Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip continue to kill and injure hundreds of Palestinians each day, including many people seeking aid amid deepening starvation across the territory. Despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that there is “no starvation” in Gaza, a U.S. doctor who just returned from Gaza says the reality is undeniable. “It was evident to me, in my firsthand experience, that what I was seeing was malnourishment in my patients,” says Dr. Ambereen Sleemi, a urogynecologist and the executive director of the International Medical Response Foundation based in New York. “We also saw it in our hospital staff. … Everybody would sit and talk about how hungry they were.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

As the Trump administration ramps up its violent immigration raids around the country, increasingly targeting immigrants with no criminal record, and racially profiling Latinos to meet arrest quotas, immigrant communities in Baltimore and beyond are living in terror. In this urgent episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with two immigrant justice organizers in Baltimore—whose identities are being protected to ensure their safety—about the horrifying reality that immigrant families, particularly Latino families, are experiencing right now. “If you don’t look Latino, do you tell your child to carry around their passport or their birth certificate?… US citizens are being detained only because they look Latino, because they are Latino.”

Additional resources:

• Maanvi Singh, Will Craft, & Andrew Witherspoon, The Guardian, “How Trump has supercharged the immigration crackdown – in data”
• Jaisal Noor, Baltimore Beat, “Baltimore residents are mobilizing to protect their immigrant neighbors from ICE”
• Tara Lynch, CBS Baltimore, “Community demands release of Maryland pastor who was arrested by ICE”

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change Adaptation, Ralph Regenvanu, has welcomed the historic International Court of Justice (ICJ) climate ruling, calling it a “milestone in the fight for climate justice”.

The ICJ has delivered a landmark advisory opinion on states’ obligations under international law to act on climate change.

The ruling marks a major shift in the global push for climate justice.

• READ MORE: UN’s highest court finds countries can be held legally responsible for emissions
• ICJ climate crisis ruling: Will world’s top court back Pacific-led call to hold governments accountable?
• Do countries have a duty to prevent climate harm? The world’s highest court is about to answer this crucial question
• Other climate crisis reports

Vanuatu — one of the nations behind the campaign — has pledged to take the decision back to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to seek a resolution supporting its full implementation.

Climate Change Minister Regenvanu said in a statement: “We now have a common foundation based on the rule of law, releasing us from the limitations of individual nations’ political interests that have dominated climate action.

“This moment will drive stronger action and accountability to protect our planet and peoples.”

The ICJ confirmed that state responsibilities extend beyond voluntary commitments under the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement.

It ruled that customary international law also requires states to prevent environmental and transboundary harm, protect human rights, and cooperate to address climate change impacts.

Duties apply to all states
These duties apply to all states, whether or not they have ratified specific climate treaties.

Violations of these obligations carry legal consequences. The ICJ clarified that climate damage can be scientifically traced to specific polluter states whose actions or inaction cause harm.

As a result, those states could be required to stop harmful activities, regulate private sector emissions, end fossil fuel subsidies, and provide reparations to affected states and individuals.

“The implementation of this decision will set a new status quo and the structural change required to give our current and future generations hope for a healthy planet and sustainable future,” Minister Regenvanu added.

He said high-emitting nations, especially those with a history of emissions, must be held accountable.

Despite continued fossil fuel expansion and weakening global ambition — compounded by the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement — Regenvanu said the ICJ ruling was a powerful tool for campaigners, lawyers, and governments.

“Vanuatu is proud and honoured to have spearheaded this initiative,” he said.

‘Powerful testament’
“The number of states and civil society actors that have joined this cause is a powerful testament to the leadership of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and youth activists.”

The court’s decision follows a resolution adopted by consensus at the UNGA on 29 March 2023. That campaign was initiated by the Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change and backed by the Vanuatu government, calling for greater accountability from high-emitting countries.

The ruling will now be taken to the UNGA in September and is expected to be a central topic at COP30 in Brazil this November.

Vanuatu has committed to working with other nations to turn this legal outcome into coordinated action through diplomacy, policy, litigation, and international cooperation.<

“This is just the beginning,” Regenvanu said. “Success will depend on what happens next. We look forward to working with global partners to ensure this becomes a true turning point for climate justice.”

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

The Department of Labor announced “updates to penalty guidelines” to improve worker safety on Monday that it said will support small businesses and eliminate workplace hazards. The announcement follows the release of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s budget for the next fiscal year, which includes a plan for nearly 10,000 fewer workplace hazard inspections amid an 8 percent funding cut and a more than 12 percent reduction in staffing.

The new guidelines reduce penalties for failing to comply with worker health and safety standards at small businesses and those of any size with no history of various serious violations. It also extends the time frame for quickly abating a hazard by redefining “immediately,” which used to mean during the inspection or on the day that it occurred, but now can take up to 15 days. 

These penalty reductions, combined with a drastic cut in the already rare inspections, will surely lead to more worker illnesses, injuries and deaths, experts say.

Penalties from OSHA for endangering workers’ health and lives are already “embarrassingly low” compared to those for other federal violations like harming wildlife, Jordan Barab, deputy assistant secretary of labor for the agency during President Barack Obama’s two terms, wrote on his blog about workplace health and safety. 

“We used to always say that you would get fined more for harassing a burro on federal land than for a serious OSHA violation,” Barab told Inside Climate News.

Penalties have gradually increased over the years, in keeping with inflation. The maximum fine for a serious violation is now $16,550 and about $165,500 for a willful violation.

But most penalties are reduced based on the company’s size, history of compliance, rapid remediation of a hazard and good-faith efforts to correct a problem. 

OSHA has an incentive to reduce penalties to encourage the employer to fix the problem rather than contesting the violation, said Barab. 

If an employer contests the violation, by law they don’t have to fix anything until that challenge is resolved, he said. “And that can be many months or even years after the initial violation.”

Before the new penalty policy changes, small businesses with 10 or fewer employers were eligible for a fine reduction of up to 70 percent, to encourage companies to apply their limited resources to mitigating hazards. The new rule extends that fee reduction to businesses with up to 25 employees, which previously qualified for a 60 percent reduction. 

The new rule also expands the 20 percent fee reduction for a history of compliance to companies that had never been cited because they’d never been inspected.

Granting a fee reduction to an employer that could have been running an unsafe workplace for decades just because OSHA never managed to get there for an inspection is a “major change” in OSHA’s policies, Barab said.

OSHA spokesperson Kristen Knebel did not answer questions about how the agency plans to keep workers safe by reducing the number of inspections and relaxing penalties for employers who violate worker health and safety standards.

Dying to Make a Living

Barab, who tracks worker deaths on his blog, told Inside Climate News about a particularly gruesome accident that happened nearly 25 years ago, when the penalties were less than half the current amounts.

On a broiling July afternoon in 2001, a work crew repairing a catwalk at an oil refinery in Delaware released a spark above a large storage tank containing spent sulfuric acid and highly flammable hydrocarbons. The spark ignited vapors from the tank, which burst into flames and collapsed. 

The fire burned for about a half hour and released 100,000 gallons of sulfuric acid into the nearby Delaware River, killing thousands of fish and crabs, according to official estimates at the time.

The explosion also killed Jeffrey Davis, a 50-year-old father of five, and sent eight of his co-workers to the hospital with serious injuries. Davis fell into the sulfuric acid, Barab said. “All they found was his boots.”

The OSHA citation amounted to about $200,000 while EPA issued a $10 million fine for Clean Water Act violations and criminal negligence, citing a long history of problems.

That was more than 20 years ago, but the situation is basically the same today, Barab said. There’s not just a much higher penalty for killing wildlife than for killing a worker, he said, but it’s also higher for lying to a federal OSHA inspector than for killing a worker.

Nearly 5,300 workers died from fatal injuries in 2023—one worker every 99 minutes—according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics. Roughly 20 times that many die of occupational illnesses or diseases related to exposures that occurred years before their deaths, which are difficult to track.

Traumatic injuries sustained at work kill more than 100 workers, on average, every week. The week of July 7 alone, workers died in a fireworks warehouse explosion in Northern California, in a tanker explosion in Texas, on a highway crew in Michigan, while trimming trees in New York, of electrocution in an Alabama manufacturing plant, in vehicle accidents across the country, in shootings on the job in two states and in a cardiac event after responding to several calls while on firefighter duty in Missouri.

The changes made and planned by President Donald Trump’s OSHA will make conditions on the job even more hazardous, experts say. 

OSHA’s ability to protect workers has “greatly diminished” over the years, according to the latest Death on the Job report from the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of U.S. unions.

The agency was starved by budget cuts and hampered by staffing reductions and low penalty rates even before the Trump administration’s additional cuts, AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Rebecca Reindel said at a hearing on OSHA compliance assistance Wednesday. While the agency’s budget and staff have steadily shrunk since 1991, the nation’s overall employment has grown substantially, she said.

Every year the AFL-CIO calculates how long it would take OSHA to inspect each workplace in its jurisdiction one time based on its resources. “Since 1991 that number has gone from once every 84 years to once every 185 years,” Reindel said. 

With the president’s proposed budget and 30 percent inspection reductions, it would be once every 266 years, she said. “The worst on record.”

The administration says the policy changes were made to minimize the burden on small businesses and increase prompt hazard abatement. 

“By lowering penalties on small employers, we are supporting the entrepreneurs that drive our economy and giving them the tools they need to keep our workers safe and healthy on the job while keeping them accountable,” said Deputy Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling in a statement announcing the changes.

That’s not how Barab sees it. 

“They’re giving a free pass to employers who have never been inspected before,” Barab said. “And they’re making it much more likely that more employers will never be inspected by significantly cutting the number of inspections that OSHA is expected to conduct next year.”

By changing the criteria for penalty reductions, the Trump administration has removed the already weak deterrent for violating the nation’s worker safety and health laws, said Reindel. “This new policy just creates incentives for employers to take the low road and to not follow the law.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Liza Gross, Inside Climate News.

The decision came directly on the heels of a Supreme Court order that greenlit the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and restructure the federal government. 

With approximately 1,115 employees — just 7 percent of the EPA’s headcount at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term — the research office has played an outsized role in helping the agency fulfill its legal mandate to use the “best available science” in its mission to protect human health and the environment. ORD science has underpinned many of the EPA’s restrictions on contaminants in air, water, and soil, and formed the basis for regulations on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS or “forever chemicals,” in drinking water, deadly fine particulate matter in air, carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, and chemicals and metals like asbestos and lead.

“Without a research arm, it will be very difficult for EPA to issue new standards for air or water pollutants, toxic chemicals, pesticides, or other hazards,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. 

ORD, which works with states, local governments, and tribes in addition to its federal work, has six national research programs, each one focused on a different aspect of health and the environment. Research being undertaken at those centers included studying how to safeguard water systems from terrorist attacks, understanding the impacts of extreme weather on human health, and modeling the economic benefits of reducing air pollution.

The EPA said it is moving some of ORD staff into other parts of the EPA, including into its air, water, and chemical offices and a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions within EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s office. The agency said the moves will save taxpayers nearly $750 million, and produce an agency that closely resembles the shrunken version of the agency that existed under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. The aim, the agency said, is to “prioritize research and science more than ever before.” 

In an email to Grist, an agency spokesperson called media reports about the disbanding of ORD “biased” and denied that the changes will affect the quality of EPA science. “Friday’s announcement is not an elimination of science and research,” the agency said. 

But former EPA employees and environmental advocates say disbanding ORD will both weaken the EPA’s research capabilities and put its scientific independence at risk of political interference.

“Part of the reason why ORD is a separate office is to preserve scientific integrity,” said Chris Frey, an associate dean at North Carolina State University who worked in the office on and off from 1992 to 2024, most recently as its Assistant Administrator under former President Joe Biden. “From a societal perspective, it’s a huge win for the public that those decisions be based on evidence and not just opinions of stakeholders to have a vested interest in an outcome.” The EPA hasn’t said how many ORD scientists will be allowed to continue working at the agency. 

Already, the U.S. regulatory system gives chemical companies like 3M and DuPont a large degree of influence over how the chemicals they produce are controlled, a strategy that has been known to fail. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, the EPA has 90 days to assess a chemical’s risks before it hits the market. 

The EPA’s decision to dissolve ORD and integrate a portion of its scientists into the agency’s policymaking infrastructure stands to benefit chemical companies and industrial polluters by rubbing away the boundaries between science and politics, science advocates argue. Research conducted at ORD not only grounded new EPA regulations, it also provided the scientific basis for TSCA enforcement. 

“There’s lots of ways that ORD speaking truth about impacts of pollutants was inconvenient for regulated industry,” said Gretchen Goldman, president of the nonprofit science advocacy organization the Union of Concerned Scientists. “They’re probably celebrating over this.” 

Despite recent wins, industry trade and lobby groups are pushing for even more freedom. Last week, on the same day the EPA announced it was disbanding ORD and a day after the EPA separately exempted dozens of chemical factories and power plants from Biden-era air pollution and emissions rules, the American Chemistry Council’s President and CEO Chris Jahn floated the idea of making changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act in an interview with The Washington Examiner. 

“EPA Administrator Zeldin, the White House, Congress are all looking at this right now,” he said, “to potentially make some updates to TSCA to make it work more effectively for the long run.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This EPA research office safeguarded Americans’ health. Trump just eliminated it. on Jul 21, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

The tools for participatory democracy and FIGHTING city/state capital Hall have been degraded to nothing more than performative no kings day and indivisible concerts.

Just the Lincoln County, Oregon, where I live — Taking out our transportation because of unpaid fucking parking tickets?

And, of course, the outrage, man, the fucking marching on the streets, the burning Trump and Company in Effigy, nah, because collectively, the society, this fucking one I am a part of, that one, has been brainwashed, and/or lobotomized, and/or colonized, and/or habituated to pain and buggering, and/or Stockholm Syndromed into prostration, and/or amnesia fed, and/or dumb-downed, and/or miseducated, and/or divided and conquered.

We can’t even have stormwater mitigation in a coastal tourist-dependent community without shit in the water, on the fucking beaches.

And so the pigs are enlisted as enforcers against people wanting to make a fucking living by helping citizens move their stuff? This is the state of Inverted Totalitarianism in the little county of Lincoln:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Though the move was celebrated by Governor Gavin Newsom as he signed the bills into law, it has exposed tensions between the progressive priorities that motivate Democratic lawmakers. Housing affordability advocates have clashed with those promoting environmental justice, with the former boosting the bills and the latter remaining wary. More broadly, the move exposes divisions between those who want more tools to mitigate climate change and environmentalists who would rather maintain strict limits on what can be built and how.

The reforms target the California Environmental Quality Act, which then-governor Ronald Reagan signed more than 50 years ago. Known as CEQA, the legislation requires public agencies and decision-makers to evaluate the environmental impact of any project requiring government approval, and to publicize any effects and mitigate them if feasible.

Supporters say the law has prevented or altered scores of projects that would have been detrimental to the environment or Californians’ quality of life. But CEQA has also become the basis for a regular stream of formal complaints and lawsuits that pile substantial costs and delays onto projects that are ultimately found to have minimal harmful effects — sometimes killing them entirely. In one infamous instance, opponents of student housing near the University of California, Berkeley argued that the associated noise would constitute environmental pollution under CEQA, which led to a three-year legal battle that the university only won after it went to the state Supreme Court. Examples like this have led CEQA, which was once a national symbol of environmental protection, to become vilified as a cause of the state’s chronic housing shortage.

