2026-01-26 20:30:00
If Democrats are to have any hope of retaking the Senate this fall, then Roy Cooper, the former North Carolina governor, must flip the seat held by retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, in one of the most anticipated races of the 2026 midterms. The stakes of the race have already led to an influx of cash and media attention: Cooper, who will likely be running against former RNC chair Michael Whatley, set fundraising records the day after announcing his candidacy last July, in a contest that could be one of the most expensive in history.
For North Carolinians like me, long before Cooper had the fate of the Senate resting on his shoulders, he was a familiar fixture in state politics. Cooper joined the state legislature in 1987 before serving four consecutive terms as the state attorney general, then winning the governorship in 2016 and again in 2020.
As a state politician, Cooper’s style was often about getting results, even when it meant working with Republicans or breaking with his own party. As governor, he’s remembered for working with Republicans to repeal HB2, which prohibited transgender people from using public restrooms aligned with their gender identity, and for passing Medicaid expansion with bipartisan support. But his gubernatorial career was also defined by a contentious relationship with state Republicans who held a supermajority in the legislature—and thus the ability to overturn Cooper’s vetoes—for four of his eight years in the office. As governor, Cooper vetoed 104 bills. Republicans overturned half of those.
I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he could’ve been a classmate’s dad.
Despite those political battles, Cooper has managed to remain pretty well liked by voters in a long-time purple state growing redder (thanks, in part, to newly drawn congressional maps). North Carolina has the country’s second largest rural population and, to reach these voters, Cooper often touts his upbringing in rural Eastern North Carolina as an indicator of his trustworthiness. North Carolinians will be familiar with his stories of cropping tobacco on his family’s farm during the summers and his frequent reminders that his mother was a public school teacher.
I remember Cooper campaigning for his first gubernatorial bid on my college’s campus and sitting courtside at basketball games. To me, he seemed like he could’ve been a classmate’s dad. He ate Bojangles. He liked Cheerwine. He’s a self-described “caniac”—a fan of the North Carolina hockey team, the Carolina Hurricanes. But will this nice-guy appeal be enough to propel Cooper to victory when the stakes are higher than ever? Recently, I traveled to Nash County, where Cooper grew up, to find out.
I’m from Eastern North Carolina, about an hour and a half from Nash County. I’ve spent a lot of time driving through this area and have become familiar with the landscape: lots of pine, oak, and maple trees; state roads curving through small towns; plenty of lakes, rivers, and creeks. Driving around Nash County feels familiar, with its rows of crops—this time of year, likely cabbage or collards. Nash has strong railroad ties, so I often bumped over tracks as I drove around.
While some parts of Nash County feel like forgotten ghost towns, others are seeing a surge of new development. Rocky Mount Mills, once a thriving cotton mill at the center of the county’s largest city, is now a bustling campus with bars and businesses where locals and visitors gather.
In nearby counties, it’s become common to see a Trump flag hanging next to a Confederate flag or Trump signs outside of homes, businesses, or roadside produce stands. But driving through Nash that day, the only political ad I saw was from a 2022 congressional campaign. Nash County’s political allegiances are a bit of a mystery, with the rural county emerging as a bellwether in recent elections. Since 2012, the county has supported the winning candidate in each US presidential election. And when President Donald Trump won the county (and the state) in 2016, so did Cooper.
I drove into Rocky Mount and stopped at a coffee shop, where I saw a chalk sandwich board that read, “Welcome. All are friends.” A few of the employees said they didn’t know enough about Cooper to have strong opinions about him. Opinions about Cooper around town are “mixed,” one barista told me.
While in Nash, I met with Harris Walker, a Rocky Mount native running for North Carolina General Assembly, at a burger spot. As a kid, Walker volunteered for one of Cooper’s earlier state assembly runs, helping distribute pamphlets.
I asked if Cooper’s long political career in the state had inspired Walker to run for office. “When he was representing Nash County he always fought for what would improve the livelihoods of people right here. Yeah, that did inspire me,” Walker said. “Watching Roy come from here and be able to follow that trajectory was important.”
Walker knew he wanted to go into politics one day, so when he was a teenager, Cooper sponsored him to be a legislative page in the state’s General Assembly. When Walker’s grandparents died during Cooper’s tenure as attorney general, Cooper attended their funerals, where he sat in the back. “It wasn’t a campaign thing for him,” Walker said. “That’s Roy Cooper.”
Still at the burger spot, I asked my waitress what she thought of Cooper as I paid my bill. She turned her head to the side. “Who’s that?” I briefly went through Cooper’s bio. “Oh, I think I like him? Well, I think I voted for him,” she replied.
Before he was going toe-to-toe with lawmakers in Raleigh, Cooper was a managing partner at the law firm his father co-founded, Fields & Cooper, in the town of Nashville. In 1997, he hired Mark Edwards, a Nash County native who’d just graduated from law school at Wake Forest University. Edwards, who chaired the Nash County Republican Party from 2009 until last year, surmises that Cooper’s time in the smaller firm in Nashville helped prepare him for his role as attorney general. “He just has a very practical demeanor about himself and is able to relate to almost anyone in any circumstance,” Edwards said. “I could see that when he was practicing law and I could see that when he was serving as attorney general.”
Walker told me he thinks many folks are proud that Cooper is from Nash County, but Edwards wonders if the national stage of a US Senate race will change that. “It’s going to be a much more partisan affair, and if he were to win, I’ll be curious to see if there’s that same feeling,” Edwards said.
