U.N. climate negotiations get underway in Brazil, with leaders urging urgency and cooperation to curb global warming. The Trump administration is not participating.

There are other thorny issues to tackle for delegates who do attend the negotiations, including a plan to scale up climate finance to $1.3 trillion annually to help communities recover from climate disasters, adapt to the even more extreme changes ahead, and build out more carbon-free sources of energy.

California Governor Gavin Newsom swept into the COP30 climate summit in Brazil with all the fanfare of a head of state.

The United States has put more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas than any other country. China is the No. 1 carbon polluter now, but because carbon dioxide stays in the air for at least a century, more of it was made in the U.S.

UN climate summit leaders have been petitioned by California gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton, asking them to prevent Gov. Gavin Newsom from speaking at their summit this month.

NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with former Secretary of State John Kerry about the COP30 climate talks in Brazil, and what it means to have the U.S. largely sitting on the sidelines.

Solving complex puzzles is challenging in the best of circumstances. Unhealthy indoor environmental conditions may make it tougher.

The ongoing government shutdown has stymied lawmakers’ plans to head to the talks in Belém, leaving just a handful of Democratic House members as the likely federal elected presence at the gathering. World leaders started making remarks last week ahead of the conference’s formal launch.

In 2015, global leaders gathered in force to get the Paris Agreement done. A decade later, shifting geopolitics makes a very different landscape for climate talks.