After this week’s reforms, most urban housing projects will now be exempt from the CEQA process. The new legislation also excepts many zoning changes from CEQA, as well as certain nonresidential projects including health clinics, childcare centers, and advanced manufacturing facilities, like semiconductor and nanotech plants, if they are sited in areas already zoned for industrial uses. (A related bill also freezes most updates to building efficiency and clean energy standards until 2031, angering climate advocates who otherwise support the push for denser housing.) Governor Newsom used a budgetary process to push the long-debated changes into law, with strong bipartisan support. 

Some activists welcomed the changes, saying they will lead to denser “infill” housing on vacant or underutilized urban land, slower growth in rents and home prices, and shorter commutes — with the welcome byproduct of fewer planet-warming emissions. 

“For those that view climate change as one of the key issues of our time, infill housing is a critical solution,” read one op-ed supporting the measures. Other environmentalists, however, lambasted the changes as environmentally destructive giveaways to developers. After Newsom signed the legislation, the Sierra Club California put out a statement calling the changes “half-baked” measures that “will have destructive consequences for environmental justice communities and endangered species across California.”

At a time when President Donald Trump’s assaults on climate policy and environmental protections have galvanized opposition from the left, what unfolded in California serves as a reminder that, even among Democrats, a divide remains on the extent to which regulation can help — or hurt — the planet. It’s the type of pickle that liberals across the country may increasingly face on issues ranging from zoning to permitting reform for renewable energy projects, which can face costly delays when they encounter procedural hurdles like CEQA. (Indeed, in California, CEQA has been an impediment to not just affordable housing but also solar farms and high-speed rail.)

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“How do we make sure the regulations we pass to save the planet don’t harm the planet?” asked Matt Lewis, director of communications for California YIMBY, a housing advocacy organization and proponent of the CEQA reforms. Transportation accounts for the largest portion of California’s carbon footprint, and Lewis argues that denser housing will be key to keeping people closer to their jobs. But, he said, people with a “not in my backyard” attitude have abused CEQA to slow down those beneficial projects. (His organization’s name is a play on this so-called NIMBY disposition, with YIMBY standing for “yes in my backyard.”)

“One of the leading causes of climate pollution is the way we permit or do not permit housing to be built in urban areas,” Lewis said, adding that more urban development could reduce pressure to build on unused land in more sensitive areas. He pointed to other legal backstops, like state clean water and air laws, that can accomplish the environmental protection goals often cited by supporters of the CEQA process. “CEQA isn’t actually the most powerful law to make sure that manufacturing facilities and other industrial facilities protect the environment,” he said.

In short, Lewis believes that any downsides of the new reforms pale in comparison to their benefits for both people and the planet. “Did we fix it perfectly this time? I’m willing to admit, no,” he said, adding that any shortcomings that environmentalists are concerned about could be repaired in future legislative sessions.

But many environmentalists contend that the downsides in the new legislation are too large.

“We put one foot forward but we take another step back,” said Miguel Miguel, director of Sierra Club California, noting his opposition to the nonresidential exemptions. He said that CEQA often acts as a first line of defense that allows community input on development projects. Without it, he argues, community voices will be marginalized. Miguel speaks from personal experience: CEQA helped save the mobile home park where he grew up from being replaced by more expensive apartments. 

Kim Delfino, an environmental attorney and consultant who followed the legislation, said that the scope of the reforms expanded from simple support for urban housing development to become “a potpourri of industry and developer desires.” She added that CEQA requires biological surveys that can be the first step to invoking other environmental protections.

“If you never look, you will never know if there are endangered species there,” she said. “We’ve decided to take a head-in-the-sand approach.”

This impasse between environmentalists and housing-focused advocates like Lewis is now decades-old and among the reasons that CEQA reforms — or rollbacks, depending on whom you ask — have taken so long to come about. As the fight has drawn out, skepticism has become entrenched. 

“Maybe I’m wrong,” California YIMBY’s Lewis said of his optimism that the latest changes can thread the needle between the state’s housing needs and environmental priorities. But, he added, he’d rather defer to elected lawmakers than environmentalists, who have long opposed his housing advocacy. “The environmental movement in California has been fundamentally dishonest about housing,” he charged.

The Sierra Club’s Miguel, for his part, hopes for more cooperation between the competing parties, lest the disagreements poison future legislative efforts. At the end of the day, all parties involved share the same broad goals, if with different levels of emphasis.

“We have to do everything and anything all at once,” he said, referring to climate and environmental policy. “That is fine art.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can weaker environmental rules help fight climate change? California just bet yes. on Jul 2, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

If approved by the House of Representatives and signed by Trump, the legislation will make the deepest cuts to America’s social safety net in decades and unravel the country’s only existing federal plan to diminish the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. 

“This sweeping legislation is the most anti-environmental bill of all time and will do extreme harm to our communities, our families, our climate, and our public lands,” the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group, said in a statement. 

The estimated cost of the GOP’s top policy priority — extending tax cuts from 2017 — is more than $4 trillion over 10 years. In order to offset those tax cuts, Senate Republicans sought to slash spending on green energy approved by Democrats during former president Joe Biden’s term, among other programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. The clean energy subsidies formed the heart of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the largest climate spending bill in American history.

The legislation now goes back to the House of Representatives, which passed a less expensive version of the megabill in May, before it goes to Trump’s desk for his signature. The House legislation would have sunsetted the IRA’s investment and production tax credits for wind and solar power within 60 days of the bill’s enactment, an aggressive timeline that renewable energy groups said would weaken their their industry and disincentivize new renewable projects. Fears over regulatory changes have already led to the cancellation of $15.5 billion in clean energy investments this year. 

The Senate legislation is only marginally less punitive to the clean energy industry. Wind and solar projects that either start construction before July 2026 or are placed in service by 2027 would be able to take full advantage of existing tax credits. Under the IRA, those credits were set to continue in some form until the country achieved substantial emissions reductions.

An earlier version of the Senate bill also included an extra “excise” tax on wind and solar, which an analysis by the American Clean Power Association showed would increase consumer energy prices up to 10 percent and cost clean energy businesses as much as $7 billion by 2036. That tax was removed from the legislation before the final vote on Tuesday. Conservative lawmakers disclaimed responsibility for the tax’s initial inclusion in the text. “I don’t know where it came from,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina, told NBC. 

The earlier House bill placed strict limits on using Chinese components in renewable energy projects. The Senate version eased that proposal to include fewer penalties for moderate use of China-linked hardware. But Senate Republicans sped up the House’s proposed phaseout for consumer tax credits for new and previously owned electric vehicles by two months, from the end of this year to September 30. Consumers previously had until 2032 to take advantage of them. 

The bill does not include the massive and controversial sell-off of public lands championed by Senator Mike Lee, from Utah, who withdrew that amendment after facing backlash in his state and across the country. 

The Senate-approved phaseout of tax credits for wind and solar comes at a time when demand for industrial power is skyrocketing in the U.S. as energy-hungry data centers and clean technology factories crop up across the country. “The intentional effort to undermine the fastest-growing sources of electric power will lead to increased energy bills, decreased grid reliability, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs,” the American Clean Power Association, a clean energy lobbying group, said in a statement. “We can’t afford to pick winners and losers when it comes to reliable, American-made energy.” 

The changes made by the Senate during a 24-hour period of intense debate could set up many more hours of debate in the lower congressional chamber. The House squeaked through its version of the bill by striking a balance between moderate Republicans from blue states like California and New York who wanted higher caps on state and local income tax deductions and fiscal hawks from deep-red states who wanted deeper spending cuts. The Senate’s version is about $800 billion more expensive, an increase that could tee up a fight over clean energy tax credit timelines and more. Chip Roy, Republican lawmaker from Texas who wants deeper cuts to green spending, already called it “a deal-killer of an already bad deal.”

Some Republican senators think that’s a good thing. 

Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska who sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune this April asking him to preserve the clean energy tax credits, was the last holdout in the Senate after Paul, Tillis, and Collins made it clear they were going to vote against the Senate bill. Despite the bill’s consequences for clean energy, Murkowski agreed to support the bill after obtaining a set of carveouts for her state on food stamp work requirements and healthcare cuts. 

After voting for the bill, Murkowski expressed misgivings about its contents. “My hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we’re not there yet,” she told reporters.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Senate Republicans just voted to dismantle America’s only climate plan on Jul 1, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

This year’s term, which began in October and ended last week, was a bit different. The justices issued a number of decisions related to climate and the environment, but none of them was a “blockbuster,” according to University of Vermont Law and Graduate School emeritus professor Pat Parenteau. 

Arguably, the decisions that will have the greatest potential consequences for climate and environmental policy came from cases that weren’t explicitly about the planet at all. 

Rather, they were decisions that legitimized the executive branch’s actions to fire personnel and block funding already appropriated by Congress. These actions may have far-reaching effects on federal agencies that work on climate and environmental issues, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, and the Department of Agriculture, which have already been affected by layoffs and funding cuts, as well as early retirement offers intended to get longtime staffers to voluntarily leave their posts.

“What’s being done is irredeemable,” Parenteau added. “The brain drain, the firing of people, the defunding — those are causing really, really long-term damage to the institutional capabilities of the federal government to implement and enforce environmental law.” 

Three of the court’s decisions help illustrate what has happened. 

Two of them — Trump v. Wilcox and Office of Personnel Management v. American Federation of Government Employees — which came earlier in the session, have made it possible for decisions by President Donald Trump to move forward while they are being litigated in lower courts, reversing orders from federal judges that had temporarily paused them. These decisions have effectively allowed firings without cause at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, and have stopped six federal agencies from bringing back probationary employees that the Trump administration had fired. 

Then last week, on the last day of its term, the Supreme Court issued a sweeping decision in Trump v. CASA that limits the power of the country’s more than 1,000 district court judges to issue nationwide injunctions against presidential orders. Those judges’ injunctions are now supposed to target only the plaintiffs in a given case. 

“Trump is the big winner in this decision,” Parenteau said. 

One of the the decision’s most immediate consequences is that it will allow Trump’s unconstitutional limits to birthright citizenship to go into effect in July. In theory, it also means that Trump could issue an executive order illegally rolling back some environmental policy, and district courts would have less power to stop it while a legal challenge makes its way through the courts. District court judges can still issue nationwide injunctions against rules from federal agencies, and they can issue nationwide injunctions against executive orders that are challenged by a large number of plaintiffs, as in a class action lawsuit. Circuit court judges’ injunction powers remain unchanged.

Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at UCLA Law, said the court’s decisions affecting funding and personnel have “giant implications.” They raise “huge questions about the balance between the executive branch and Congress, and the executive branch’s ability and authority to simply ignore what Congress has appropriated.”

Kirti Datla, director of strategic legal advocacy for the nonprofit Earthjustice, said this term’s Supreme Court decisions have been “enabling” the Trump administration in its attempts to shrink the size of the government and eliminate institutional expertise. “It’s hard to quantify, but it’s impossible to deny.”

Although the justices didn’t release any landmark environmental decisions this term, the court took up multiple “unusual cases” that showed its continued interest in environmental statutes and administrative actions, according to Datla. For example, in Ohio v. EPA the court decided not to temporarily block an EPA policy requiring power plants to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, and in Diamond Alternative Energy LLC v. EPA it decided to allow oil company plaintiffs to sue the EPA for having allowed California to set its own stricter auto emissions standards than the federal government’s.

The Ohio case was “just a regular decision,” Datla said — ”getting deep into the weeds of the record and ultimately disagreeing with what a lower court had done, which is not usually how the Supreme Court spends its time.” Neither case changed existing law or resulted in a big-picture pronouncement about how to apply or interpret the law. And the Diamond case may become irrelevant anyway, since the Senate recently voted — controversially — to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke California’s auto emissions waiver. 

Other notable decisions from the Supreme Court’s term included Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which limited the scope of environmental reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. The court essentially said that such reviews don’t have to look at upstream consequences of a given project — such as oil drilling and refining, for projects like railroads that are only directly associated with transporting these fuels — and that courts should defer to federal agencies when deciding what to include in environmental impact statements.

City and County of San Francisco v. EPA found that some of the EPA’s pollution permits under the Clean Water Act are unenforceable unless the EPA writes out specific steps that water management agencies should take to comply with them. But Datla said this was a “quite narrow case” whose national implications are unclear.

The justices have not yet added any explicitly climate- and environment-related cases to their docket for its next session. But Parenteau, the emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, said he’s nervous that the court will take up a challenge to Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc. That decision from 2000 said residents of South Carolina had legal standing to sue an industrial polluter, even without proving they had been harmed in a particular way. They just had to show that the pollution had impacted the “aesthetic and recreational values” of the river they liked to swim in. Overturning the case could make it more difficult for environmental advocates to file similar lawsuits. “The Laidlaw case has me very worried,” Parenteau said.

For Carlson, the UCLA Law professor, a longer-term worry is that the court’s conservative supermajority will eventually overturn the “endangerment finding,” a precedent set in 2009 saying that carbon dioxide and several other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated by the EPA. “It’s going to get challenged, and it will get challenged up to the Supreme Court,” Carlson said.

Overall, the outlook isn’t good. The executive branch and the Supreme Court “are exhibiting extraordinary hostility to actions on climate change at a time when the planet is burning,” she said. “It’s a pretty depressing story overall.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Supreme Court just ended its term. Here are the decisions that will affect climate policy. on Jul 1, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

But while this is the first real taste of extreme heat for Northeastern cities, parts of the country like Texas have been cooking since May. Alaska this month issued its first-ever heat advisory. Forecasters expect more above-average temperatures through the summer.

Summers are indeed getting hotter, a consequence of the warming planet. As the climate heats up, the frequency and intensity of heat waves is increasing and their timing is changing, arriving earlier in the season.

But the damage from extreme heat isn’t spread out evenly, and the more dangerous effects to people are not necessarily found in the hottest places. High temperatures often lead to more emergencies and hospital visits when they represent a big jump from a place’s average, which means ordinarily cooler regions tend to suffer the worst harm from heat. That includes places like Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, where temperatures rarely climb higher than 80 degrees Fahrenheit and most homes don’t have air-conditioning.

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Now researchers have found that rural areas may suffer more under extreme heat than previously thought. A report from Headwaters Economics and the Federation of American Scientists found that more than half of rural ZIP codes in the United States, which includes some 11.5 million Americans, have “high” heat vulnerability, a consequence not just of temperatures but unique risk factors that occur far outside of major cities.The thermometers thus do not tell the whole story about who is likely to suffer from extreme heat — nor do the images, which tend to come from sweltering cities. But understanding the factors that worsen the harm of rising temperatures could help save lives.

What makes the countryside so vulnerable to extreme heat

The discussion around the geography of extreme heat tends to focus on the urban heat island effect. The concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass of dense urban areas act as a sponge for the sun’s rays. Air pollution from cars, trucks, furnaces, and factories helps trap warmer temperatures over cities, and that hotter air, in turn, accelerates the formation of pollutants like ozone. On a hot summer day, a city center can be 25 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding regions. And with so many people squeezed into these metropolitan ovens, it adds up to a massive health burden from extreme heat.

But far outside of downtowns, where homes and buildings get farther and farther apart, rural regions face their own long-running challenges that exacerbate the dangers of extreme heat.

A major factor: the median age of the rural population is older than in cities. That matters, because on a physiological level, older adults struggle more to cope with heat than the young. People living in rural communities also have double the rates of chronic health conditions that enhance the damage from heat like high blood pressure and emphysema compared to people living in urban ZIP codes.