Later in the day, I drove into Rocky Mount’s downtown and met Cassandra Conover, who chairs the Nash County Democratic Party, at the party’s headquarters near an old train station. Conover and her husband, John, moved to Nash County from Petersburg, Virginia, just before the pandemic. Conover, who was a longtime prosecutor in Virginia, wasn’t surprised to hear that some people were un-opinionated about Cooper. She explained that there’s a “level of apathy” about politics in the county. But she hopes that’s changing. Each of the county’s 24 voting precincts enlists a chair to help organize elections and reach voters in their precincts, but when Conover arrived, most of the positions were vacant. Now, all but one precinct is chaired.
Because Cooper’s a familiar name around town, Conover thinks voters in the county are comfortable with him as a candidate. Cooper “has demonstrated the things that make him more credible and more authentic,” Conover said. “And that’s what the voters right here are looking for.”
“He was the governor for all the people,” Roberson said. “And going into the Senate, I feel that he’ll be a Senator for all of the people.”
Nearly everyone I spoke to recalled Cooper coming back to Nash County for various reasons: to attend funerals, birthday parties, community events, and to visit and care for his aging parents.
Morris Roberson, whose brothers attended Northern Nash High School (one of the first Rocky Mount schools to integrate) with Cooper and played with him on the football team there, remembered Cooper visiting Rocky Mount for the 85th birthday party of his high school basketball coach, Bobby Dunn. Cooper attended the event wearing his high school letterman jacket and shared a few words with the crowd. Roberson thinks Cooper will “represent the masses” if elected to the Senate. “He was the governor for all the people,” Roberson said. “And going into the Senate, I feel that he’ll be a Senator for all of the people.”
Brenda Brown, the Republican mayor of Nashville, lived next to Cooper’s parents for years. Just a few years older than the former governor, Brown remembers Cooper as a “regular Nash County boy with ambitions.” Despite their political disagreements, Brown describes Cooper as a “great person.” “He hasn’t lost the connection with Nashville, and it is appreciated,” Brown said.
Echoing the barista I spoke to earlier, Brown said that now, opinions are “mixed” when it comes to Cooper. “I think he still has a lot of respect from our county for what he did as governor, but at the same time, I think there’s some people that were disappointed,” she said.
Of course, not all Republicans take as favorable a view of Cooper. State Republicans—including Whatley—blamed the August murder of a passenger on a Charlotte light-rail train on Cooper’s “soft on crime” policies. Cooper has also been repeatedly criticized by Republicans for how his administration handled disaster relief efforts after Hurricane Helene. Under his administration, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which assists homeowners with disaster recovery efforts, was mismanaged and left many hurricane victims displaced.
While the latest polling shows Cooper with a comfortable lead on Whatley, only Election Day will prove whether Cooper’s homegrown persona is enough to win a national race. To do so, he’ll have to not only win urban areas like Raleigh and Charlotte, but also minimize his losses in some of the state’s more conservative rural counties—where trailing Whatley by 10, 15, or even 25 points would be a triumph for any Democrat. If Cooper can repeat his performance as a gubernatorial candidate and “lose less badly” in those counties, he may be on track to victory, said Asher Hildebrand, a professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “That is important at a time when many voters—especially right of center voters—feel kind of looked down on by today’s Democratic Party,” Hildebrand said.
Though Democratic candidates on both ends of the spectrum—from democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to moderate Abigail Spanberger—celebrated victories in November’s elections, politicians like Cooper are an increasingly rare breed. In many ways, Cooper is a “bridge” between the Democratic Party of the last century and the party today, Hildebrand said.
When he was elected governor, Cooper was a relatively moderate former state AG with an “ideological pragmatism” reminiscent of 20th-century Democratic governors, who valued getting work done over party allegiance, Hildebrand said. But though he never lost that results-oriented approach, his governorship also came in an era of increased partisan fighting and ideological orthodoxy, shaped by what Hildebrand describes as “a political ecosystem that rewards stridency over compromise.” Somehow, Cooper has managed to hold on to his nice-guy reputation despite that—at least in his home county. In North Carolina, where unaffiliated voters outnumber both major parties, Cooper’s likability could be valuable.
“He has an ability to connect with voters in a way that is authentic and respectful and doesn’t look down on them,” Hildebrand said. Cooper’s style is “a throwback to politics as it once was. It’s a throwback that I think a lot of voters still want in this era.”
2026-01-26 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The Village of Sauget in St. Clair County, Illinois, was founded in order to be polluted. Incorporated in 1926 by a group of Monsanto Chemical Company executives (and initially named “Monsanto”) it was and is an industry town: with deliberately lax manufacturing and emissions laws, it has played host to companies like ExxonMobil, Clayton Chemical, Gavilon Fertilizer, Eastman Chemical, and Veolia North America.
The 134 residents of Sauget—and the 700,000 people in the greater East St. Louis metro area that surrounds it—have often seen their needs come second to those of their corporate neighbors. In the 1990s, according to the last longitudinal EPA study done in the area, they inhaled high levels of lead, volatile organic compounds, and sulfur dioxide compounds that can increase the risk of cancer and respiratory illness.
“We were basically incorporated to be a sewer,” the town’s mayor, Rich Sauget, told the Wall Street Journal in 2006.
Trump aimed to “eliminate funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production,” the White House noted.
Since 1999, one well-known local polluter has been Veolia Environmental Services, a subsidiary of a French company that runs an incinerator, which stores and burns hazardous waste. The company is certified to burn toxic substances like PFAS, and people in the area have long complained of acrid or sewage-like smells near the facility.
