Vanderbilt's stunning upset of No. 1 Alabama that led to crazed fans marching the goal posts through the streets of Nashville was just the appetizer.
Saturday proved to be one of the wildest days in The Associated Press college football poll in years.
Four teams ranked in the top 11 in the latest poll were upset by unranked teams, the first time that happened on a single day since Nov. 12, 2016, when five teams did it, according to Sportradar.
What looked on paper to be a calm day — with only one matchup between ranked teams — turned out to be anything but predictable, with No. 1 Alabama, No. 4 Tennessee, No. 10 Michigan and No. 11 Southern California all losing to unranked teams. One other top-10 team lost Saturday, with No. 9 Missouri getting blown out 41-10 at No. 25 Texas A&M.
No. 8 Miami rallied to avoid falling, too, escaping with a 39-38 victory at California. The Hurricanes overcame a 25-point deficit in the second half, taking the lead with 35 seconds left in the game that ended near midnight on the West Coast.
This marked the first time that two SEC teams ranked in the top five lost to unranked conference opponents on the same day and was the fifth time in the past 20 years that at least five teams ranked in the top 11 lost on the same day.
Vanderbilt got it started in surprising fashion by knocking off the Crimson Tide 40-35 just a week after Alabama vaulted into the top spot in the AP Top 25 with a 41-34 win over Georgia. The Commodores had been 0-60 against teams ranked in the top five, according to Sportradar, which was the most games for any team that had lost every game against a top-five team. Temple now takes over that title with a 0-25 record.
The fans then tore down the goal posts and carried them a couple of miles before tossing them into the Cumberland River.
“This is the dream, right here,” Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea said. “And for the next 12 hours, I’m going to enjoy the dream. We’ve got more ahead of us, but this is what Vanderbilt football needs to be about: big wins on big stages. We’re going to go get some more.”
The upsets and thrilling games were far from over.
The Volunteers were the next-highest ranked team to go down, when Malachi Singleton scored on an 11-yard run with 1:17 remaining to lift Arkansas to a 19-14 win at home.
Tennessee still had a chance by driving to the Arkansas 20, but Nico Iamaleava was pushed out of bounds on fourth-and-5 at the 16 as time expired. Arkansas fans immediately stormed the field.
“You get into coaching for moments like what just happened, and it’s to see the kids and the smiles on their face and the hard work that they do, because there’s a lot of teams that can’t get to that feeling,” Razorbacks coach Sam Pittman said. “We did tonight.”
There were two other field stormings in the Big Ten following wins that weren't nearly as shocking.
Washington beat Michigan 27-17 in a national championship rematch that was missing both coaches from the title game and most of the key players.
“It feels good. You lose to them in the championship and then to come back and win and beat them, it feels good,” said Washington safety Kamren Fabiculanan, one of the few holdovers on the Huskies' roster from the championship game.
The loss snapped Michigan’s 24-game Big Ten regular-season winning streak. The Wolverines had not suffered a Big Ten loss since falling at Michigan State on Oct. 30, 2021.
Minnesota then knocked off USC when Max Brosmer powered into the end zone for on fourth-and-goal from the 1 with 56 seconds left for a 24-17 win.
The officials on the field ruled him short, but the replay review resulted in a reversal the entire stadium knew was coming.
The game ended when Miller Moss' heave into the end zone was intercepted. The crowd streamed onto the field to engulf the Gophers in a raucous celebration of their first victory over the Trojans since 1955.
A version of this story was corrected to show that the last time this many teams ranked in the top 11 lost to unranked teams was 2016.
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Washington players celebrate on the field after a 27-17 win over Michigan in an NCAA college football game Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
As climate change leads to a seemingly endless stream of weather disasters around the world, countries are struggling to adapt to the new reality. Preparing to better withstand hurricanes, floods, heat waves, droughts and wildfires will take hundreds of billions of dollars.
And then there is confronting the root cause of climate change—the burning of fossil fuels like coal, gasoline and oil—by transitioning to clean energies like wind and solar.
That will take trillions of dollars.
Enter climate finance, a general term that means different things to different people but boils down to: paying for projects to adapt to and combat the cause of climate change. Financing related to climate change is especially important for developing countries, which don't have the same resources or access to credit that rich countries do.
International mega banks, funded by taxpayer dollars, are the biggest, fastest-growing source of climate finance for the developing world. Called multilateral development banks because they get contributions from various countries, there are only a handful of these banks in the world, the World Bank the largest among them.
How these banks allocate resources are some of the weightiest decisions made in defining how poorer nations can respond to climate change. They were a key reason why, in 2022, the world met a goal countries had set in 2009 to supply developing nations with $100 billion annually to address climate change.
At the annual U.N. climate conference that opens Monday in Azerbaijan, global leaders are expected to discuss how to generate trillions of dollars for climate finance in the years to come. The nonprofit research group Climate Policy Initiative estimates the world needs about five times the current annual amount of climate financing to limit warming to 1.5 C (2.7 degrees F) since the late 1800s. Currently, global average temperatures are about 1.3 C (2.3 degrees F) higher.