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Rural infrastructure is another vulnerability. While there may be more forests and farms in the country that can cool the air, the buildings there are often older, with less adequate insulation and cooling systems for this new era of severe heat. Manufactured and mobile homes, more common in rural areas, are particularly sensitive to heat. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, mobile homes make up 5 percent of the housing stock but account for 30 percent of indoor heat deaths.

Even if rural residents have air conditioners and fans, they tend to have lower incomes and thus devote a higher share of their spending for electricity, up to 40 percent more than city dwellers, which makes it less affordable for them to stay cool. That’s if they can get electricity at all: Rural areas are more vulnerable to outages due to older infrastructure and the long distances that power lines have to be routed, creating greater chances of problems like tree branches falling on lines. According to the US Census Bureau, 35.4 percent of households in rural areas experienced an outage over the course of a year, compared to 22.8 percent of households in urban areas.

Sparsely populated communities also have fewer public spaces, such as shopping malls and libraries, where people can pass a hot summer day. Rural economies also depend more on outdoor labor, and there are still no federal workplace heat regulations. Farmworkers, construction crews, and delivery drivers are especially vulnerable to hot weather, and an average of 40 workers die each year from extreme heat.

The health infrastructure is lacking as well. “There is a longstanding healthcare crisis in rural areas,” said Grace Wickerson, senior manager for climate and health at the Federation of American Scientists. There aren’t always nearby clinics and hospitals that can quickly treat heat emergencies. “To really take care of someone when they’re actually in full-on heat stroke, they need to be cooled down in a matter of minutes,” Wickerson said.

The Phoenix Fire Department has now started using ice immersion for heat stroke victims when transporting patients to hospitals to buy precious time. But rural emergency responders are less likely to have tools like this in their ambulances. “In Montana, which has not traditionally seen a lot of extreme heat, you would not have those tools on your truck and not have that awareness to do that cooling. When you see someone who has to also then travel miles to get care, that’s going to worsen their health related outcomes,” Wickerson said.

Emergency response times are generally much longer in rural areas, sometimes extending more than 25 minutes. People also have lower incomes and lower rates of insurance far from cities. Hospitals in rural areas are closing down as well. So when severe heat sets in, rural healthcare systems can get overwhelmed easily.Looking at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Census Bureau, Wickerson and her collaborators mapped out how all these underlying factors are converging with extreme heat. They found that 59 percent of urban ZIP codes and 54 percent of rural ZIP codes are highly vulnerable to extreme heat as defined by the CDC’s Heat and Health Index, meaning they are much more likely to see health problems from extreme heat. So while rural areas may be cooler, the people living there face heat dangers comparable to those in much hotter cities, and geographically, they cover a much wider expanse of the country.

So while temperatures out in the sticks may not climb to the same peaks they do in downtowns, urban heat islands are surrounded by an ocean of rural heat vulnerabilities.

There’s no easy path to cooling off

There are ways to reduce the dangers of scorching weather across vast swaths of the country, but they aren’t fast or cheap. They require big upgrades to infrastructure — more robust energy delivery, more shade and green spaces, better insulation, cool roofs, and more energy-efficient cooling.

Countering extreme heat also requires bigger structural investments to reverse the ongoing rural healthcare crisis where a doctor shortage, hospital closures, and longer emergency response times are converging. But the Republican budget proposal will do the opposite, cutting healthcare access for millions of Americans that would, in turn, lead to dozens of hospitals closing down, mainly in rural areas.

Protecting people from dangerous heat also demands policy changes. Most states don’t have any worker protections on the books for extreme heat. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is in the process of creating the first federal heat safety standard for employers, requiring them to give employees breaks, water, and shade when it gets hot. But it’s not clear how strong the final regulation will be given that the Trump administration has been working to weaken rules across the board.

Cities and local governments could also impose rules that prevent utilities from shutting off power to customers during heat waves, similar to regulations that limit heat shutoffs during the winter.

But there are limits to how much people can adapt to hotter temperatures. Even places with a long history of managing heat are seeing more deaths and hospitalizations as relentless temperatures continue to mount. That means curbing the ongoing warming trend has to be part of the solution as well, reducing greenhouse gas emissions to slow climate change.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline It’s not just the cities. Extreme heat is a growing threat to rural America. on Jun 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Umair Irfan, Vox.

Janine Jackson interviewed the Joint Center’s LaToya Parker about the Trump budget’s racial impacts for the June 20, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MarketWatch (3/7/25)

Janine Jackson: “Most Americans Can’t Afford Life Anymore” is the matter-of-fact headline over a story on Dow Jones MarketWatch. You might think that’s a “stop the presses” story, but apparently, for corporate news, it’s just one item among others these days.

The lived reality is, of course, not just a nightmare, but a crime, perpetrated by the most powerful and wealthy on the rest of us. As we marshal a response, it’s important to see the ways that we are not all suffering in the same ways, that anti-Black racism in this country’s decision-making is not a bug, but a feature, and not reducible to anything else. What’s more, efforts to reduce or dissolve racial inequities, to set them aside just for the moment, really just wind up erasing them.

So how do we shape a resistance to this massive transfer of wealth, while acknowledging that it takes intentionality for all of us to truly benefit?

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.” She joins us now by phone from Virginia. Welcome to CounterSpin, LaToya Parker.

LaToya Parker: Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: I just heard Tavis Smiley, with the relevant reference to Martin Luther King, saying: “Budgets are moral documents.” Budgets can harm or heal materially, and they also send a message about priorities: what matters, who matters. When you and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad looked at the Trump budget bill that the House passed, you wrote that, “racially, the impact is stark”—for Black people and for Black workers in particular. I know that it’s more than one thing, but tell us what you are looking to lift up for people that they might not see.

OtherWords (5/28/25)

LP: Sure. Thank you so much for raising that. This bill is more than numbers. It’s a moral document, like you mentioned, that reveals our nation’s priorities. What stands out is a reverse wealth transfer. The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.

JJ: You just said “historic pathways.” You can’t do economics without history. So wealth, home ownership—just static reporting doesn’t explain, really, that you can’t start people in a hole and then say, “Well, now the Earth is flat. So what’s wrong with you?” What are some of those programs that you’re talking about that would be impacted?

LP: For instance, nearly one-third of Black Americans rely on Medicaid. These cuts will limit access to vital care, including maternal health, elder care and mental health services.

Nearly 25% of Black households depend on SNAP, compared to under 8% of white households. SNAP cuts will hit Black families hardest, worsening food insecurities.

But in terms of federal workforce attacks, Black Americans are overrepresented in the public sector, 18.7% of the federal workforce, and over a third in the South. So massive agency cuts threaten thousands of stable, middle-class jobs, undermining one of the most successful civil rights victories in American history.

LaToya Parker: “The ultra-wealthy get billions in tax breaks, while Black families lose the very programs that have historically provided pathways to the middle class.”

So if I was to focus on the reverse wealth transfer, as we clearly lift up in the article, the House-passed reconciliation bill is a massive transfer of wealth from working families to the ultra-wealthy. It eliminates the estate tax, which currently only applies to estates worth more than $13.99 million per person, or nearly $28 million per couple. That’s just 1% of estates. So 99.9% of families, especially Black families, will never benefit from this.

Black families hold less than 5% of the US wealth, despite being over 13% of households. The median white household has 10 times the wealth of the median Black household. Repealing the estate tax subsidizes dynastic wealth for the majority white top 1%, and does nothing for the vast majority of Black families who are far less likely to inherit significant wealth.

JJ: I feel like that wealth disconnection, and I’ve spoken with Dedrick Asante-Muhammad about this in the past, there’s a misunderstanding or just an erasure of history in the conversation about wealth, and Why don’t Black families have wealth? Why can’t they just give their kids enough money to go to school? And it sounds like it’s about Black families not valuing savings or something. But of course, we have a history of white-supremacist discrimination in lending and loaning and home ownership, and in all kinds of things that lead us to this situation that we’re in today. And you can’t move forward without recognizing that.

LP: Absolutely. Absolutely.

JJ: I remember reading a story years ago that said, “Here’s the best workplaces for women.” And it was kind of like, “Well, if you hate discrimination, these companies are good.” Reporting, I think, can make it seem as though folks are just sitting around thinking, “Well, what job should I get? Where should I get a job?” As though we were just equally situated economic actors.

But that doesn’t look anything like life. We are not consumers of employment. Media could do a different job of helping people understand the way things work.

LP: Absolutely. And I think that’s why it’s so important that you’re raising this issue. In fact, we bring it up in our article, in terms of cuts to the federal workforce and benefits. So, for instance, to pay for these tax breaks to the wealthy, the bill slashes benefits for federal employees, and it guts civil service protections, saving just $5 billion a year in the bill that costs trillions, right?

So just thinking about that, Black employees make up, like I said before, 18.7% of the federal workforce, thanks to decades of civil rights progress and anti-discrimination law. Federal jobs have long provided higher wages, stronger benefits and greater job security for Black workers than much of the private sector.

And the DMV alone, the DC/Maryland/Virginia region, more than 450,000 federal workers are employed, with Black workers making up over a quarter in DC/Maryland/Virginia. In the South, well over a third of the federal workers in states like Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana are Black. In Georgia, it’s nearly 44%. So federal employment has been a cornerstone for Black middle-class advancement, helping families build generational wealth, send children to college and retire with dignity.

JJ: And so when we hear calls about, “Let’s thin out the federal government, because these are all bureaucrats who are making more money than they should,” it lands different when you understand that so many Black people found advancement, found opportunity through the federal government when they were being denied it at every other point. And it only came from explicit policies, anti-discriminatory policies, that opened up federal employment, that’s been so meaningful.

LP: Exactly. Exactly. Federal retirement benefits like the pensions and annuities are a rare source of guaranteed income. Nearly half of Black families have zero retirement savings, making these benefits critical to avoiding poverty in retirement. So these policies amount to a reverse wealth transfer, enriching wealthy heirs while undermining the public servants and systems that have historically offered a path forward for Black workers. Instead of gutting the benefits and eliminating the estate tax, we should invest in systems that have provided pathways to the middle class for Black workers, and expand these opportunities beyond government employment. Ultimately, this isn’t just about policy, it’s about what kind of nation we want to be, right? So that’s what it’s all about.

JJ: And I’ll just add to that with a final note. Of course, I’m a media critic, but I think lots of folks could understand why I reacted to this line from this MarketWatch piece that said, “Years of elevated prices have strained all but the wealthiest consumers, and low- and middle-income Americans say something needs to change.” Well, for me, I’m hearing that, and I’m like, “So it’s only low- and middle-income people, it’s only the people at the sharp end, who want anything to change.”

And, first of all, we’re supposed to see that as a fair fight, the vast majority of people against the wealthiest. But also, it makes it seem like such a zero-sum game, as though there isn’t any shared idea among a lot of people who want racial and economic equity in this country. It sells it to people as like, “Oh, well, we could make life livable for poor people or for Black people, but you, reader, are going to have to give something up.” It’s such a small, mean version of what I believe a lot of folks have in their hearts, in terms of a vision going forward in this country. And that’s just my gripe.

LP: I agree. These aren’t luxury programs. They’re lifelines across the board for all Americans. The working poor—if you like to call it that, some like to call it that—cutting them is just cruel, right? It’s economically destructive, it’s irresponsible. Fiscally, states would lose $1.1 trillion over 10 years, risking over a million jobs in healthcare and food industries alone. So I agree 100%.

JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note for now. We’ve been speaking with LaToya Parker, senior researcher at the Joint Center. They’re online at JointCenter.org, and you can find her piece, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, on the impact of the federal budget on Black workers at OtherWords.org. Thank you so much, LaToya Parker, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LP: Thank you again for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

The world-destabilizing horrors we see on the news today (and the many forms of resistance we don’t see) can easily make us feel overwhelmed and hopeless about the state of the world. But as Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back have seen firsthand organizing with poor and working-class communities around the US, “there’s amazing grassroots organizing led by poor and dispossessed people that’s happening right now… there’s kind of an awakening happening, but I think instead of looking to our political leaders or looking to some of the more established folks out there.” In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Theoharis and Sandweiss-Back about their new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty.
Guests:

• The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is an anti-poverty activist, pastor, theologian, and author. She is the executive director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Rev. Dr. Theoharis has been organizing in poor and low-income communities for the past thirty-plus years.
• Noam Sandweiss-Back is an organizer and a writer born in Jerusalem and raised in New Jersey. He has spent a decade organizing among the poor and dispossessed, including with the Kairos Center and the Poor People’s Campaign.

Credits:

• Producer: Rosette Sewali
• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

This marks the first time that lab-grown seafood (also known as “cultivated seafood” or “cell-cultured seafood”) is available for sale anywhere in the world, according to the Good Food Institute, a think tank that advocates for alternative proteins — substitutes for conventional meat made without relying on industrial animal agriculture. It’s a major milestone for the emerging cultivated protein industry, which aims to deliver real meat and seafood at scale without replicating the environmental harms of large-scale livestock operations. 

It’s also a sign that the Food and Drug Administration under the second Trump administration is allowing the regulatory process around lab-grown meat to continue without political interference, despite widespread Republican skepticism of the technology.

Wildtype, which manufactures sushi-grade salmon by cultivating fish cells under laboratory conditions, is the fourth cultivated protein company to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, to sell its product in the U.S. The company first reached out to the FDA to discuss the safety of its cultivated salmon during the first Trump administration in 2019, said co-founder and CEO Justin Kolbeck, adding that Wildtype underwent eight rounds of questioning from the agency over the next six years. Kolbeck described the experience as “a science-driven, data-driven process” and said the team of regulators working with Wildtype stayed largely the same across the three presidential terms.

“Did it feel like a long time in the lifespan of an early-stage startup? Yes,” said Kolbeck. “But it is completely appropriate, in my opinion. And the reason is that this is a new way to make food. And I think consumers have a right to feel like our food authorities turned over every stone that they can think of.”

In a letter to the company, the FDA stated that it had “no questions” about Wildtype’s conclusion that its cell-cultivated salmon is “as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods.” However, the agency did add that if Wildtype’s manufacturing processes change, it should contact the FDA again for further consultation. The FDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

The company is now partnering with Kann, a Haitian restaurant in Portland helmed by the James Beard Award-winning chef Gregory Gourdet. The restaurant began serving Wildtype’s salmon weekly on Thursdays this month; in July, the fish will be on the menu full-time. 

Kolbeck said that Kann sold out of all its cultivated salmon portions on the first night of service. “I don’t think people saw this as some crazy, wild new thing,” he said. Instead, it was “another option on the menu, which is ultimately what we’re working for. We want to provide consumers with another option for seafood.”

Consumers have an increasing number of choices for alternative proteins at grocery stores and restaurants — from plant-based burgers and chicken nuggets to faux meat made from fermented fungi. Like other alternative protein companies, cultivated protein brands often position their means of production as more sustainable than animal agriculture, the leading source of methane emissions in the U.S. But cultivated meat differs from other alternative proteins in that it’s not vegan; it is meat, just without the mass animal slaughter.

Even though federal regulators have approved only a handful of these products for sale, there has been growing political backlash to cultivated meat. 

Last month, three states with Republican-led legislatures enacted bills banning or temporarily banning the sale of such products: Nebraska, Montana, and Indiana. They join three other states with similar bans: Mississippi, where a law prohibiting cultivated meat sales unanimously passed in both the state House and Senate earlier this year; Alabama; and Florida. 