Darnell Tingle, who leads United Congregations of Metro-East (UCM)—a group of faith communities working to address environmental and social justice issues in the area—says congregants at the half-a-dozen Illinois churches within 10 miles of Veolia often wonder if the incinerator is what’s making them sick.
According to Lucas King, Veolia’s Sauget Facility Manager, “Veolia North America is committed to safe operations, ensuring our processes are in compliance with all applicable regulatory requirements, and protecting the health of the communities where we operate. We are proud of Veolia’s record of safety, compliance and community partnership-building.”
But Tingle claims, “we have some of the worst air quality in the country.” Children in East St. Louis suffer from asthma at much higher rates than the national average. But it’s hard for the 878 people who live within a mile of Veolia’s incinerator to prove anything. So, in 2023, UCM proposed a solution: they would install air quality monitoring stations on half-a-dozen local churches, pay scientists to analyze that data, and finance the whole thing with $500,000 in Community Change Grant funding, a landmark program of Joe Biden’s EPA.
Soon, Tingle hoped, they’d have the answers they were looking for. But in early 2025, his promised grant money was abruptly withdrawn by the newly inaugurated Trump administration—along with 105 similar grants, totaling at least $1.6 billion, from Alaska to Florida. The EPA’s new administrator Lee Zeldin, declared the grants “unnecessary,” and with the help of Elon Musk’s now-decommissioned DOGE, froze the money and closed the Office of Environmental Justice, amounting to losses of at least $37 billion.
Only two of the six planned air-quality monitors were installed in East St. Louis before the grants were terminated, Tingle said—and Tingle’s organization doesn’t have the money to pay scientists to analyze the data those monitors generate. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed an air quality study in Sauget, the main conclusion of which was that, because the EPA has not done adequate data collection, the CDC could not say much about the incinerator’s health impacts. In particular, the agency said, they were unable to conclude whether or not the volatile organic compound levels in the air were hurting people. So the community is still left with poor health effects and lots of suspicions about where they come from—but without concrete proof.
“For many communities, they’ve been going through the stages of grief.”
This Community Change Grant program was unique in the realm of federal funding, said Zealan Hoover, former senior advisor to Biden’s EPA administrator Michael Regan. “Most EPA funding flows through the states, and that is a model that works well,” Hoover said. “But at the same time, money that flows top down through states takes longer to reach communities and is not always as responsive as grants directly to the frontline communities that have a very clear, well-defined scope of what they need to do.”
Zeldin and Trump asserted that freezing these grants—which, organizers say, happened without any forewarning from the EPA, sometimes in the middle of grant disbursal and sometimes without communities seeing any money at all—was justified as a way to end the “green new scam” and “eliminate funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production,” according to a White House fact sheet.
A year later, many other communities beyond Sauget are also experiencing the grant terminations in starker terms. In Pocatello, Idaho, some of the town’s unsewered neighborhoods still face the unsanitary hardships of nitrate contamination from septic systems in their drinking water source. In the South Bronx, New York, one community remains vulnerable to extreme flooding, in part because their plan to revitalizing a dilapidated waterfront park has been defunded. And in South Dakota, the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe’s plan to use $19.9 million in grant funding to (among other things) rebuild a long-unusable bridge, build resilience hubs, weatherize buildings, and install solar panels on the homes of community elders remains just a plan.
“For many communities, they’ve been going through the stages of grief,” said Hoover. “First was disbelief, because they know the merits of these projects. They know how badly it’s needed by the community. That has evolved over time into disappointment that the agency has been unwilling to reconsider, even after seeing cases like Kipnuk, Alaska, where EPA terminated a grant for flood prevention and then the town was washed away in a flood.”
The communities and organizations around the country who lost funding have responded in a variety of ways. Some, like UCM in East St. Louis, are hopeful that other forms of funding will turn up—and are refocusing on other projects. Other municipalities and nonprofits are still involved in litigation against the EPA, hoping to recoup some of the losses they’ve sustained in money and in time.
In South Dakota, rather than making an appeal, the town of Flandreau ended up closing its application for a grant to bring solar power to the homes of some Flandreau Santee Sioux Nation members, according to Rhonda Conn, the associate director of Native Sun Community Power Development, the nonprofit which hoped to work with the town and tribe.
Native Sun has pushed on to seek funding sources for its other work. The organization secured some local and private funding, but nothing at the scale of the EPA Community Change money has materialized, Conn said. In the process, Native Sun has been forced to work on a very lean budget—no permanent office space, few workers, and few plans to expand. These days, they’re spending more time working on renewable energy workforce development with the state of Minnesota, as opposed to taking big, costly swings at new infrastructure projects.
“For us, the infrastructure stuff is not going to go away,” Conn said. “It’s just about where we’re balancing our energy right now.”
In green energy and disaster resilience work, organizations are competing under higher pressure for less money. “There are still some grant and loan programs operating at lower levels across the government, there are still sources of state, local, and private funding,” Hoover said. “But there are not multibillion-dollar sources of funding commensurate with what the Trump administration terminated.”
“It’s very stressful,” Conn said. “Because everybody now is scrambling for the same pot of money, and there isn’t enough of it.”
2026-01-26 08:34:07
He helped build the religious right in the United States. Now he’s in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to join the clergy’s fight ICE’s siege of the city.
“Being here, in solidarity, is part of the repair work in my own soul,” said Rev. Rob Schenck, an Evangelical minister who spent decades commingling church and state to advance conservative causes like the anti-abortion movement. One example: Schenck’s organization, Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, created “Operation Higher Court,” which trained wealthy couples as “stealth missionaries” to befriend Supreme Court justices to preserve, in his words, a Christian nation.
