U.S. President Joe Biden has left Washington for a global climate meeting with a giant domestic investment in tow — and likely to face questions about how far the U.S. will go to pull other large greenhouse gas emitters along.

His attendance Friday at the U.N. climate conference, known as COP27, in the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, is the first stop on an around-the-world trip that will also take him to a meeting of Southeast Asian leaders in Cambodia and a Group of 20 summit meeting for leaders of the world's largest economies in Bali, Indonesia.

Shortly after Hurricane Nicole made landfall early Thursday along the east coast of Florida, it was downgraded to a tropical storm but it was still battering a large area of the storm-weary state with strong winds, damaging storm surge and heavy rain.

The rare November hurricane prompted officials to shut down airports and theme parks and order evacuations in areas that included former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club.

The climate change generation is saying officials are talking too much, listening too little and acting even less. And they are fed up.

"Instead of talking about how to solve the climate crisis, they negotiate about how to continue polluting," said Mitzy Violeta, a 23-year old indigenous activist from Mexico. "Youth movements are realizing the solution isn't going to be in international gatherings," like the one taking place in Egypt.

Samantha Power, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), on Wednesday announced $8.5 million in funding for Lebanon that will support 22 new solar-powered water pumping projects in Lebanon. These projects, which will be completed over the next two years, will serve more than 150 towns and villages and benefit over half a million Lebanese citizens and refugees by providing reliable access to water and decreasing operating costs and dependence on fuel to those who desperately need it.

"USAID has supported 41 solar energy projects to date benefiting 460,000 residents in 70 Lebanese towns and villages. In addition to providing a much-needed source of electricity, solar-powered water pumping projects also refurbish the stations’ chlorination equipment. Pumping chlorinated water to towns is particularly critical as the country addresses an unprecedented cholera outbreak," the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.

Many people evacuated from vulnerable locations in the northwestern Bahamas as Tropical Storm Nicole approached Wednesday and residents of Florida braced for the storm, which could strengthen to a hurricane.

Nicole was expected to be the first storm to make landfall in the Bahamas since Hurricane Dorian, a devastating Category 5 storm that hit the archipelago in 2019, before hitting storm-weary Florida on Wednesday night and moving into Georgia on Thursday.

U.S. President Joe Biden is coming to international climate talks in Egypt this week with a message that historic American action to fight climate change won't shift into reverse, as happened twice before when Democrats lost power.

Current and former Biden top climate officials said the vast majority of the summer's incentive-laden $375 billion climate-and-health spending package — by far the biggest law passed by Congress to fight global warming — was crafted in such a way that will make it hard and unpalatable for future Republican Congresses or presidents to reverse it.

The United Arab Emirates and Egypt agreed Tuesday to develop one of the world's largest wind farms in a deal struck on the sidelines of the UN's COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh. 

Flamingos, herons and fish once filled a freshwater lagoon in southern Spain. Today, it's a fetid brown splotch. The whisper of wind in the grass is a sad substitute for the cacophony of migratory birds.

Biologist Carmen Díaz steps onto cracked mud. The lagoon in the heart of Spain's Doñana nature reserve is a puddle. The park called "the crown jewel of Spain" may be dying.

World leaders are making the case for tougher action to tackle global warming Tuesday, as this year's international climate talks in Egypt heard growing calls for fossil fuel companies to help pay for the damage they have helped cause to the planet.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres warned Monday that humanity was on "a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator," urging countries to "cooperate or perish."

It was a total loss — the type that is usually glossed over in big impersonal statistics like $40 billion in damage from this summer's Pakistan floods that put one-third of the nation underwater.

"We lost everything, our home and our possessions," said Taj Mai, a mother of seven who is four months pregnant and in a flood relief camp in Pakistan's Punjab province. "At least in a camp our children will get food and milk."