The governors of these states have framed these laws as necessary to protect consumers from “fake meat” (as the Nebraska governor’s office puts it) and ranchers from unfair competition in the marketplace. This posture casts doubt not just on the safety of cultivated foods, but also their legitimacy as meat. The Montana bill defines cultivated meat as “the concept of meat … rather than from a whole slaughtered animal.” 

However, recent outcry from ranchers suggests these state officials do not speak for all agricultural producers and consumers; in Nebraska, for example, ranchers have welcomed competition from cultivated protein companies. 

Madeleine Cohen, who heads the regulatory team at the Good Food Institute, argued these states are sacrificing a chance to create jobs and tax revenue. “There are a small number of states that have chosen to put political wins over consumer choice and over our general free market system,” said Cohen. “And they will now kind of be sitting on the sidelines, and they will miss out on economic opportunities.”

But Kolbeck and other proponents argue that biotechnology is needed to meet the rising demand for meat and seafood without depleting the world’s natural resources. Both overfishing — which happens when wild fish are harvested at a rate faster than they can reproduce — and warming temperatures pose risks to global food security. Research has shown that climate change has already impacted fish and shellfish populations around the world. Fish farms are an increasingly common alternative to wild fisheries, but these energy-intensive operations can pollute waterways.

Kolbeck framed cultivated salmon as a way to reduce the food system’s impact on aquatic ecosystems, protecting them for “future generations so that people can continue to fish sustainably.”

“How do we take a little bit of pressure off of wild fish stocks and keep these places beautiful?” he said, referring to areas like Bristol Bay in Alaska, where the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery is located. 

Suzi Gerber, head of the Association for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, or AMPS, a cultivated protein trade group, expressed optimism about the industry’s future. She noted that Trump recently released an executive order calling to boost U.S. seafood production.

“The timing is perfect,” said Gerber. “Wildtype and other seafood producing members of AMPS are very happy to answer this call and to ensure a bright future for American seafood alongside our agricultural colleagues in aquaculture, wild, and farmed fisheries.”

Eric Schulze, an independent consultant for cultivated meat companies and a former federal regulator, said that the FDA’s thumbs-up to Wildtype should put Americans’ mind at ease about cultivated meat. 

“The U.S. produces some of the safest food in the world — conventional and cultivated — and this clearance only elevates food safety and enhances consumer choice,” said Schulze. “Everyone wins.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Want to try lab-grown salmon? The US just approved it. on Jun 20, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

So when the nonprofit Earth Genome, which builds data-driven tools and resources for a more sustainable planet, approached Mehrabi to collaborate on developing his vision for a digital food supply map, he leapt at the chance. When their U.S. prototype proved successful, they went global.

The resulting app, which launched Thursday and was shared exclusively with Grist, identifies food flows through just about every major port, road, rail, and shipping lane across the world and traces goods to where they are ultimately consumed. The developers have crowned it a “digital twin of the global food system” and hope it will be used by policymakers and researchers working to better adapt to an increasingly fragile supply chain beleaguered by climate change. The model pinpoints critical global transportation chokepoints where disruptions, such as extreme weather, would have domino effects on food security and, in doing so, identifies opportunities for local and regional agricultural producers to gain a forward-thinking market foothold.

“Food is so important to us,” said Mehrabi. “There’s a need for building these systems, these digital food twins that can be used in decision-making contexts. The first step to doing that is building the data.”

The model is a “first of its kind,” according to Alla Semenova, an economist at St. Mary’s College of Maryland who was not involved with the development of the project. The tool makes the interconnected nature of the global food supply system clear and “underlines the importance of government policies aimed at supporting diversified and localized food production and distribution systems,” she said.

Food systems don’t operate independently. From seeds sprouting to life in fallow fields to the very moment a shopper buys a packaged good from a local vendor, the supply chain links producers, consumers, laborers, processors, regulators, analysts, drivers, and retailers together in a complex web. It’s a network that stretches beyond borders and bodies of water, connecting people and places across the globe. That complexity also makes our understanding of the ripple effect of climate disruptions across the planet’s food system inherently fragmented.

The map attempts to make sense of the tangled maze of food supply chains across the world. It provides a detailed view of the amount of the most common agricultural food groups — from grains and oils to dairy, eggs, and meat — exported outside states, districts, and municipalities. Other elements embedded into its data repository measure the total economic impact of the supply chain on people and food accessibility in a region, tallying the size of its agricultural sector, the average annual economic output per person, population size, and measures of human health, standard of living, and education. The tool also calculates the total mass, calories, and macronutrient content of all crop, aquatic, and livestock commodities flowing in and out of a place. It illustrates trade data, too, for nearly 3,800 regions across 240 countries. 

The model also visualizes critical choke points where disruptions, such as extreme weather, would have cascading effects on these commodity flows. In the data, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Turkish Straits, the Strait of Malacca, the Black Sea, and a relatively small number of ports, inland waterways and railway networks in the U.S. and Brazil all stand out as bottlenecks — key maritime passages and coastal and island choke points handling considerable portions of the world’s food trade.

It can even be proactively used to assess how a corresponding series of climate shocks on a trade route is measured in calories, protein, or critical micronutrients — all prime food insecurity benchmarks, said Mehrabi. Roughly 9 percent of the world’s supply chain routes — fewer than 350 — account for 80 percent of global caloric flows.

The U.S. is not insulated from the effects of extreme weather shocks on the food system. It imports about 128 megatonnes of food from roughly 154 countries around the world, which represents about a third of the nation’s food supply, according to an analysis by Better Planet Laboratory data scientist Ginni Braich. Some of its top imports, including bananas, coffee, olive oil, cocoa beans, and oranges, face the most imminent climate-related risks.

Similarly, if a series of simultaneous and destabilizing climate shocks hit one of the leading wheat exporters in Western Australia, India’s rice powerhouse in Uttar Pradesh, and Paraná, Brazil, which is among the planet’s biggest exporters of soybeans, it could disrupt food supplies and affect food energy requirements for tens of millions of people. These regions have already experienced severe extreme weather in recent years. In 2023, parts of the state of Western Australia confronted the lowest annual rainfall on record since 1900, above-average temperatures, and everything from severe heat waves to catastrophic fire danger conditions and significant blazes. Uttar Pradesh experienced extreme weather events on 167 days of 2024 — up from 119 days in the year before — while periods of heavy rainfall flooded swaths of Paraná and droughts dried up rivers throughout Brazil.

According to the open-source data the team released with the map, severe disruptions to food exports from these three regions could affect the calories that support more than a million people in the U.S. and Mexico and 55 million people in China for a year. The cascading effects would be most acutely felt by low-income households in these locations that are already struggling with food access.

Given the implications for food security, Mehrabi’s team has heard from several groups interested in understanding how the tool might be used to help governments prepare emergency food reserves. The initial U.S. prototype garnered interest from officials at the State Department and Department of Homeland Security during the Biden administration, including former Special Envoy for Global Food Security Cary Fowler.

Fowler told Grist that when he was at the State Department, his office had “a number of interactions” with the team behind the map while they were developing it. “I thought then and think now that this approach holds much promise in helping us understand and analyze large amounts of data and complex relationships,” said Fowler. “As these tools are improved, I can imagine that they will catalyze new insights and help with program and policy development. They could potentially provide us with an ‘early warning’ of where food system problems are set to erupt into crisis.”

Despite its clear benefits, the map does have some limitations. It doesn’t display what specific agricultural goods a place may import or where residents’ food comes from. (Though the developers say that can be mined from the data.) The map shows where the food is flowing based on estimates of the cheapest route to transport the food and satellite data on known routes — and not, say, the precise numbers of trucks or rail cars, or port capacities. And unlike its U.S.-geared predecessor, the tool does not have an embedded model of what different climate shocks and extreme weather events might do to food availability in an area.

“We’re not directly competing with a very specific use case for something like ‘How much do you stock a warehouse?’” said Mehrabi of the model’s limitations. “That’s not what we’re trying to do … our aim is from a humanitarian perspective.”

And that shows up in how the tool visualizes the brittleness of the current food system, according to Earth Genome’s creative technologist, Cameron Kruse. While their initial U.S. model showed that just 5.5 percent of the nation’s total counties produce half the country’s food, this global picture is even more concentrated, he said. Just 1.2 percent of the world’s countries are responsible for half of all domestic wheat exports, exposing critical vulnerabilities in the global food supply. It also sounds the alarm about the global effects of localized transport disruptions and provides a framework for future simulations that could predict the effects of climate shocks.

“As long as these models stay siloed and isolated, they continue growing siloed and isolated,” said Kruse. “If you hear about a drought in the news, or you hear about certain hurricanes impacting a region, go to that region in Food Twin, and see where that region is producing food. And then check out the news and see if global leaders are talking about it,” he said. “Use this as almost a gut-check of like, ‘Are we focusing on the right issues?’”

Editor’s note: Cary Fowler is a former Grist donor. Funders have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new app details where your food comes from — and just how fragile the global food system really is on Jun 19, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

It’s the kind of bureaucratic alert that rarely makes national headlines. But in a city where permafrost thaw buckles roads, homes lack air conditioning, and the high at this time of year is generally in the low 70s, the warning comes as a sign of rapidly shifting climate. Alaska is warming more than twice as fast as the global average. 

In Alaska, where hazardous cold is historically more of a concern, weather offices in Fairbanks — just 120 miles south of the Arctic circle as the raven flies — didn’t have the option of issuing heat advisories until the beginning of this month, when it was added to a list of possible public alerts. “It gives us a more direct way of communicating these kinds of hazards when they occur,” Santiago said.

The heat bearing down on Alaska isn’t entirely unprecedented, at least in meteorological terms. On the heels of a cold spring, a dome of high pressure, known as an upper-level ridge, has settled over the Interior, a fairly common pattern that traps warm air. In the state’s central valleys, that can spell high temperatures and dry conditions. Temperatures on Friday reached a high of 82 degrees Fahrenheit. An updated advisory on Sunday warned the hot conditions would last until Tuesday, with “temperatures up to 87F to 89F… Isolated areas up to 90F are possible, especially in the Yukon Flats.”

“People in [the] Lower 48 might think that’s nothing, but here those temps could feel like 110,” Santiago said.

With nearly 22 hours of sunlight approaching the solstice, daytime heat accumulates and lingers — not just outside, but indoors. Unlike the Lower 48, most homes in Alaska weren’t built to keep heat out, but to keep it in during months of subzero cold. The thick insulation this requires turns houses into ovens during extended periods of hot temperatures. In Europe, where infrastructure is similarly designed for cold climates, a brutal 2003 heat wave exposed the potential risks: It killed 35,000 people.

That’s part of why the state’s new heat advisory matters. It’s not just a weather bulletin. It’s a warning for a state where most people don’t have the coping mechanisms taken for granted elsewhere — shaded porches, central air, even knowing the signs of heatstroke.

The sudden temperature jump also poses its own challenges. “I’m originally from Texas,” Santiago said. “I’m so used to hot summers that in the 50s, I start putting on a jacket. Now living in Alaska, I’m wearing dresses at that temperature.” But it’s not just a matter of clothing: When your body adapts to higher temperatures, the volume of blood expands, allowing your heart to pump more efficiently and reducing heat stress. You begin sweating earlier, and produce more sweat per gland. But it generally takes one to two weeks of exposure to adapt, making sudden swings in temperature riskier. 

The office Santiago works for, like many National Weather Service offices, have recently lost staff under Trump administration cuts. More than 560 members were laid off across the country, reducing its capacity by about a third, and leaving many stations critically understaffed. As a result, the Fairbanks office that made the state’s first heat warning must now suspend operations overnight. “We’re working to the best of our ability with what we have,” Santiago said. The early start to summer heat comes after a winter with low snow levels and early melt, raising concerns about fire season. Layoffs have also affected firefighting staff, where both technical expertise and basic manpower are in question. Concerned about federal capacity, California Gov. Newsom launched a firefighter recruitment effort this week, but in Alaska, much of the wildland firefighting force is federal, raising the question of whether those like Santiago who must prepare for threats ahead will have the resources they need.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alaska just hit a climate milestone — its first-ever heat advisory on Jun 16, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lois Parshley.

Through his dehumanisation of Palestinians, his racist incitement and mindless conflation of “Israelis” and “Jews”, Morgan continues to add fuel to the fire of genocide.

I already had a very low opinion of Piers Morgan. But I was stunned by his display of racist ignorance last night while interviewing the Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, who showed great fortitude and dignity throughout.

Outrageously Morgan berates Alnaouq, whose entire family in Gaza was wiped out by Israel early on in its genocide, for insisting that there is a distinction – recognised by Palestinians, if not Israel – between Israelis and Jews.

Alnaouq points out that Palestinians have a problem, not with Jews, but with Israelis for violently occupying and colonising their land for many decades, and for putting Palestinians in Gaza under a brutal 17-year siege that has now been transformed into campaign of starvation.

The exchange has to be heard to be believed, starting at 59 minutes and 50 seconds.

“How can you say you have no problem with the Jews, but you have a problem with the Israelis, given that most Israelis are Jewish?” Morgan asks incredulously.

Alnaouq: “I am simply astonished that you can’t make the difference between the Jews and the Israelis, Piers.”

Morgan: “I am astonished you would try to draw a distinction.”

Morgan then insists that Hamas is a “death cult” determined to kill all Israelis because they are Jews.

Alnaouq: “It’s dangerous when you make this [out to be] a religious war.”

Morgan: “It’s dangerous when you try to pretend that they’re not after killing Jews…

“You don’t think Hamas target Jews because they are Jews.”

Alnaouq: “Of course, not.”

Morgan: “It’s nonsense.”

Alnaouq: “I am surprised that you are saying this, Piers. Genuinely, I am surprised.”

Morgan (again incredulous): “You’re surprised that I think Hamas target Jewish people.”

Alnaouq: “Of course.”

Morgan: “I find that staggering, Ahmed. It’s obviously a ridiculous thing to say.”

Alnaouq: “Why?”

Morgan: “Because obviously they target and murder as many Jewish people as they can get their hands on. And you say it’s because they are Israelis, not Jewish.”

Alnaouq: “Because they are occupiers, because they occupied our country.”

Morgan: “And because they are Jewish.”

Alnaouq: “No. Because they occupied our country, and colonised our country. Because they came to our country and kicked us out in 1948 and they killed thousands of Palestinians, including my grandparents.”

Morgan: “But you know why Israel was set up after World War Two. Because Jewish people were the victims of an appalling Holocaust by Hitler and the Nazis where 6 million of them were exterminated purely for their ethnicity and for being Jewish. So the Jewish people were given the state of Israel.”

Alnaouq: “My country.”

Morgan: “I understand that argument, but it wasn’t ‘Israelis’ given that land. It was the Jewish people.”

Alnaouq: “Who are you to give the Jewish people my country?”

You can learn much from this exchange about why the western political and media class have been so comfortable watching Israel commit a genocide against the Palestinians.

Journalists like Morgan are so immersed in their own confected narrative bubble, they have so bought into the dehumanisation of Palestinians, that Israel’s brutal, illegal occupation, colonisation and apartheid system is invisible to them – and therefore any resistance from Palestinians to their oppression by Israel can only be understood as an attack on Jews, as evidence of antisemitism.

Illustrating the trap faced by Palestinians, Alnaouq’s very attempts to make a clear distinction between “Israelis” and “Jews” is turned against him – becoming evidence for Morgan of his antisemitism.

Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

Morgan introduced Alnaouq by pointing out that the Palestinian journalist had written on X / Twitter last year, after his family in Gaza were killed: “I blame you, Piers Morgan, for their murder and the murder of all innocent people in Gaza.”