Now, he says he must confront the damage he helped cause, including what he believes was his role in delivering “the entities that are now inflicting all of this suffering on so many people”—extending to the rise of President Donald Trump. “We made this terrible deal with Donald Trump because we were already demoralized,” he told Mother Jones in 2018. “He didn’t demoralize us—he is the evidence of our demoralization.”
So, here, braving subzero temperatures, Schenck told me, “I have to do the work of repair.” The video above was taken on Friday, during the city’s “Day of Truth and Freedom”—a citywide strike and march in which clergy played a prominent role. “These folks are showing more grace in accepting me than I would have ever extended to them,” he said, flanked by organizers shouting, “Whose streets? Our streets!”
The next day, after learning of federal agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti, Schenck extended his stay in the city. I’ve been following Rob on his journey over the last few days and the clergy’s fight against ICE, which we will feature more of in the coming days.
“This is redemption,” he told me. “This is redemption.”
2026-01-26 05:04:01
It didn’t take long for the Trump administration to blame 37-year-old Alex Pretti for his own death after a federal immigration agent shot and killed him on Saturday in Minneapolis.
Pretti, an intensive-care unit nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, is the second US citizen to be killed by federal immigration agents in less than a month. Videos of the Saturday shooting, which have been analyzed by various outlets including Mother Jones, dispute the federal description.
The president referred to Pretti as a “gunman” and wrote “LET OUR ICE PATRIOTS DO THEIR JOB!” on Truth Social.
The Trump administration has claimed that Pretti was an armed agitator who wanted to cause mass harm. While video analysis appears to show an immigration agent removing a gun from the pile of men, it is never seen in Pretti’s hand. A witness on the scene has also testified that she saw no sign of Pretti holding a gun at any point. And, according to officials, Pretti held a firearms permit, required by state law in Minnesota to carry a handgun.
Trump’s top advisor Stephen Miller called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and a “would-be assassin” in a series of posts on Saturday. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press conference on Saturday that the nurse committed an act of “domestic terrorism” and that was “ just the facts.”
Noem also previously said that Renée Nicole Good, the other US citizen who was shot and killed by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis, had committed “an act of domestic terrorism.”
Some on the right have questioned the narrative coming out of the Trump administration and have urged that a thorough investigation take place—even while, often, still praising the president and immigration officials and criticizing Minnesota’s leaders.
Here’s what some conservatives have said since the Saturday shooting.
“Any administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins are doing an incredible disservice to the nation and to President Trump’s legacy,” he wrote on X.
“The events in Minneapolis are incredibly disturbing. The credibility of ICE and DHS are at stake. There must be a full joint federal and state investigation. We can trust the American people with the truth,” he wrote on X.
“Well, first off, this is a real tragedy, and I think the death of Americans that we’re seeing on TV, it’s causing deep concerns over federal tactics and accountability. Americans don’t like what they’re seeing right now,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Stitt then applauded President Trump and how he ran on closing down the border, while criticizing former President Joe Biden. You know, we believe in federalism and states’ rights and nobody likes feds coming into their state. So what’s the goal right now? Is it to deport every single non-US citizen. I don’t think that’s what Americans want.
“Imaging [sic] if one of our MAGA independent journalists or even just a MAGA supporter stood in the street outside a J6’ers house while Biden’s FBI carried out a law enforcement operation, home invasion, and arrest. Then Biden’s FBI goes to the MAGA guy videoing it all and shoves a woman with him to the ground and sprays them with bear spray then throws the MAGA guy to the ground as MAGA guy was trying to help the woman off the ground. Then Biden’s FBI beats MAGA guy on the ground, disarms MAGA guy, and then shoots him dead,” she wrote on X, asking, “What would have been our reaction?”
“I don’t believe this for 2 seconds,” he wrote over a post quoting Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino. “Peretti was a radicalized leftist who wanted to “dearrest” and obstruct. He refused to be detained and fought feds. They saw the gun, yelled GUN Gun and he got shot. There’s no reason to think he was trying to massacre LEOs.”
“The President is a great marketer and PR guy. While those around him may not realize it, I’m pretty sure he understands another dead American with his team rushing to undermine second amendment arguments and define the dead guy with a lot of facts still unknown is a bad look,” he wrote on X.
“How was he threatening Border Patrol?” she asked in an interview with FBI Director Kash Patel. Bartiromo inquired if federal forces had a handgun in their possession. Patel said they do. “And how was he using that handgun in terms of threatening Border Patrol? What was the threat? He had his camera, right, he was filming it.”
2026-01-26 00:20:08
The nation’s largest union of registered nurses fervently renewed their demand to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and cease current deportation operations in American cities after a federal immigration agent shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old registered nurse, in Minneapolis on Saturday.
“The nation’s nurses,” National Nurses United, which has more than 225,000 members nationwide, began in a statement, “who make it their mission to care for and save human lives, are horrified and outraged that immigration agents have once again committed cold-blooded murder of a public observer who posed no threat to them.”
“This time,” they continued, “they have executed one of our fellow nurses.”
The border patrol agent who killed Pretti fired more than 10 shots in five seconds toward the nurse, according to the New York Times. Pretti, a US citizen and Minneapolis local, worked in the intensive-care unit at a Veterans Affairs hospital. Videos detail the last moments leading up to his death: he was directing traffic on the street while filming immigration agents, attempted to assist another observer who was pushed to the ground by immigration enforcement, pepper-sprayed by the agent who ends up shooting him, and tackled by several agents onto the street.