A new goal needs to reach higher and hold institutions and governments accountable to their promises, said Tim Hirschel-Burns, an expert at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center.
"The core of it is getting a goal that is going to catalyze the actions that fills the really significant climate finance gap that developing countries face, which is much bigger than $100 billion,” he said.
As the international community has come to accept the reality of climate change, the debate has shifted to the question of where the money to fund the energy transition will come from, said Dharshan Wignarajah, director of Climate Policy Initiative’s London-based office.
“The question is not ‘are we going to transition?’, but ‘how quickly can we engineer the transition?’” said Wignarajah, who helped lead the climate talks, called the Conference of Parties, when the United Kingdom was host in 2021. “That has forced finance to be ever-more prominent at the COP discussions, because ultimately it comes down to who pays.”
Developing nations are much more reliant on these banks for financing climate projects than industrialized countries.
In the U.S. and Canada, commercial banks and corporations provided funding for more than half of climate-friendly projects in 2022, according to Climate Policy Initiative. In sub-Saharan Africa, those private lenders only accounted for 7%.
This is because it is harder for developing countries to get low interest rates.
“If you’re Kenya, and you want to borrow from private lenders, they might charge you 10% interest rates because your credit rating isn’t very good,” Hirschel-Burns said.
But the multilateral banks have better credit ratings than many countries do. For example, the International Development Association — an arm of the World Bank and the top international aid provider to Kenya — has the highest possible rating from Moody’s Investor Service, while Kenya itself has a junk rating.
The banks borrow money with that better rating, then lend to developing countries in turn, offering a more reasonable rate than governments could get if they borrowed directly from private lenders.
The multilateral banks’ development goals are wide-ranging. They seek to improve people's health and the environment, expand energy access and end poverty. Addressing energy access has meant the banks have provided billions of dollars for fossil fuel power plants, according to an AP analysis, though their policies have improved and fewer such projects have been funded in recent years.
Investment in fossil fuels continues to rise worldwide, reaching $1.1 trillion in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. And multilateral banks continue to rank among the biggest funders of fossil fuel-prolonging projects, helping to “lock in a high-carbon pathway” for countries, according to a report by the Clean Air Fund, which lobbies for the funding of projects to improve air quality.
“This is development aid we're talking about, and it should be assisting countries to leapfrog,” said Jane Burston, CEO of the Clean Air Fund, referring to the idea that developing countries could industrialize with renewable energies and skip over development that rich nations historically made with fossil fuels.
“It's baffling why development assistance is being given to something that continues to make people unhealthy as well as harms the planet,” she added.
Seemingly contradictory actions can be seen in a loan made by an arm of the World Bank, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. It loaned $105 million toward rehabilitating coal plants in India, with their last loans toward the project going out in 2018, according to an Associated Press analysis of data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Coal spews carbon pollution, contributing to climate change and creating breathing problems for people who are exposed. However, the improvements made coal plants more efficient and reduced their greenhouse gas emissions, according to project documents.
The Clean Air Fund's report estimated the World Bank provided $2.7 billion in “fossil fuel prolonging finance” between 2018 and 2022. During that time, the bank also loaned about 32 times the amount for renewables as they did for non-renewables in India, including $120 million for rooftop solar.
"Renewable energy support is always our first choice as we work to provide access to electricity to the nearly 700 million people who still cannot power their homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses," a World Bank spokesperson said in a statement.
The bank's policies still “selectively support natural gas as a transition fuel” if its research shows the project is low risk to the climate, the spokesperson said. The bank's recent policies require rigorous vetting for every project to make sure its investments reduce climate impacts.
The World Bank delivered $42.6 billion in climate finance in its most recent fiscal year, a 10% increase from the year before. And at the most recent COP, the bank promised nearly half of its lending will soon go toward climate finance.
In Vietnam, about half of power generation comes from fossil fuels, primarily coal power. The Asian Development Bank loaned about $900 million on coal in Vietnam, with their spending on the fossil fuel in the country ending in 2017. The bank's updated climate policies “will not support coal mining, processing, storage, and transportation, nor any new coal-fired power generation,” the bank said in a statement. The bank put $9.8 billion toward climate finance in 2023, and aims to finance $100 billion in climate-friendly projects between 2019 and 2030.
The country’s biggest growth area for energy is in wind. The Global Energy Monitor ranks Vietnam seventh in the world in planned wind power. And the Asian Development Bank committed about $60 million in loans toward wind energy in Vietnam between 2021 and 2022.
The banks have made broad commitments in recent years to align with the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement. But those promises leave pathways open to continue funding fossil fuels, said Bronwen Tucker, global public finance co-manager at Oil Change International.
According to the green group's monitoring of the banks' commitments, all nine of the major banks tracked can fund gas projects in at least some cases. Rich countries should step in and fill the trillions of dollars in need for climate action with donations to less developed countries “to avoid climate breakdown and save lives,” Tucker said.
“The MDBs can't be climate bankers if they are still fossil bankers," she said. “Relying on banks that are locking in fossil fuels and the worst-ever debt crisis is not working.”
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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