Morgan’s subsequent exchange with Alnaouq proved precisely his point. Through dehumanisation of Palestinians, through racist incitement, through mindless, antisemitic conflations of “Israeli” and “Jewish”, Morgan continues to add fuel to the fire, he continues to give succour to the genocide apologists 20 months into that genocide.

His sudden, extremely belated reversal over the past two weeks about whether Israel has “overstepped the rules of war” – conveniently coinciding with a similar reassessment in European capitals – should be welcomed. It may finally help to turn the tide on Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. But let us not forget that, had Morgan and others decided to turn that tide sooner, many thousands of Palestinian children might still be alive.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

To better understand how this heat island effect plays out in Laredo, the nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last summer and enlisted more than 100 volunteers to drive around the city taking temperature readings. Edgar Villaseñor, the center’s advocacy campaign manager, taught himself to organize all that data and used it to create the map below. (Red shows where it’s hottest in the afternoon and blue where it’s coolest — notice the disparities between neighborhoods.) 

But Villaseñor wanted a more professional map to make it easier to navigate. He also wanted to hire someone to take thermal pictures on the ground in the hottest neighborhoods so that the center could create an interactive website for Laredo’s residents. He reckoned the city council could use such a site to figure out where to install more shading for people waiting at bus stops, for instance. So he applied for a $10,000 grant through NOAA’s Center for Heat Resilient Communities, which was funded through the Biden administration’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The research center was ready to announce on May 5 that the Rio Grande nonprofit, along with 14 city governments, had been selected to work closely with its researchers to tailor plans for addressing urban heat, according to V. Kelly Turner, who co-led the Center for Heat Resilient Communities. But the day before the announcement, Turner received a notice from NOAA that it was defunding the center. Turner says it sent another termination of funding notice to a separate data-gathering group, the Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring, which was created with the same IRA funding. (When contacted for this story, a NOAA representative directed Grist to Turner for comment.) “The funding just stopped,” Villaseñor said. “I’m stuck with this valuable data that not a lot of people have.”

It’s the latest in a flurry of cuts across the federal government since President Donald Trump took office in January. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has canceled hundreds of grants meant to help communities curb pollution and make themselves more resilient, such as by updating wastewater systems. NOAA announced last month that it would axe a database that tracks billion-dollar disasters, which experts said will hobble communities’ ability to assess the risk of catastrophes. Major job cuts at NOAA also have hurricane scientists worried that coastal cities — especially along the Gulf Coast — won’t get accurate forecasts of storms headed their way.

The defunding of the Center for Heat Resilient Communities came as a surprise to the group’s own leaders, who said they will continue collaborating with cities on their own. Though its budget was just $2.25 million, they say that money could have gone a long way in helping not just the grantees, but communities anywhere in the U.S. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm and momentum for doing this kind of work, and we’re not going to just let that go,” said Turner, who’s also associate director of heat research at the Luskin Center for Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We’re going to continue to interface with [communities], it’s just going to be incredibly scaled down.”

The program would have been the first of its kind in the U.S. In an ideal scenario, the Center for Heat Resilient Communities could have developed a universal heat plan for every city in the country. The challenge, however, is not only that heat varies significantly from neighborhood to neighborhood — richer areas with more green spaces tend to be much cooler — but also that no two cities experience heat the same way. A sticky, humid 90 degrees in Miami, for example, will feel a whole lot worse than 90 in Phoenix. 

Turner and her colleagues at the research center had planned to work with a range of communities — coastal, rural, agricultural, tribal — for a year to craft action plans and discuss ways to construct green spaces, open more cooling centers for people to seek shelter, or outfit homes with better insulation and windows. “If the community was in a heavily vegetated, forested area, maybe urban forestry wouldn’t be the strategy that they’re interested in learning more about,” said Ladd Keith, director of the Heat Resilience Initiative at the University of Arizona, who co-led the center. “It might be something more about housing quality.”

The researchers had also planned to help communities determine who’s most at risk from rising heat, based on local economies and demographics. Rural economies, for example, have more agricultural workers exposed in shade-free fields, whereas office workers in urban areas find relief from air conditioning. Some cities have higher populations of elderly people, who need extra protection because their bodies don’t handle heat as well as those of younger folks. 

While each city has a unique approach to handling heat, the 15 communities chosen represented the many geographies and climates of the U.S., Keith said. With this collaboration, the researchers would have been able to piece together a publicly available guide that any other city could consult. “We would have also learned quite a lot from their participation,” Keith said. “We would have had a really robust roadmap that would be really applicable to all cities across the country.”

The funding from NOAA might be gone, but what remains is the expertise that these researchers can still provide to communities as independent scientists. “We don’t want to leave them completely hanging,” Turner said. “While we can’t do as in-depth and rigorous work with them, we still feel like we owe it to them to help with their heat resilience plans.”

Villaseñor, for his part, said his work won’t stop, even though that $10,000 grant would have gone a long way. He might rely on volunteers, for instance, to take those thermal images of the Lardeo’s hot spots. “I’m still trying to see what I can do without funding,” Villaseñor said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Funding to protect American cities from extreme heat just evaporated on Jun 4, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.

The case centered on a proposed 88-mile railway that would connect the oil fields of northeastern Utah to a national rail network that runs along the Colorado River and on to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

The waxy crude oil is currently transported by truck over narrow mountain passes. Project proponents said shipping the fossil fuel by rail — on as many as 10 trains daily — would be quicker and revitalize the local economy by quadrupling the Uinta Basin’s oil production.

In 2020, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition applied to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board for approval of the railroad’s construction. Under NEPA, the board was required to conduct an Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, to evaluate possible harms from the project and consider how they could be mitigated.

Environmental groups and Eagle County, Colorado, opposed the railway project. They cited the potential for derailments and spills into the Colorado River, the drinking water supply for 40 million people. Opponents were also concerned about increased air pollution in the Uinta Basin, where oil fields emit high levels of methane, a potent planet-warming greenhouse gas, as well as volatile organic compounds, some of which have been linked to increased risks of cancer. 

Gulf Coast communities would also be harmed by air pollution when the crude oil was refined, opponents argued. The increased oil production and associated emissions would also drive climate change and its disastrous global effects: hurricanes, floods, droughts, and extreme heat.

The Center for Biological Diversity, among the groups that had sued the Surface Transportation Board, said in a prepared statement that the ruling “relieves federal agencies of the obligation to review all foreseeable environmental harms and grants them more leeway to decide what potential environmental harms to analyze, despite what communities may think is important. It tells agencies that they can ignore certain foreseeable impacts just because they are too remote in time or space.”

In 2021, the board issued a 3,600-page EIS, which identified numerous “significant and adverse impacts that could occur as a result of the railroad line’s construction and operation — including disruptions to local wetlands, land use, and recreation,” according to court documents. 

The board nonetheless approved the railroad construction, concluding that the project’s transportation and economic benefits outweighed its environmental impacts.

Opponents, including EarthJustice and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. They argued the board’s environmental review excluded impacts of the project on people living near the oil fields, as well as Gulf Coast residents. 

The appellate court agreed. It ruled that the board’s EIS impermissibly limited the analysis of upstream and downstream projects.

“The appeals court had ruled that the federal agency that approved the railway failed in its obligations to consider the regional consequences of massively increased oil extraction on the Uinta Basin, the increased air pollution for the communities in Texas and Louisiana where the oil would be refined, and the global climate consequences,” said Dr. Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. 

The Seven County Coalition and the railroad company then appealed to the Supreme Court.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling will allow all these consequences to unfold without meaningful restraint,” Moench said. “This court has made a name for itself making rulings that mock science and common sense and fail to protect the common good. This unfortunate ruling fits that same pattern.”

NEPA has been federal law since 1970. It doesn’t prescribe specific environmental decisions, but it does establish a process to ensure federal agencies follow proper procedure in permitting. It can be a laborious, time-consuming process, but requires an agency to be thorough in assessing potential environmental impacts while giving the public adequate opportunity to comment.

NEPA doesn’t necessarily halt projects, but it can force project developers to pursue alternatives that protect environmentally sensitive areas and communities.

In his first term, President Donald Trump rolled back some aspects of NEPA, including weakening requirements to consider cumulative impacts of a project and the effects of climate change. Shortly after taking office this year, Trump signaled he plans to further streamline NEPA to expedite its approval process, especially for energy projects.

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Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by President Trump in his first term, wrote the opinion on behalf of four other members of the court. “NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents (who may not always be entirely motivated by concern for the environment) to try to stop or at least slow down new infrastructure and construction projects,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Courts should “afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness,” Kavanaugh wrote. “NEPA does not allow courts, under the guise of judicial review of agency compliance with NEPA, to delay or block agency projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand.”

Thursday’s 8-0 decision excluded Justice Neil Gorsuch, who recused himself because of his close connection to billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, who would economically benefit from the project.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor differed with Kavanaugh on his rationale for the ruling, but agreed on the outcome. She wrote that NEPA didn’t require the board to consider the effects of oil drilling and refining because those activities were outside its authority. “Even a foreseeable environmental effect is outside of NEPA’s scope if the agency could not lawfully decide to modify or reject the proposed action on account of it.”

Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Sotomayor in the concurrence.

The coalition was represented by Jay Johnson of Venable LLP, who said the ruling “restores much-needed balance to the federal environmental review process.” 

Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, the project’s public partner, said the decision affirms the years of work and collaboration that have gone into making the Uinta Basin Railway a reality. “It represents a turning point for rural Utah — bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options and opening new doors for investment and economic stability.”

Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said despite the court’s ruling, “we’ll keep fighting to make sure this railway is never built.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Supreme Court just blew up a major environmental law on Jun 3, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lisa Sorg, Inside Climate News.

Caving to pressure from Zionist groups, Toronto’s City Council just passed a controversial new bylaw that will severely limit Canadians’ right to peacefully protest. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Toronto-based, award-winning journalist Samira Mohyeddin about the origins and effects of Toronto’s “bubble zone” bylaw and how it will provide a template for other jurisdictions across North America to undermine political dissent.

Guest(s):

• Samira Mohyeddin is an award winning producer and broadcaster based in Toronto. For nearly a decade she was a producer and host at Canada’s National Broadcaster, CBC Radio. She is the founder of On The Line Media and the 2024 / 2025 journalism fellow at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto

Additional resources:

• Samira Mohyeddin, From the Desk, “Toronto passes Zionist bylaw”
• Adam Carter, CBC, “Toronto city council passes controversial ‘bubble zone’ protest bylaw”

Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner and it’s good to have you all with us. And we once again, go to Israel Palestine, to Palestine, Israel and talk about what’s going on and the horrendous war and slaughter taking place in Gaza at this moment. And we’re once again joined by Samira Mohyeddin, who hosts From the Desk, which is an incredible program and welcome. Good to have you with us.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Always a pleasure to speak with you, Marc.

Marc Steiner:

And Samira is an award-winning producer and broadcaster for nearly a decade. She was producer and host of Canada’s National Broadcaster, CPC Radio. She’s the founder of the online media and a 20 24, 20 25 Journalism Fellow at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. And Samir’s, always good to have you with us. And I really big sign. I mean, when we talked last, we focused on Palestine, Israel, but there’s something about this particular moment that is one of the worst in my 30, 40 years, 50 years. One of that’s been being involved in this from my time as a young Zionist to now. And one of the things I posited to a congregation, a synagogue a few weeks back was how can we be doing this after all that’s been done to us? And I just feel that we’re in a very dangerous moment worldwide because of all this. Well, let me let you jump in.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Yeah. The images that have been coming out, particularly in the last two weeks, children burned beyond recognition, sinned and charred bodies. We saw that young girl walking through a fiery inferno survival itself as a form of punishment. There’s 24,000 orphans now in Gaza, and it just keeps getting worse. And I’m sorry to have laughed at the start of the program, but when these images came out a couple of days ago of this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and you saw Palestinians lined up in these cages, I mean, it’s just horrendous what we’re seeing. And yet you have these governments, the US government, Canada, uk, Germany, just not acting. It just begs the question, where is the red line? Is there even a red line for Israel?

Marc Steiner:

That’s an important question. One of the things, I had a conversation the other day with some friends from Israel, one of whom lives in Canada, another one family who lives here in the states, old friends who were part of the world of maam, which was the Marx Zionist party back in the day in Israel, and the left in Israel itself has gone. They’re in Germany, they’re in Canada, they’re in the United States, they’re in Mexico, they’re in Argentina, they’re not there. And you’re seeing this kind of really brutal Neofascist government.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Well, they’re under attack. They’re under attack in Israel, right? I mean, they are being brutalized, they’re being imprisoned, they’re being silenced, they’re being censored. So a Netanyahu Smote Rich and Ben Gere talk about Israel being on a fight on eight different fronts. And one of those fronts is the enemy from within. And that enemy for them is anyone who is speaking out, anyone who’s even saying ceasefire is being seen as an enemy.

Marc Steiner:

So I’m just curious, in your analysis, you’ve been doing this for so long and it’s so deep in your consciousness and your work, as I alluded to earlier, what’s happening this moment in Gaza is different than I’ve seen in a long time. And I wonder where you think this is taking us.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I mean, there are a couple of things. I think one of them is that I don’t think people were paying attention when October 7th first happened, and then October 8th and ninth came, this government particularly, I’m speaking about the Netanyahu government, was very clear about what they intended to do, right? They said, we’re going to cut off all food, cut off all water, cut off all electricity, and get rid of the seed of Amalek so that there was this sort of invoking of biblical stories, biblical language. And to kill the seed of Amalek means to kill the women. And children just wipe out the entire group. And that’s what we’re seeing happen.

Norman Finkelstein refers to the mowing of the lawn that Israel says it does once in a while in Gaza. This is the entire burning of the entire fields happening. I was talking to a friend about this. There are no battlefields that you can really speak of in Gaza, the UN report that came out six months ago noted that more than 80% of people killed in Gaza were killed inside their homes. So what does that tell you? That means that people are just being targeted in the middle of the night while they’re sleeping. Entire families have been wiped off the registry. So yeah, you’re very right, mark, when you say that we’ve never seen anything like this. And I just feel like Israel is at a point where Netanyahu and its government, smote, rich, Ben Vere, they know that this is the moment that if they don’t wipe out Gaza now, they’ll never get another chance. And also, this is something else that I keep impressing upon people, and it also gives me a little bit of hope when I think about the history. So this isn’t the first time that Israel has wanted to get rid of Palestinians in Gaza, Israel first invaded Gaza back in 1956.

And in 1976, Israel wanted to remove all Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai and put them on basically reservations. They built all these homes and they wanted to move them in there. So I get a little bit of hope from that knowing that they’ve tried to do it before and it didn’t work. And I’m hoping that it won’t work this time either. But they have made the entire landscape uninhabitable. That’s the difference

Marc Steiner:

They have. I think that we’re seeing, I think to the last, as we started this conversation, I maybe even under not seeing the right number, but I was reading 56,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Those are the ones that are confirmed,

Marc Steiner:

Right?

Samira Mohyeddin:

And when I spoke with doctors, I realized what that means. That means that a doctor saw you in a hospital and that you died before their eyes. And so they mark that down. But you and I both know there are tens of thousands of people under the rubble that we actually have seen Israeli bulldozers going in and leveling entire towns. All of Rafa has been leveled. There are people under that rubble,

Marc Steiner:

Which you said earlier when you raise the name Amalek from the Old Testament, the heightened danger here for me is watching fundamentalists in Israel, religious fundamentalists, taking over the country, taking over the argument, taking over the language being used, and the imagery, which says a lot about the destruction of your enemy, whoever they are. That’s why I think this moment is so dangerous.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I mean, mark, just to pick up on what you’re saying, just look at the way the star of David has been used, the way it’s been desecrated, the way it’s been spray painted on people’s homes that have been destroyed and occupied in Gaza. It’s so dangerous for Judaism. Really, this Israeli government has ruined Judaism is causing antisemitism a very real scourge in our society. Not only have they hollowed out the definition of antisemitism, because anyone who’s criticizing Israel now is antisemitic, but they are also desecrating the very iconography of the religion for nefarious purposes.