At some point in this interaction, according to the Times analysis, federal agents appear to pull a firearm from near Pretti’s right hip and carry it away. According to officials, Pretti held a firearms permit, required by state law in Minnesota to carry a handgun. Department of Homeland Security officials have posted a photo of a gun they claim belongs to Pretti. The Border Patrol Union claimed that Pretti “brandishes” a weapon—though videos show him holding a phone, not a gun, in his hand to record the agents. A witness on the scene has testified that she saw no sign of Pretti holding a gun at any point.
Within seconds, a border patrol agent—whose identity has yet to be confirmed—shoots and kills Pretti, who lies motionless as other observers record and cry out.
Pretti is the third person shot and second person killed by immigration agents in the Minneapolis area in less than a month. On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, also 37, while in her car. One week later, a federal agent shot a man in the leg. That man, who DHS claimed was a Venezuelan national who was a target in an immigration operation, was taken to the hospital with a non-life-threatening injury.
The nurse’s union wrote on Saturday that ICE and all related immigration enforcement agencies “have been kidnapping hard-working people—mothers, fathers, and children —and now murdered a registered nurse, one of the most trusted professions in the country.”
In the hours after his killing, colleagues of Pretti’s remembered him as a kind, dedicated nurse.
A colleague of Pretti, Ruth Anway, told the New York Times that he “wanted to be helpful, to help humanity and have a career that was a force of good in the world.” Anway, a nurse, said that Pretti was interested in social justice issues, adding, “I’m not surprised he was out there protesting and observing.”
This isn’t the first time that National Nurses United has spoken out against President Donald Trump and his administration’s violent immigration enforcement campaign across the nation. Consistently, over several months, the union has posted statements in support of immigrants’ rights and against immigration agents’ tactics. After Good was killed, they wrote, “Armed federal agents on our streets and in our communities, not immigrant workers, are the biggest threat to our collective safety.”
Just one day before Pretti was killed, the union called for Congress to abolish ICE and to reject the Homeland Security Appropriations bill, which would give more money to Trump’s anti-immigration force. The spending package passed the House this week with several Democrats voting in support and is now headed for the Senate—where key Democrats, following Pretti’s killing, are threatening to block the bill.
“Make no mistake,” the nurses’ union wrote on Friday, “the terror we are experiencing is being subsidized by our own government.” “Nurses,” they continued, “know that our vision for a healthy society is possible and we will not stop fighting until it is a reality.”
2026-01-25 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
“I just got a whiff,” said Peter Harrison, a marine scientist, as he leaned over the edge of the boat and pointed his flashlight into the dark water. “It’s really coming through now.”
It was shortly after 10 pm on a cloudy December night, and Harrison, a coral researcher at Australia’s Southern Cross University, was about 25 miles off the coast of northern Queensland. He was with a group of scientists, tourism operators, and Indigenous Australians who had spent the last few nights above the Great Barrier Reef—the largest living structure on the planet—looking for coral spawn.
And apparently, it has a smell.
Over a few nights in the Australian summer, shortly after the full moon, millions of corals across the Great Barrier Reef start bubbling out pearly bundles of sperm and eggs, known as spawn. It’s as if the reef is snowing upside down. Those bundles float to the surface and break apart. If all goes to plan, the eggs of one coral will encounter the sperm of another and grow into free-swimming coral larvae. Those larvae make their way to the reef, where they find a spot to “settle,” like a seed taking root, and then morph into what we know of as coral.
Spawning on the Great Barrier Reef has been called the largest reproductive event on Earth, and, in more colorful terms, “the world’s largest orgasm.” Coral spawn can be so abundant in some areas above the reef that it forms large, veiny slicks—as if there had been a chemical spill.
This was what the team was looking for out on the reef, and sniffing is one of the only ways to find it, said Harrison, who was among a small group of scientists who first documented the phenomenon of mass coral spawning in the 1980s. Some people say coral spawn smells like watermelon or fresh cow’s milk. To me it was just vaguely fishy.
“Here we go,” said Mark Gibbs, another scientist onboard and an engineer at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), a government agency. All of a sudden the water around us was full of little orbs, as if hundreds of Beanie Babies had been ripped open. “Nets in the water!” Gibbs said to the crew. A few people onboard began skimming the water’s surface with modified pool nets for spawn and then dumping the contents into a large plastic bin.
That night, the team collected hundreds of thousands of coral eggs as part of a Herculean effort to try to keep the Great Barrier Reef alive. Rising global temperatures, together with a raft of other challenges, threaten to destroy this iconic ecosystem—the gem of Australia, a World Heritage site, and one of the main engines of the country’s massive tourism industry. In response to these existential threats, the government launched a project called the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP). The goal is nothing less than to help the world’s greatest coral reef survive climate change. And with nearly $300 million in funding and hundreds of people involved, RRAP is the largest collective effort on Earth ever mounted to protect a reef.
The project involves robots, one of the world’s largest research aquariums, and droves of world-renowned scientists. The scale is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
But even then, will it be enough?
The first thing to know about the Great Barrier Reef is that it’s utterly enormous. It covers about 133,000 square miles, making it significantly larger than the entire country of Italy. And despite the name, it’s not really one reef but a collection of 3,000 or so individual ones that form a reef archipelago.
Another important detail is that the reef is still spectacular.
Over three days in December, I scuba dived offshore from Port Douglas and Cairns, coastal cities in Queensland that largely run on reef tourism, a whopping $5.3 billion annual industry. Descending onto the reef was like sinking into an alien city. Coral colonies twice my height rose from the seafloor, forming shapes mostly foreign to the terrestrial world. Life burst from every surface.
