in a tarpaulin tent outside a mine. | Olivia Acland. For over a year, protesters across the region have intermittently blocked mine entrances as well as main roads, determined to stop the valuable ore from leaving Chiatura. In some ways it has worked: Seven months ago, Chiatura Management Company, the firm in charge of staffing Georgian Manganese’s underground operations, announced it would pause production.  “Due to the financial crisis that arose from the radical protests by the people of Shukruti village, the production process in Chiatura has been completely halted,” it read. Yet to the people of Chiatura, this feels more like a punishment than a triumph.  Manganese has been extracted from the area since 1879 and many residents rely on the mines for their livelihoods. The region bears all the hallmarks of a mining town that thrived during the Soviet Union when conditions in the mines were much better, according to residents. Today, rusted cable cars sway above concrete buildings that house washing stations and aging machinery.   While locals had sought compensation for the damage to their homes, they now just find themselves out of work.  Soviet-era buildings and mining infrastructure around Chiatura. | Olivia Acland.  Making matters worse, Georgian Manganese, licensed to mine 16,430 hectares until 2046, is now sourcing much of its ore from open pits instead of underground mines. These are more dangerous to the communities around them: Machines rip open the hillsides to expose shallow craters, while families living next to the pits say toxic dust drifts off them into their gardens and houses.  MORE PITS The village of Zodi is perched on a plateau surrounded by gently undulating hills, 10 kilometers from Chiatura. Many of its residents rely on farming, and cows roam across its open fields. “It is a beautiful village with a unique microclimate which is great for wine-making,” says Kote Abdushelishvili, a 36-year-old filmmaker from Zodi.  Mining officials say the village sits on manganese reserves. In 2023, caterpillar trucks rolled into Zodi and began ripping up the earth. Villagers, including Abdushelishvili, chased them out. “We stopped them,” he says, “We said if you want to go on, you will have to kill us first.” A padlocked gate to the mine’s ventilation system. | Olivia Acland Abdushelishvili later went to Georgian Manganese’s Chiatura office to demand a meeting with the state-appointed special manager. When he was turned away, he shouted up to the window: “You can attack us, you can kill us, we will not stop.” Two days later, as Abdushelishvili strolled through a quiet neighborhood in Tbilisi, masked men jumped out of a car, slammed him to the pavement and beat him up. Despite the fierce resistance in Chiatura, Georgian Manganese continues to send its metal to European markets. In the first two months of 2025, the EU imported 6,000 metric tons of manganese from Georgia. With the bloc facing mounting pressures — from the climate crisis to new defense demands — its hunger for manganese is set to grow. As the EU weakens its corporate accountability demands and Georgia drifts further into authoritarianism, the voices of Chiatura’s people are growing even fainter.  “We are not asking for something unreasonable,” says activist Tengiz Gvelesiani, who was recently detained in Chiatura along with Neparidze, “We are asking for healthy lives, a good working environment and fresh air.” Georgian Manganese did not respond to requests for comment. This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.