Marc Steiner:

I agree. I think that when you look at how Judaism is being used at this moment, antisemitism has always been there. It lurks beneath the surface all the time. People have hated Jews forever. And what this does is unleash it. You can see it all across America. You can see it across Europe. You can see it across everywhere. I had this argument the other day where I said, no, I’m not saying that Jews are causing that. We’re causing antisemitism. I’m saying the actions of Israel are unleashing the forces of antisemitism and I that those contradictions are just abound. Let’s take it back home for a moment. I’m going to talk a bit about where you live in Canada,

Samira Mohyeddin:

Toronto. Yeah,

Marc Steiner:

Toronto. And many of our listeners here who don’t live in Canada, have no idea what this whole bubble thing’s about. So tell us exactly what’s happening in Toronto with quashing down any anti-ISIS Israeli protests at the moment.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Yeah, so we just recently, when I say we, I mean the Toronto City Council just passed what’s called a bubble zone bylaw. And in order to explain this to you, I need to take you back to March, 2024. So in March, 2024, there were real estate blitzes throughout North America, including in the us. One of them was in Teaneck, New Jersey. And so inside synagogues, they were selling stolen Palestinian land. These are settlements. So settlement properties were being sold in synagogues. And so inside those synagogues were real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and lawyers ready to sell you homes within illegally occupied.

Marc Steiner:

It happened here in Baltimore,

Samira Mohyeddin:

Palestine. Oh, it did? I didn’t know that. Everywhere.

Marc Steiner:

Everywhere.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Okay. Yeah. So here in Canada, we had one in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and I’m not sure if there was one in Vancouver. But anyways, as a result of this, people went and were protesting outside of that, of those synagogues. And as a result of this, a lot of the pro-Israeli organizations here in Toronto and in Canada, were calling for what they’re calling bubble zone bylaws, which means if you can classify your place as a vulnerable institution, which the city of Toronto has, so places of worship are considered vulnerable institutions, schools, recreational areas like art galleries and blah, blah, blah, these places can be excluded from people protesting in front of them. And so in March of 24, people had these real estate blitzers here in Toronto, people had gone and protested. And in December of 2024, after so much pressure being put on the Toronto City Council, the solicitor, so city solicitor was tasked with coming up for a plan for a bylaw, which would protect these institutions and create these areas. So that’s 3000 places where in Toronto, where you potentially cannot protest any

Marc Steiner:

3000 places, you can’t set up a pig line.

Samira Mohyeddin:

3000 places. Yes. So what ended up happening was that the city started public consultations about this bylaw. Now, they had three public consultations, and the report that came out of those public consultations was that 77% of the public were against this bylaw. They did not want it. However, they still went ahead with a vote in Toronto City Council. So last week they had a vote, 16 of the counselors passed, the bylaw nine were against it. So ultimately it passed. Now, what was interesting in the back and forth on this bylaw was that there were motions that were introduced. So 20 meters, 50 meters, 100 meters. How far away do you have to be from one of these institutions to be able to protest? And so initially the bylaw had said 20 meters, but they passed a motion so that now it’s 50 meters, you have to be 50 meters away from a synagogue or wherever else that something is going on that you want to protest about. And so I made this joke to my friend. I said, if a protest happens in the forest and no one is around to hear it, is that even a protest? The whole point of a protest is to be disruptive.

So this is what we’re seeing. We’re seeing this throughout North America, in particular, old laws being broken, new laws being enacted also that people who want to support Israel during this genocide can do so comfortably.

Marc Steiner:

I mean, people look at Canada in places like Toronto as being politically progressive. So what’s the political dynamic that allows us to happen in Toronto that allows us 16 people to vote for this line to oppose it on the city council? What is a dynamic politically in Canada that’s allowing this to happen?

Samira Mohyeddin:

I have to be honest, the Israeli lobby is very strong here. They put a lot of pressure on our lawmakers to act, and if they don’t, the accusations of antisemitism are sky high. And there is a real fear of being branded as antisemitic. And that’s really what it boils down to, because there is no reason why our lawmakers would sacrifice our charter of rights and freedoms, particularly the freedom of assembly, the freedom of expression, all of these freedoms in order to not allow people to protest in certain areas. Now, I will say for all the hoop law that this bylaw has caught, I was at a protest yesterday.

The former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations was being hosted here in Toronto by a pro-Israel organization inside one of Toronto’s landmarks. This is a public institution. And as you recall, GLA Adon, the former ambassador on his last day, said that he thinks the UN headquarters should be wiped off the face of the earth. So this is a man who was being hosted, and now people did go and protest and they didn’t care if there was a bylaw or no bylaw or so. People are really going to let bylaws be bylaws. I mean, no one’s going to care about this. They’re going to go protest. The only thing that this might do, and by the way, it’s cost taxpayers in this city, $2 million for this

Marc Steiner:

Bylaw. What do you mean cost $2 million?

Samira Mohyeddin:

It’s going to cost $2 million. The new bylaw officers, all the paperwork, all the bureaucracy that’s going to go into enforcing this thing, which is really unenforceable

Because what’s going to happen is it’s going to clog up our courts. People are going to bring so many charter rights infringements against this bylaw constitutional infringements. So it’s an absurd thing, but again, it’s an absurdity that goes to the times that we are living in right now, whereas it’s also a tragedy. There’s a lot of comedy involved in what you and I are seeing right now, mark, because we have the weight of history on our side. We’ve been here before, we’ve seen fascism before, and this is just another manifestation of it. And I really feel like people need to wake up and understand what’s happening around them.

Marc Steiner:

So I’m curious to pick up from the particular point about the growth of neo fascism all around us. We’re seeing in this country, in United States, Trump attacking Harvard and other universities threatening to take away their money, calling them Antisemites, which is just total bs. I mean, Harvard antisemitic. I mean, the percentage of Jewish kids at Harvard and the faculty. Give me a break. Anyway, so that’s happening and it’s also happening in Canada.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Yes.

Marc Steiner:

I’m curious about from your perspective, what is the political power and dynamic that’s pushing that it, it’s not just the Jewish community. I mean, it’s something beyond that. Something is happening here that’s pushing a very powerful Neofascist agenda across the globe.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I mean, it also has to do with money, right? It’s capitalism. Also, the University of Toronto, for instance, where I was a journalism fellow this year at the Women and Gender Studies Institute, you are seeing our professors at the University of Toronto being persecuted also, they’re being brought in to speak to the vice provost, the dean, et cetera, for things for, for social media posts, for literally just saying ceasefire or asking why their institutions aren’t divesting from Israeli genocide, asking why their pensions are going towards arms manufacturers. I mean, these are the basic things that people are being persecuted for, that they’re having their livelihoods put on the line. This is what we’re seeing. It’s not just in the us. I mean, it’s not to the extent that you’re seeing it in the United States, but there’s a lot of professors that are under a lot of threat here throughout Canada.

Marc Steiner:

So what is resistance to that? What’s the political dynamic taking place in Canada, let’s say, since we’re talking about your country at this moment, that resists that and builds a movement to stop it?

Samira Mohyeddin:

I mean, I can tell you one of the things that was a big victory at the University of Toronto is that the Professors Pension Federation Union voted to divest from weapons manufacturers. This was a big two.

Marc Steiner:

This is across Canada?

Samira Mohyeddin:

No, this is the University of Toronto.

Marc Steiner:

Toronto, okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Samira Mohyeddin:

So the University of Toronto did this, and then the week after Toronto Metropolitan University did the same. So you’re seeing this happen, and another big thing that happened was that yesterday the Toronto District School Board finally recognized that anti Palestinian racism is a thing because they had been denying it for years. And there are teachers now who are pushing to have the nakba taught in the school system. Now, there is a lot of pushback on this from pro-Israeli groups here, but they are slowly trying to get this within the curriculum. And I always say, if history, if you are afraid of history or history is not your friend, there’s something going on there. So they are saying that some of the students would feel uncomfortable with teaching about Palestinian history. Who would feel uncomfortable about that?

Marc Steiner:

Right. It’s like saying in Canada, United States, no, we are not going to teach you about what happened to indigenous people in America. It might make you uncomfortable that your ancestors wiped out entire people. Right,

Samira Mohyeddin:

Exactly. I mean, when I went to school here in Canada in the eighties, we never learned about what this government and what this country did to the indigenous population. It’s only in the last, oh, I would say decade or so that students are wearing orange shirts, that there’s the truth and reconciliation that people are learning.

Marc Steiner:

What’s an orange shirt mean?

Samira Mohyeddin:

Oh, sorry. Orange shirt day is for the marking, the indigenous indigenous day here, and what happened to young people that were stolen from their parents and taken to residential schools, and we know what happened inside those schools. So that’s only been happening in the last decade. So that’s really what teachers now here are pushing for, but there is a real pushback on it.

Marc Steiner:

So taking a step back to where we are with Israel Palestine and what’s happening, and we’re watching what’s happening in Gaza, I think that this is a very pivotal moment. It’s a piece I’m working on now that says it’s not since 1948 that the power of this moment, and we are in a very dangerous place. I think you’re seeing antisemitism rise up. You’re seeing Israel just mass murdering Palestinian children and families all across Kaza, more land being taken in what’s called the West Bank and New Israeli and the right winging just taking power there and across the globe. So I’m curious, you are in the midst of this all the time. You speak about this, you fight about it, you’re on the front line, and I’m curious where you think this takes the organizing and fight against both what’s happening in Israel at this moment with Palestinians and the larger question of the rise of this kind of neofascist movement and how you stop it.

Samira Mohyeddin:

One of the things I’ve noticed, and I’m sure you have also, is that within the last two weeks, there seems to be a bit of a shift, particularly in mainstream media. You’re seeing journalists start to do their jobs, which means when an IDF spokesperson comes on the air and says, there are no starving people in Gaza, there are no starving Palestinians. In Gaza, you’re seeing journalists actually say, well, wait a minute. We just saw this 9-year-old die. I saw the bodies. I’ve seen the bones. So there’s a lot of that happening right now. There’s a bit of a turn happening. Everyone is starting to do their jobs, what they’re supposed to do. There are also backtracks from institutions, writers, artists, people who did not feel comfortable speaking out a year ago are starting to speak out now. And I have to say to all those people, bless you. Try and encourage others to do it. I really think that having the courage to speak out right now is contagious. And so come out, come out wherever you are. That to me is the first thing. It’s not too late. Remember, the screenshots are not going to be kind. This stuff wasn’t around during apartheid South Africa. We know who spoke out

Now and who didn’t, and so it’s never too late to do that. The other thing that I’m seeing is that there are some murmurings within even governments like Germany’s saying, maybe our full support for Israel isn’t such a great thing. I mean, Canada, the UK and France put out a statement last week saying they might be moving towards sanctions or an arms embargo if Israel doesn’t curb its military activities. We didn’t see statements like this last year. So there is some movement happening, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough. And I really see Israel’s spiraling right now. I mean, there are a lot of people within Israel right now protesting on the streets too. Let’s not discount these people in Israel who are getting arrested. And I’m speaking about Israelis, Jewish Israelis,

Marc Steiner:

Right? Yes, right.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Who are being arrested. All of these people, they are on the streets and they’re calling it what it is. It’s a genocide. And that takes a lot of guts, and I think we need to encourage those people. Also,

Marc Steiner:

There’s stuff going on inside of Israel now among Jews and others, but among Jews in Israel at this moment who were protesting, it reminds me of what they’re facing, the danger they’re facing physically for saying, no, reminds me a great deal of what I experienced as a civil rights worker in the South. The absolute fear that you’re going to die from standing up to say, we have to end segregation. The same thing is happening, and I think it’s not being reported or talked about enough, which I’m going to try to do much more of, is getting those Jewish voices on from Israel, talking about why they’re standing up, and actually the huge numbers of people who are saying no. That’s really kind of an undercover story. I think.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I agree with you. I think we need to highlight the Jewish voices in particular who go to places like Mata and provide, put their bodies on the line that get in between these settlers, these rab settlers that are completely unhinged and have the support of the army at every turn. They’re putting their bodies on the line. There was actually a woman here in Canada, Anna Lipman, who just returned last week. She was doing what’s called protective presence within the occupied West Bank. She was there for months, has been arrested numerous times by the Israeli army. So I think it’s important to highlight those people also.

Marc Steiner:

So just as we wrap up, I’m going to come back to Canada here at the Bubble Law and talk a bit more about, so we can conclude with that, where this is going, who’s standing up to it, and where do you think what effect this is going to have?

Samira Mohyeddin:

The thing is that Toronto was one of the last areas to invoke this bubble legislation. So there was a suburb called Vaughn, which had it first. Then we have another sort of area called Brampton, which had it also, what was really interesting during the debates around this bubble legislation was that the counselors, the city counselors that were for it, were making comparisons to abortion clinics. So Canada had enacted bubble legislation for women’s reproductive health clinics so that women who were going in to have abortions wouldn’t need to look at fetuses torn up and all that stuff. And doctors who were performing these surgeries wouldn’t have people surround their homes and all this stuff. And so I think it’s a very churlish comparison because one act is against domestic and international law, the sale of occupied Palestinian lands. The other is about women’s reproductive health. But they sort of jumped on this and said, we’ve had bubble legislation before.

We need to have it for this. Now, there was a one particular counselor, her name was Diana Sacks, who was the only one that spoke the truth. Because what is really interesting about this mark is that no one ever talks about the root causes of why we even had this legislation come about. We had this legislation come about because people were selling stolen Palestinian land inside synagogues. People weren’t ever protesting in front of synagogues willy-nilly. There was no reason to. But when you make your synagogue into a place of crime, well then people are going to protest in front of it. So that is the real problem that I have, that the root causes are never talked about. But I really firmly believe that this bylaw is not going to stop anyone from protesting. It really won’t.

Marc Steiner:

So you’ll be out there.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I’ll be out there covering it. I mean, this was the 85th protest held in Toronto since October 8th.

Marc Steiner:

Around is Israel Palestine, you mean around boron? Gaza,

Samira Mohyeddin:

Yes. Toronto has had more protests than any other city in the whole of North America.

Marc Steiner:

Interesting.

Samira Mohyeddin:

And it really is, in a lot of ways, I think people need to pay more attention to this city. It is ground zero for what is going on in Israel Palestine.

Marc Steiner:

So what we’re going to do is pay more attention to you. So we can talk more about this since it’s ground zero and you’re in ground zero, so there’s so much more to talk about. But we’re going to link to your broadcast where you really, so people can hear what you have to say and what you’re saying. It’s called From the Desk, Samira Mohyeddin. It’s just an amazing, great program, very animated, very deep. You’ll enjoy it. And Samira, I want to thank you once again for joining us. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you despite the heaviness of what we have to face in our conversations. So we’ll keep up the fight and we’ll stay in touch.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Thank you so much, mark. It’s really great speaking with you all. Take care.