What really struck me was the color. Two decades of scuba diving had led me to believe that you can only find vivid blues, reds, oranges, and pinks in an artist’s imaginings of coral reefs, like in the scenes of Finding Nemo. But coral colonies on the reefs I saw here were just as vibrant. Some of the colonies of the antler-like staghorn coral were so blue it was as if they had been dipped in paint.
It’s easy to see how the reef—built from the bodies of some 450 species of hard coral—provides a foundation for life in the ocean. While cruising around large colonies of branching coral, I would see groups of young fish hiding out among their nubby calciferous fingers. The Great Barrier Reef is home to more than 1,600 fish species, many of which are a source of food for Indigenous Australians and part of a $200 million commercial fishing industry.
“The reef is part of our life,” said Cindel Keyes, an Indigenous Australian of the Gunggandji peoples, near Cairns, who was part of the crew collecting coral spawn with Harrison. RRAP partners with First Nations peoples, many of whom have relied on the reef for thousands of years and are eager to help sustain it. “It’s there to provide for us, too,” Keyes, who comes from a family of fishers, told me.
The Great Barrier Reef is not dead, as many visitors assume from headlines. But in a matter of decades—by the time the children of today grow old—it very well could be.
The world’s coral reefs face all kinds of problems, from big storms to runoff from commercial farmland, but only one is proving truly existential: marine heat. Each piece of coral is not one animal but a colony of animals, known as polyps, and polyps are sensitive to heat. They get most of their food from a specific type of algae that lives within their tiny bodies. But when ocean temperatures climb too high, polyps eject or otherwise lose those algae, turn bleach-white, and begin to starve. If a coral colony is “bleached” for too long, it will die.
The global prognosis is bleak. The world has already lost about half of its coverage of coral reefs since the 1950s, not including steep losses over the last two decades. And should wealthy countries continue burning fossil fuels—pushing global temperatures more than 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline—it will likely lose the rest of it.
Projections for the Great Barrier Reef are just as grim. A recent study published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications projected that coral cover across the reef would decline, on average, by more than 50 percent over the next 15 years, under all emissions scenarios—including the most optimistic. The reef would only later recover to anything close to what it looks like today, the authors wrote, if there are immediate, near-impossibly steep emissions cuts. (The study was funded by RRAP.)
The reef has already had a taste of this future: In the last decade alone, there have been six mass bleaching events. One of the worst years was 2016, when coral cover across the entire reef declined by an estimated 30 percent. Yet recent years have also been alarming. Surveys by AIMS found that bleaching last year affected a greater portion of the reef than any other year on record, contributing to record annual declines of hard coral in the northern and southern stretches of the reef.
“I’ve been suffering,” said Harrison, who’s been diving on the Great Barrier Reef for more than 40 years. “I’ve got chronic ecological grief. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, like when you see another mass bleaching. It can be quite crushing.”
The problem isn’t just bleaching but that these events are becoming so frequent that coral doesn’t have time to recover, said Mia Hoogenboom, a coral reef ecologist at Australia’s James Cook University, who’s also involved in RRAP.
“The hopeful part is if we can take action now to help the system adapt to the changing environment, then we’ve got a good chance of keeping the resilience in the system,” Hoogenboom said. “But the longer we wait, the less chance we have to maintain the Great Barrier Reef as a functioning ecosystem.”
That night in December, after filling two large plastic bins onboard with coral spawn, the crew motored to a nearby spot on the reef where several inflatable pools were floating on the ocean’s surface. The boat slowly approached one of the pools—which looked a bit like a life raft—and two guys onboard dumped spawn into it.
The government established RRAP in 2018 with an ambitious goal: to identify tools that might help the reef cope with warming, refine them through research and testing, and then scale them up so they can help the reef at large. It is a massive undertaking. RRAP involves more than 300 scientists, engineers, and other experts across 20-plus institutions, including AIMS, which operates one of the world’s largest research aquariums called the National Sea Simulator. And it has a lot of money. The government committed roughly $135 million to the project, and it has another $154 million from private sources, including companies and foundations. It’s operating on the scale of decades, not years, said Cedric Robillot, RRAP’s executive director.
Scientists at RRAP have now honed in on several approaches that they think will work, and a key one is assisted reproduction—essentially, helping corals on the reef have babies. That’s what scientists were doing on the water after dark in December.
Normally, when corals spawn, only a fraction of their eggs get fertilized and grow into baby corals. They might get eaten by fish, for example, or swept out to sea, away from the reef, where the larvae can’t settle. That’s simply nature at work in normal conditions. But as the reef loses more and more of its coral, the eggs of one individual have a harder time meeting the sperm of another, leading to a fertility crisis.
RRAP is trying to improve those odds through what some have called coral IVF.
At sea, scientists skim spawn from the surface and then load them into those protected pools, which are anchored to the reef. Suspended inside the pools are thousands of palm-sized ceramic structures for the larval coral to settle on, like empty pots in a plant nursery. After a week or so, scientists will use those structures—which at that point should be growing baby corals—to reseed damaged parts of the reef.
With this approach, scientists can collect spawn from regions that appear more tolerant to warming and reseed areas where the corals have been killed off by heat. Heat tolerance is, to an extent, rooted in a coral’s DNA and passed down from parent to offspring. So those babies may be less likely to bleach and die. While baby corals are growing in those pools, scientists can also introduce specific kinds of algae—the ones that live symbiotically within polyps—that are more adapted to heat. That may make the coral itself more resistant to warming.
But what’s even more impressive is that scientists are also breeding corals on land, at the National Sea Simulator, to repopulate the reef. SeaSim, located a few hours south of Cairns on the outskirts of Townsville, is essentially a baby factory for coral.
I drove to SeaSim one evening in December with Robillot, a technophile with silver hair and a French accent. He first walked me through a warehouse-like room filled with several deep, rectangular tanks lit by blue light. The light caused bits of coral growing inside them to fluoresce. Other than the sound of running water, it was quiet.
The main event—one of the year’s biggest, for coral nerds anyway—was just outside.
SeaSim has several open-air tanks designed to breed corals with little human intervention. Those tanks, known as autospawners, mimic the conditions on the wild reef, including water temperature and light. So when scientists put adult corals inside them, the colonies will spawn naturally, as they would in the wild. The tanks collect their spawn automatically and mix it together in another container that creates the optimal density of coral sperm for fertilization.
Observing spawning isn’t easy. It typically happens just once a year for each species, and the timing can be unpredictable. But I got lucky: Colonies of a kind of branching coral known as Acropora kenti were set to spawn later that evening. Through glass panels on the side of the autospawners, I saw their orangish branches, bunched together like the base of a broom. They were covered in pink, acne-like bumps—the bundles of spawn they were getting ready to release—which was a clear sign it would happen soon.
As it grew dark, the dozen or so people around the tanks flipped on red headlamps to take a closer look. (White light can disrupt spawning.) Around 7:30 pm, the show started. One colony after another popped out cream-colored balls. They hung for a moment just above the coral branches before floating to the surface and getting sucked into a pipe. It was a reminder that corals, which usually look as inert as rocks, really are alive. “It’s such a beautiful little phenomenon,” Robillot said, as we watched together. “It’s a sign that we still have vitality in the system.”
After spawning at SeaSim, scientists move the embryos into larger, indoor tanks, where they develop into larvae. Those larvae then get transferred to yet other tanks, settling on small tabs of concrete. Scientists then insert those tabs into slots on small ceramic structures—those same structures as the ones suspended in the floating pools at sea—which they’ll use to reseed the reef. One clear advantage of spawning corals in a lab is that scientists can breed individual corals that appear, through testing, to be more resistant to heat. Ideally, their babies will then be a bit more resistant, too.
During spawning late last year, SeaSim produced roughly 19 million coral embryos across three species.
“People often don’t understand the scale that we’re talking about,” said Carly Randall, a biologist at AIMS who works with RRAP. “We have massive numbers of autospawning systems lined up. We have automated image analysis to track survival and growth. It is like an industrial production facility.”
Including the spawn collection at sea, RRAP produced more than 35 million coral embryos last year that are now growing across tens of thousands of ceramic structures that will be dropped onto the reef. The goal RRAP is working toward, Robillot says, is to be able to stock the reef with 100 million corals every year that survive until they’re at least 1 year old. (Under the right conditions, each ceramic structure can produce one coral that lives until 1 year old in the ocean, Robillot told me. That means RRAP would need to release at least a million of those structures on the reef every year.)
On that scale, the project could help maintain at least some coral cover across the reef, even in the face of more than 2 degrees C of warming, Robillot said, citing unpublished research. One study, published in 2021 and partially funded by RRAP, suggests that a combination of interventions, including adding heat-tolerant corals, can delay the reef’s decline by several years.
“We are not replacing reefs,” Robillot said. “It’s just too big. We’re talking about starting to change the makeup of the population by adapting them to warmer temperatures and helping their recovery. If you systematically introduce corals that are more heat-tolerant over a period of 10 to 20 to 30 years, then over a hundred years, you significantly change the outlook for your population.”
The obvious deficiency of RRAP, and many other reef conservation projects, is that it doesn’t tackle the root problem: rising greenhouse gas emissions. While restoration might help maintain some version of coral reefs in the near term, those gains will only be temporary if the world doesn’t immediately rein in carbon emissions. “It all relies on the premise that the world will get its act together on emissions reductions,” Robillot said. “If we don’t do that, then there’s no point, because it’s a runaway train.”
Many groups involved in reef conservation have failed to reckon with this reality, even though they’re often on the front lines of climate change. During my trip, I would be on dive boats listening to biologists talk about restoration, while we burned diesel fuel and were served red meat—one of the most emissions-intensive foods. A lot of tour operators, some of whom work with RRAP, don’t talk about climate change much at all. Two of the guides who took me out on the reef even downplayed the threat of climate change to me.
Yolanda Waters, founder and CEO of Divers for Climate, a nonprofit network of scuba divers who care about climate change, said this isn’t surprising. “At the industry level, climate change is still very hush-hush,” said Waters, who previously worked in the reef tourism industry. “In most of those boats, climate messaging is just nonexistent.”
This makes some sense. Tourism companies don’t want people to think the reef is dying. “When international headlines describe the Reef as ‘dying’ or ‘lost,’ it can create the impression that the visitor experience is no longer worthwhile, even though large parts of the Reef remain vibrant, actively managed, and accessible,” Gareth Phillips, CEO of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, a trade group, told me by email. (I asked around, but no one could point me to data that clearly linked negative media stories to a drop in visitors to the Great Barrier Reef.)
Yet by failing to talk about the urgent threat of climate change, the tourism industry—a powerful force in Australia, that influences people from all over the world—is squandering an opportunity to educate the public about what is ultimately the only way to save the reef, said Tanya Murphy, a campaigner at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, a nonprofit advocacy group. Tourists are ending their vacation with the memory of, say, a shark or manta ray, not a new urge to fight against climate change, Waters said. So the status quo persists: People don’t connect reducing emissions with saving the reef, even though that’s “the only reef conservation action that can really be taken from anywhere,” she added.