Marc Steiner:

And once again, I want to thank Samira Mohyeddin for joining us today. And we’ll be linking to her work so you can see it for yourself. It’s really intense and deeply intellectual and dives deep into subjects. Be a well worth a watch for you. And we’re going to bring you more updates from Samira, and we’re going to be talking to her again, as we said during the end of our conversation. And thanks to David Hebdon for running the program today, and Alina Nek for working her magic and editing and the titleless killer of our for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to our guests, mayor. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

A New Zealand-born Niuean educator says being recognised in the King’s Birthday honours list reflects the importance of connecting young tagata Niue in Aotearoa to their roots.

Mele Ikiua, who hails from the village of Hakupu Atua in Niue, has been named a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to vagahau Niue language and education.

She told RNZ Pacific the most significant achievement in her career to date had been the promotion of vagahau Niue in the NCEA system.

• READ MORE: King’s Birthday Honours 2025 — the full list of recipients

The change in 2023 enabled vagahau Niue learners to earn literacy credits in the subject, and receive recognition beyond “achieved” in the NCEA system. That, Ikiua said, was about continuing to increase learning opportunities for young Niue people in Aotearoa.

“Because if you look at it, the work that we do — and I say ‘we’ because there’s a lot of people other than myself — we’re here to try and maintain, and try and hold onto, our language because they say our language is very, very endangered.

“The bigger picture for young Niue learners who haven’t connected, or haven’t been able to learn about their vagahau or where they come from [is that] it’s a safe place for them to come and learn . . . There’s no judgement, and they learn the basic foundations before they can delve deeper.”

Her work and advocacy for Niuean culture and vagahau Niue has also extended beyond the formal education system.

Niue stage at Polyfest
Since 2014, Ikiua had been the co-ordinator of the Niue stage at Polyfest, a role she took up after being involved in the festival as a tutor. She also established Three Star Nation, a network which provides leadership, educational and cultural programmes for young people.

Last year, Ikiua also set up the Tokiofa Arts Academy, the world’s first Niue Performing Arts Academy. And in February this year, Three Star Nation held Hologa Niue — the first ever Niuean arts and culture festival in Auckland.

She said being recognised in the King’s Birthday honours list was a shared achievement.

“This award is not only mine. It belongs to the family. It belongs to the village. And my colleagues have been amazing too. It’s for us all.”

She is one of several Pasifika honoured in this weekend’s list.

Others include long-serving Auckland councillor and former National MP Anae Arthur Anae; Air Rarotonga chief executive officer and owner Ewan Francis Smith; Okesene Galo; Ngatepaeru Marsters and Viliami Teumohenga.

Cook Islander, Berry Rangi has been awarded a King’s Service Medal for services to the community, particularly Pacific peoples.

Lifted breast screening rates
She has been instrumental in lifting the coverage rates of breast and cervical screening for Pacific women in Hawke’s Bay.

“When you grow up in the islands, you’re not for yourself – you’re for everybody,” she said.

“You’re for the village, for your island.”

She said when she moved to Napier there were very few Pasifika in the city — there were more in Hastings, the nearby city to the south.

“I did things because I knew there was a need for our people, and I’d just go out and do it without having to be asked.”

Berry Rangi also co-founded Tiare Ahuriri, the Napier branch of the national Pacific women’s organisation, PACIFICA.

She has been a Meals on Wheels volunteer with the Red Cross in Napier since 1990 and has been recognised for her 34 years of service in this role.

Maintaining a heritage craft
She also contributes to maintaining the heritage craft of tivaevae (quilting) by delivering workshops to people of all ages and communities across Hawke’s Bay.

Another honours recipient is Uili Galo, who has been made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the Tokelau community.

Galo, of the Tokelau Aotearoa Leaders Council, said it is very gratifying to see his community’s efforts acknolwedged at the highest level.

“I’ve got a lot of people behind me, my elders that I need to acknowledge and thank . . .  my kainga,” he said.

“While the award has been given against my name, it’s them that have been doing all the hard work.”

He said his community came to Aotearoa in the 1970s.

“Right through they’ve been trying to capture their culture and who they are as a people. But obviously as new generations are born here, they assimilate into the pa’alangi world, and somehow lose a sense of who they are.

“A lot of our youth are not quite sure who they are. They know obviously the pa’alangi world they live in, but the challenge of them is to know their identity, that’s really important.”

Pasifika sports duo say recognition is for everyone
Two sporting recipients named as Members of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the King’s Birthday Honours say the honour is for all those who have worked with them.

Pauline-Jean Henrietta Luyten, who is of Tongan heritage, has been involved with rugby at different levels over the years, and is currently a co-chair of New Zealand Rugby’s Pacific Advisory Group.

Annie Burma Teina Tangata Esita Scoon, of Cook Islands heritage, has been involved with softball since she played the sport in school years ago.

While they have been “committed” to their sports loves, their contribution to the different Pasifika communities they serve is being recognised.

Luyten told RNZ Pacific she was humbled and shocked that people took the time to actually put a nomination through.

“You know, all the work we do, it’s in service of all of our communities and our families, and you don’t really look for recognition,” she said.

“The family, the community, everyone who have worked with me and encouraged me they all deserve this recognition.”

Luyten, who has links in Ha’apai, Tonga, said she has loved being involved in rugby, starting off as a junior player and went through the school competition.

Community and provincial rugby
After moving down to Timaru, she was involved with community and provincial rugby, before she got pulled into New Zealand Rugby Pacific Advisory Group.

Luyten made New Zealand rugby history as the first woman of Pacific Island descent to be appointed to a provincial union board in 2019.

She was a board member of the South Canterbury Rugby Football Union and played fullback at Timaru Girls’ High School back in 1997, when rugby competition was first introduced .

Her mother Ailine was one of the first Tongan women to take up residence in Timaru. That was back in the early 1970s.

As well as a law degree at Otago University Luyten completed a Bachelor of Science in 2005 and then went on to complete post-graduate studies in sports medicine in 2009.

She is also a founding member of the Tongan Society South Canterbury which was established in 2016.

Opportunities for Pasifika families
On her rugby involvement, she said the game provides opportunities for Pasifika families and she is happy to be contributing as an administrator.

“Where I know I can contribute has been in that non-playing space and sort of understanding the rugby system, because it’s so big, so complex and kind of challenging.”

Fighting the stereotypes that “Pasifika can’t be directors” has been a major one.

“Some people think there’s not enough of us out there. But for me, I’m like, nah we’ve got people,” she stated.

“We’ve got heaps of people all over the show that can actually step into these roles.

“They may be experienced in different sectors, like the health sector, social sector, financial, but maybe haven’t quite crossed hard enough into the rugby space. So I feel it’s my duty to to do everything I can to create those spaces for our kids, for the future.”

Call for two rugby votes
Earlier this month the group registered the New Zealand Pasifika Rugby Council, which moved a motion, with the support of some local unions, that Pasifika be given two votes within New Zealand Rugby.

“So this was an opportunity too for us to actually be fully embedded into the New Zealand Rugby system.

“But unfortunately, the magic number was 61.3 [percent] and we literally got 61, so it was 0.3 percent less voting, and that was disappointing.”

Luyten said she and the Pacific advisory team will keep working and fighting to get what they have set their mind on.

For Scoon, the acknowledgement was recognition of everyone else who are behind the scenes, doing the work.

She said the award was for the Pasifika people in her community in the Palmerston North area.

Voice is for ‘them’
“To me what stands out is that our Pasifika people will be recognized that they’ve had a voice out there,” she said.

“So, it’s for them really; it’s not me, it’s them. They get the recognition that’s due to them. I love my Pacific people down here.”

Scoon is a name well known among the Palmerston North Pasifika and softball communities.

The 78-year-old has played, officiated, coached and now administers the game of softball.

She was born in the Cook Islands and moved with her family to New Zealand in 1948. Her first involvement with softball was in school, as a nine-year-old in Auckland.

Then she helped her children as a coach.

“And then that sort of lead on to learning how to score the game, then coaching the game, yes, and then to just being an administrator of the game,” she said.

Passion for the game
“I’ve gone through softball – I’ve been the chief scorer at national tournaments, I’ve selected at tournaments, and it’s been good because I’d like to think that what I taught my children is a passion for the game, because a lot of them are still involved.”

A car accident years ago has left her wheelchair-bound.

She has also competed as at the Paraplegic Games where she said she proved that “although disabled, there were things that we could do if you just manipulate your body a wee bit and try and think it may not pan out as much as possible, but it does work”.

“All you need to do is just try get out there, but also encourage other people to come out.”

She has kept passing on her softball knowledge to school children.

In her community work, Scoon said she just keeps encouraging people to keep working on what they want to achieve and not to shy away from speaking their mind.

Setting a goal
“I told everybody that they set a goal and work on achieving that goal,” she said.

“And also encouraged alot of them to not be shy and don’t back off if you want something.”

She said one of the challenging experiences, in working with the Pasifika community, is the belief by some that they may not be good enough.

Her advice to many is to learn what they can and try to improve, so that they can get better in life.

“I wasn’t born like this,” she said, referring to her disability.

“You pick out what suits you but because our island people — we’re very shy people and we’re proud. We’re very proud people. Rather than make a fuss, we’d rather step back.

“They shouldn’t and they need to stand up and they want to be recognised.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The U.S. Senate undermined that authority on Thursday when it voted 51 to 44 to revoke a waiver the Environmental Protection Agency approved allowing the Golden State to implement and enforce a de facto ban on the sale of gasoline-powered cars by 2035. The Senate also rescinded waivers allowing California to set stricter emissions standards for new diesel trucks, and mandating the adoption of zero-emission trucks.

Environmental groups quickly decried the votes, saying that California’s standards are essential to protecting public health and achieving nationwide emissions reduction targets. The rules are seen as a sort of national benchmark since automakers don’t create separate product lines: one for California and another for everyone else. A provision in the Clean Air Act also allows other states to adopt the Golden State’s standards; 16 states and the District of Columbia have adopted many of the rules established by the California Air Resources Board.

“These standards are vital in protecting people from the vehicle pollution which causes asthma attacks and other serious health problems,” said Dan Lashof, a senior fellow at the nonprofit World Resources Institute, in a statement.

On a wonkier level, however, legal and policy experts objected to the way Senators rescinded California’s waiver: They used the 1996 Congressional Review Act, or CRA, a law enacted to allow Congress to overturn some federal actions with a simple majority, rather than the usual 60 votes. Two government watchdogs said the act did not apply to the state’s waiver.

“Republicans twisted the Senate’s own rules,” Joanna Slaney, vice president for political and government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. UCLA Law professor Ann Carlson warned in a blog post ahead of the vote that Congress “may be opening up a Pandora’s box it can’t close,” and that “there will be no limit on using the CRA to overturn all kinds of actions that the act doesn’t cover.”

At the heart of the controversy is whether the air pollution waiver that the EPA granted to California last year qualifies as a “rule” under the CRA. Both the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan oversight agency, and the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan appointee tasked with interpreting Congressional rules and procedures, issued advisory opinions earlier this year saying that it doesn’t. Republican Senator MIke Lee of Utah appeared to agree with this interpretation: A one-pager on a bill he proposed to repeal California’s waiver said that the exemptions “cannot be reviewed under the Congressional Review Act because the waiver granted by EPA is not a rule as that term is defined in the CRA.” 

Party leaders don’t usually contravene the parliamentarian’s guidance. If they do, they run the risk of their opponents doing the same when they are in power. “Republicans should tread carefully today,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, told NPR on Thursday. California Senator Alex Padilla said in a statement that “radical Republicans” had “gone nuclear on the Senate rulebook.”

“It won’t be long before Democrats are back in the driver’s seat again,” Padilla added. “When that happens, all bets will be off. Every agency action that Democrats don’t like — whether it’s a rule or not — will be fair game, from mining permits and fossil fuel projects to foreign affairs and tax policies.” 

Dan Farber, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, told Grist that the Senate’s capricious interpretation of the CRA means it could be used to rescind waivers from the Department of Health and Human Services allowing states to modify Medicaid requirements, or broadcasting licenses issued by the Federal Communications Commission. The act could also be used to revoke pollution permits that the EPA grants to states.

He clarified, however, that the Senate only nullified specific waivers in California affecting the sale of gasoline-powered cars. It did not repeal provisions in the Clean Air Act that allow the EPA to issue new waivers, as long as they’re not “substantially the same” as the rescinded ones. “I think that California still has the power to put forward, and EPA has the power to approve, different emissions regulations in the future,” Farber said. “Changing the deadlines by a few years could be enough.” 

California’s current standards require 35 percent of new cars sold within the state to be zero-emissions by 2026, ratcheting up to 100 percent of new sales by 2035. President Donald Trump revoked California’s waiver allowing such regulations in 2019, during his first term, but that move was challenged in court and the waiver was restored by the Biden administration.

Although automakers have previously backed California’s air pollution standards, industry groups cheered the vote on Thursday. John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group, said in a statement that the Senate deserved “enormous credit.” 

“The fact is these EV sales mandates were never achievable,” he said. “Automakers warned federal and state policymakers that reaching these EV sales targets would take a miracle, especially in the coming years when the mandates get exponentially tougher.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta objected to the Senate vote and vowed to challenge it in court. “Reducing emissions is essential to the prosperity, health, and well-being of California and its families,” he said in a statement. Governor Gavin Newsom said undoing his state’s air pollution rules risked “ced[ing] American car-industry dominance to China.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Senate just voted to block California’s gas car ban on May 22, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

Policymakers, elected officials, and experts in building, insurance, and real estate say that while the elimination of this essential resource feels politically motivated, its economic value was clear-cut, and often helped cities and companies assess risk with reliable, publicly accessible, and unbiased data.

NOAA created the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database in 1980 to track storms, floods, and other catastrophes that caused at least that much in damage. (NOAA did not respond to a request to comment for this story.) Although such events are rare, they account for more than 80 percent of the nation’s weather- and climate-related damages. In the 45 years since its launch, the database amassed 403 entries, totaling more than $3 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. 

By scrupulously recording this data, NOAA could spot trends, including steep increases in the cost and frequency of disasters from one year to the next and one decade to the next. Insurance companies, state and local governments, researchers, and the public used this information to track climate risk over time, project it into the future, and plan accordingly.

Much of this record-keeping occurred at the National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI. The agency and its trove of climate data happens to sit in Asheville, North Carolina. The city is just one of many in six states that saw the blunt end of Hurricane Helene, the $78.7 billion storm that walloped the southeast in September. Western North Carolina saw one of the highest disaster costs per million residents last year, according to the database’s own calculations.

Local and state authorities gather their own data on disaster costs, but it’s often piecemeal. Avril Pinder, the Buncombe County manager, said the county’s preliminary calculations peg the losses from Helene at something like $80 million, the picture is not as complete as the more comprehensive insights NOAA provides. “We would all do our own [cost estimates] but NOAA has that bigger picture,” Pinder said.

Local governments rely on consultants and engineers to track disaster costs, but officials in Asheville told Grist that resilience measures meant to protect residents from future disasters are highly dependent on federal projections. For instance, in 2021, the city used NOAA data to make the case for major reconstruction of the dam at North Fork Reservoir, which provides 70 percent of Buncombe County’s water. That work, completed in 2021, is believed to have kept the dam from failing during the flooding that followed Helene. “Losing that broader national benchmark will likely make it harder to illustrate the growing scale of disasters and the importance of proactive investments like this,” Jessica Hughes, a city of Asheville communications officer, said. 