(Not everyone in the tourism industry is so quiet. Eric Fisher, who works for a large Australian tourism company called Experience Co Limited, says he tells tourists that climate change is the biggest threat to the Great Barrier Reef. “It’s what we tell people every day,” Fisher told me. “So as they fall in love with it, they’re more likely to leave with an understanding of that connection.”)
Keeping mum on climate change, while speaking loudly about restoration and other conservation efforts, including RRAP, can also take pressure off big polluters to address their carbon footprints, Waters and Murphy said. Polluters who fund reef conservation, including the government and energy companies, are given social license to operate without stricter emissions cuts, because the public thinks they’re doing enough, they said.
In reality, the Australian government continues to permit fossil fuel projects. Last year, for example, the Albanese administration, which is politically left of center, approved an extension of a gas project in Western Australia that Murphy and other advocates call “a big carbon bomb.” The extension of the project, known as the North West Shelf, will produce carbon emissions equivalent to about 20 percent of Australia’s current yearly carbon footprint, according to The Guardian.
A spokesperson for the Albanese government acknowledged in a statement to Vox that climate change is the biggest threat to coral reefs globally. “It underlines the need for Australia and the world to take urgent action, including reaching net zero emissions,” the statement, sent by Sarah Anderson, said. “The Albanese Government remains committed to action on climate change and our net zero targets.”
Anderson highlighted a government policy called the Safeguard Mechanism, which sets emissions limits for the country’s largest polluters, including the North West Shelf Facility. Yet the policy only applies to Scope 1 emissions. That means it doesn’t limit emissions tied to gas that the North West Shelf project exports — the bulk of the project’s carbon footprint.
Although Australia has far fewer emissions compared to large economies like the US and China, the country is among the dirtiest on a per-capita basis. If any country can reduce its emissions, it should be Australia, Waters said. “We’re such a wealthy, privileged country,” Waters said. “We’ve got the biggest reef in the world. If we can do better, why wouldn’t we?”
On a stormy morning, near the end of my trip, we returned to the reef—this time, visiting another set of floating pools, offshore from Port Douglas. They had been filled with spawn several days earlier. Small corals were now growing on the ceramic structures, and they were ready to be deployed on the reef.
After a nauseating two-hour ride out to sea, a group of scientists and tourism operators jumped into small tenders and collected the structures from inside the pools. Then they motored around an area of the reef that had previously been damaged by a cyclone and started dropping coral babies off the side of the boat, one by one.
As it started to pour, and I noticed water flooding into the front of the tender, I couldn’t help but think about how absurd all of this was. Custom-made pools and ceramics. Hours and hours on the reef, floating in small boats in a vast ocean. Sniffing out spawn.
“You sort of think about the level of effort, that we’re going to try and rescue something that’s been on our planet for so many millions of years,” Harrison told me on the boat a few nights earlier. “It seems a bit ironic that humans now have to intervene to try and rescue corals.”
RRAP is making this process far more efficient, Robillot says—machines, not people, will eventually be dropping the ceramic structures off the boats, for example. But still, why not invest the money instead in climate advocacy or clean energy? Isn’t that an easier, perhaps better, way to help?
It can’t be either or, Robillot said. And it’s not, he contends. Many donors who fund the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a core RRAP partner and Robillot’s employer, are putting more of their money into climate action relative to reef conservation, he said. The government of Australia, meanwhile, says it’s spending billions on clean energy and green-lit a record number of renewable energy projects in 2025. Plus, while the scale of resources behind RRAP is certainly huge for coral reefs, it’s tiny compared to the cost of fixing the climate crisis. “We need trillions,” Robillot said.
Investing that roughly $300 million into fighting climate change could have a small impact on reefs decades from now. Putting it into projects like RRAP helps reefs today. It’s only a waste of money—worse than a waste of money—if that investment undermines climate action. And Robillot doesn’t think it does.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation has been criticized for its ties to mining and energy companies, including Peabody Energy and BHP. The Reef Foundation currently receives money from mining giant Rio Tinto and BHP Foundation (which is funded by BHP) for projects unrelated to RRAP, the organization told Vox. “It is a bit concerning,” Murphy told me. “It’s really important that we get polluters to pay for the damage they’re causing. But that should be done as an obligatory tax and they should not be getting any marketing benefits from that.”
Robillot argues that these companies have not influenced RRAP’s work, or restricted what its staff can say about climate change. “If we can still scream that climate change is the main driver of loss of coral reefs, I don’t have an issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s realistic to only take money from people who do not have any impact on climate change. I don’t know anyone.”
Yet if there’s one argument that I find most convincing for RRAP—for any project trying to help wildlife suffering from climate change—it’s that even if the world stops burning fossil fuels, these ecosystems will still decline. They will still need our support, our help to recover. The planet is currently crossing the 1.5-degree threshold, at which point the majority of coral reefs worldwide are expected to die off. “If you stop emissions today, they will still suffer,” Robillot said of reefs. “And we’re not going to stop emissions today.”
Yet if there’s one argument that I find most convincing for RRAP—for any project trying to help wildlife suffering from climate change—it’s that even if the world stops burning fossil fuels, these ecosystems will still decline. They will still need our support, our help to recover. The planet is currently crossing the 1.5-degree threshold, at which point the majority of coral reefs worldwide are expected to die off. “If you stop emissions today, they will still suffer,” Robillot said of reefs. “And we’re not going to stop emissions today.”