This comes as the region’s assessment of its climate risk experiences a seismic shift. Many people believed they were largely immune to the climate crisis. “After Hurricane Helene, which occurred in an area that had once been hailed as a climate haven in western North Carolina, all the way up in the mountains, we now know that climate havens don’t really exist,” said Carly Fabian, a senior insurance policy advocate at consumer rights nonprofit Public Citizen.

According to Asheville realtor Hadley Cropp, people do deep research before deciding where to move. Helene called into question the idea of a “climate haven,” leading homebuyers to begin asking new questions and seeking detailed climate data before deciding whether and where to buy. “Helene has kind of shifted the landscape a little bit,” Cropp said. “Floodplains have been expanded and redesigned, and so people before Helene never even really asked about that kind of thing unless it was specifically in an obvious floodplain.”

Although insurance companies rely on several datasets to set rates, NOAA’s information was widely trusted, said Jason Tyson, spokesman for North Carolina’s Department of Insurance. “Because it’s coming from the government, it’s not encumbered by the rival databases that might have some sort of agenda,” he said. The industry is broadly understood to acknowledge climate change apolitically — because it’s costing them a lot of money, they simply have to understand it, predicting future risk in order to better guard against losses.

The database did not meticulously detail how climate change is fueling bigger and hotter wildfires, intensifying hurricanes, and exacerbating flooding. It provided economic quantification of what a given disaster cost, and how those costs mounted: In the 1980s, the U.S. experienced a little over three billion-dollar disasters a year. That tally skyrocketed to 23 annually between 2020 and 2024. “It is definitely not a plot of climate-change-increased disasters over time,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s a plot of increased disaster losses for a variety of reasons that includes climate change, but it’s certainly not limited to it, and maybe isn’t even the primary driver in many cases.”

Yes, without a doubt, climate change has been making disasters more expensive for victims, government, and insurers. But at the same time, more people have been settling where hurricanes make landfall along the Gulf Coast, and in the wildland-urban interfaces where housing developments abut forested areas. That’s putting more and more structures in harm’s way. The U.S. has also been getting richer, meaning larger homes filled with more stuff. 

Still, researchers used the database to help them understand how billion-dollar disasters are becoming more common, and what role climate change has to play in making hurricanes, heat waves, and floods worse. “It’s surprisingly difficult to get high-quality, reliable estimates of the economic damages associated with events, and the health effects associated with events,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central, a research and communication nonprofit. “So it’s a real loss there to the ability to start using that database to try to parse out the economic damages associated with climate change.”

NOAA was uniquely positioned to maintain such a database, as some of the information it ingested came from insurance companies. “They don’t necessarily want to disclose that to their competitors, but they were willing to disclose it to this nonpartisan science agency,” Swain said. “And so NOAA was able to get information to go into this database that it’s not clear anyone else is going to be able to have access to.” It’s unlikely, then, that anyone in the private sector will be able to build a comparable dataset. “This is to the dismay and even alarm of many people, for example, in the insurance industry,” Swain said, “which would be the industry best suited to potentially develop an alternative.” 

Losing the database will have ripple effects, Swain added, because there’s a very long list of entities that use this information to determine where to rebuild after a disaster, where to regrow crops, and where to insure: federal agencies, local governments, the construction industry, the real estate industry, agricultural interests, and insurers. “Really,” Swain said, “who doesn’t need this information in some form starts to become maybe an easier question to answer.”

With or without the database, billion-dollar disasters will keep happening, and almost certainly with more frequency as the planet warms. “Just because we stop reporting this information, doesn’t mean that the disasters are stopping and that the damages are ending,” Dahl said. “It really just leaves us more in the dark as a nation.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The government just killed an essential way to assess climate risk on May 14, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Katie Myers.

A new Auckland-based kava business has found itself at the heart of a cultural debate, with critics raising concerns about appropriation, authenticity, and the future of kava as a deeply rooted Pacific tradition.

Vibes Kava, co-founded by Charles Byram and Derek Hillen, operates out of New Leaf Kombucha taproom in Grey Lynn.

The pair launched the business earlier this year, promoting it as a space for connection and community.

• READ MORE: PHOTOESSAY: Visual peregrinations in the realm of kava — Pacific Journalism Review
• Other kava reports

Byram, a Kiwi-American of Samoan descent, returned to Aotearoa after growing up in the United States. Hillen, originally from Canada, moved to New Zealand 10 years ago.

Both say they discovered kava during the covid-19 pandemic and credit it with helping them shift away from alcohol.

“We wanted to create something that brings people together in a healthier way,” the pair said.

However, their vision has been met with growing criticism, with people saying the business lacks cultural depth, misrepresents tradition, and risks commodifying a sacred practice.

Context and different perspectives
Tensions escalated after Vibes Kava posted a promotional video on Instagram, describing their offering as “a modern take on a 3000-year-old tradition” and “a lifestyle shift, one shell at a time”.

On their website, Hillen is referred to as a “kava evangelist,” while videos feature Byram hosting casual kava circles and promoting fortnightly “kava socials.”

The kava they sell is bottled, with tag names referencing the effects of each different kava bottle — for example, “buzzy kava” and “chill kava”.

Their promotional content was later reposted on TikTok by a prominent Pacific influencer, prompting an influx of online input about the legitimacy of their business and the diversity of their kava circles.

The reposted video has since received more than 95,000 views, 1600 shares, and 11,000 interactions.

In the TikTok caption, the influencer questioned the ethical foundations of the business.

“I would like to know what type of ethics was put into the creation of this . . . who was consulted, and said it was okay to make a brand out of a tradition?”

Criticised the brand’s aesthetic
Speaking to RNZ Pacific anonymously, the influencer criticised the brand’s aesthetic and messaging, describing it as “exploitative”.

“Their website and Instagram portray trendy, wellness-style branding rather than a proud celebration of authentic Pacific customs or values,” they said.

“I feel like co-owner Charles appears to use his Samoan heritage as a buffer against the backlash he’s received.

“Not to discredit his identity in any way; he is Samoan, and seems like a proud Samoan too.

“However, that should be reflected consistently in their branding. What’s currently shown on their website and Instagram is a mix of Fijian kava practice served in a Samoan tanoa. That to me is confusing and dilutes cultural authenticity.”

Fiji academic Dr Apo Aporosa said much of the misunderstanding stems from a narrow perception of kava as simply being a beverage.

“Most people who think they are using kava are not,” Aporosa said.

‘Detached from culture’
“What they’re consuming may contain Piper methysticum, but it’s detached from the cultural framework that defines what kava actually is.”

Aporosa said it is important to recognise kava as both a substance and a practice — one that involves ceremony, structure, and values.

“It is used to nurture vā, the relational space between people, and is traditionally accompanied by specific customs: woven mats, the tanoa bowl, coconut shell cups (bilo or ipu), and a shared sense of respect and order.”

He said that the commodification of kava, through flavoured drink extracts and Western “wellness” branding, is concerning, and that it distorts the plant’s original purpose.

“When people repackage kava without understanding or respecting the culture it comes from, it becomes cultural appropriation,” he said.

He added that it is not about restricting access to kava — it is about protecting its cultural integrity and honouring the knowledge Pacific communities have preserved for upwards of 2000 years.

‘We can’t just gatekeep — we need to guide’
Dr Edmond Fehoko, is a renowned Tongan academic and senior lecturer at Otago University, garnered international attention for his research on the experiences and perceptions of New Zealand-born Tongan men who participate in faikava.

He said these situations are layered.

“I see the cultural appreciation side of things, and I see the cultural appropriation side of things,” Fehoko said.

“It is one of the few practices we hold dearly to our heart, and that is somewhat indigenous to our Pacific people — it can’t be found anywhere else.

“Hence, it holds a sacred place in our society. But, we as a peoples, have actually not done a good enough job to raise awareness of the practice to other societies, and now it’s a race issue, that only Pacific people have the rights to this — and I don’t think that is the case anymore.”

He explained that it is part of a broader dynamic around kava’s globalisation — and that for many people, both Pacific and non-Pacific, kava is an “interesting and exciting space, where all types of people, and all genders, come in and feel safe”.

“Yes, that is moving away from the cultural, customary way of things. But, we need to find new ways, and create new opportunities, to further disseminate our knowledge.

‘Not the same today’
“Our kava practice is not the same today as it was 10, 20 years ago. Kava practices have evolved significantly across generations.

“There are over 200 kava bars in the United States . . . kava is one of the few traditions that is uniquely Pacific. But our understanding of it has to evolve too. We can’t just gatekeep — we need to guide,” he said.

He added that the issue of kava being commercialised by non-Pacific people cannot necessarily be criticised.

“It’s two-fold, and quite contradictory,” he said, adding that the criticism against these ventures often overlooks the parallel ways in which Pacific communities are also reshaping and profiting from the tradition.

“We argue that non-Pacific people are profiting off our culture, but the truth is, many of us are too,” he said.

“A minority have extensive knowledge of kava . . . and if others want to appreciate our culture, let them take it further with us, instead of the backlash.

“If these lads are enjoying a good time and have the same vibe . . . the only difference is the colour of their skin, and the language they are using, which has become the norm in our kava practices as well.

“But here, we have an opportunity to educate people on the importance of our practice. Let’s raise awareness. Kava is a practice we can use as a vehicle, or medium, to navigate these spaces.”

‘Getting judged for the colour of my skin’
“I completely understand the points that have been brought up,” Byram said in response to the criticism.

Tearing up, he said that was one of the most difficult things to swallow was backlash fixated on his cultural identity.

“I felt like I was getting judged for the colour of my skin, and for not understanding who I was or what I was trying to accomplish. If my skin was a bit darker, I might have been given some more grace.

“I was raised in a Samoan household. My grandfather is Samoan . . . my mum is Samoan. It’s tough to be this person and then get hurt online, without having a conversation with me. Nobody took the time to ask those questions,” he said.

The pair also pushed back on claims they are focused on profit.

“We went there to learn, to dive into the culture. We went to a lot of kava bars, interviewed farmers, just to understand the origin of kava, how it works within a community, and then how best to engage with, and showcase it,” Byram said.

“People have criticised that we are profiting — we’re making no money at this point. All the money we make from this kava has gone back to the farmers in Vanuatu.”

Representing a minority
Hillen thinks those criticising them represent a minority.

“We have a lot of Pasifika customers that come here [and] they support us.

“They are ecstatic their culture is being promoted this way, and love what we are doing. The negative response from a minority part of the population was surprising to us.”

Critics had argued that the business showcased confusing blends of different cultural approaches.

Byram and Hillen said that it is up to other people to investigate and learn about the cultures, and that they are simply trying to acknowledge all of them.

Byram, however, added that the critics brought up some good points — and that this will be a catalyst for change within their business.

“Yesterday, we joined the Pacific Business Hub. We are [taking] steps to integrate more about the culture, community, and what we are trying to accomplish here.”

They also addressed their initial silence and comment moderation.

‘Cycle so self-perpetuating’
“I think the cycle was so self-perpetuating, so I was like . . . I need to make sure I respond with candor, concern, and active communication.

“So I deleted comments and put a pause on things, so we could have some space before the comments get out of hand.

“At the end of the day . . . this is about my connection with my culture and people more than anything, and I’m excited to grow from it. I’m learning, and I’m utilising this as a growth point. We’re just doing our best,” Byram said.

Hillen added: “You have to understand, this business is super new, so we’re still figuring out how best to do things, how to market and grow along with not only the community.

“What we really want to represent as people who care about, and believe in this.”

Byram said they want to acknowledge as many peoples as possible.

“We don’t want to create ceremony or steal anything from the culture. We really just want to celebrate it, and so again, we acknowledge the concern,” he added.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Israel is in a weak position and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremism knows no bounds. The only other way around an eventual regional war is the ousting of the Israeli prime minister.

US President Donald Trump has closed his line of communication with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to various reports citing officials.

This comes amid alleged growing pressure on Israel regarding Gaza and the abrupt halt to American operations against Ansarallah in Yemen. So, is this all an act or is the US finally pressuring Israel?

• READ MORE: Israeli protesters in Tel Aviv demand an end to war on Gaza
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

On May 1, news broke that President Donald Trump had suddenly ousted his national security advisor Mike Waltz. According to a Washington Post article on the issue, the ouster was in part a response to Waltz’s undermining of the President, for having engaged in intense coordination with Israeli PM Netanyahu regarding the issue of attacking Iran prior to the Israeli Premier’s visit to the Oval Office.

Some analysts, considering that Waltz has been pushing for a war on Iran, argued that his ouster was a signal that the Trump administration’s pro-diplomacy voices were pushing back against the hawks.

This shift also came at a time when Iran-US talks had stalled, largely thanks to a pressure campaign from the Israel Lobby, leading US think tanks and Israeli officials like Ron Dermer.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Trump publicly announced the end to a campaign designed to destroy/degrade Yemen’s Ansarallah-led government in Sana’a on May 6.

Israeli leadership shocked
According to Israeli media, citing government sources, the leadership in Tel Aviv was shocked by the move to end operations against Yemen, essentially leaving the Israelis to deal with Ansarallah alone.

After this, more information began to leak, originating from the Israeli Hebrew-language media, claiming that the Trump administration was demanding Israel reach an agreement for aid to be delivered to Gaza, in addition to signing a ceasefire agreement.

The other major claim is that President Trump has grown so frustrated with Netanyahu that he has cut communication with him directly.

Although neither side has officially clarified details on the reported rift between the two sides, a few days ago the Israeli prime minister released a social media video claiming that he would act alone to defend Israel.

On Friday morning, another update came in that American Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth would be cancelling his planned visit to Tel Aviv.

Can Trump and Netanyahu remake the Middle East?       Video: Palestine Chronicle

Is the US finally standing up to Israel?
In order to assess this issue correctly, we have to place all of the above-mentioned developments into their proper context.

The issue must also be prefaced on the fact that every member of the Trump government is pro-Israeli to the hilt and has received significant backing from the Israel Lobby.

Mike Waltz was indeed fired and according to leaked AIPAC audio revealed by The Grayzone, he was somewhat groomed for a role in government by the pro-Israel Lobby for a long time.

Another revelation regarding Waltz, aside from him allegedly coordinating with Netanyahu behind Trump’s back and adding journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a private Signal group chat, was that he was storing his chats on an Israeli-owned app.

Yet, Waltz was not booted out of the government like John Bolton was during Trump’s first term in office, he has instead been designated as UN ambassador to the United Nations.

The UN ambassador position was supposed to be handed to Elise Stefanik, a radically vocal supporter of Israel who helped lead the charge in cracking down on pro-Palestine free speech on university campuses. Stefanik’s nomination was withdrawn in order to maintain the Republican majority in the Congress.

If Trump was truly seeking to push back against the Israel Lobby’s push to collapse negotiations with Iran, then why did Trump signal around a week ago that new sanctions packages were on the way?

He announced on Friday that a third independent Chinese refiner would be hit with secondary sanctions for receiving Iranian oil.

Israeli demands in Trump’s rhetoric
The sanctions, on top of the fact that his negotiating team have continuously attempted to add conditions the the talks, viewed in Tehran as non-starters, indicates that precisely what pro-Israel think tanks like WINEP and FDD have been demanding is working its way into not only the negotiating team, but coming out in Trump’s own rhetoric.

There is certainly an argument to make here, that there is a significant split within the pro-Israel Lobby in the US, which is now working its way into the Trump administration, yet it is important to note that the Trump campaign itself was bankrolled by Zionist billionaires and tech moguls.

Miriam Adelson, Israel’s richest billionaire, was his largest donor. Adelson also happens to own Israel Hayom, the most widely distributed newspaper in Israel that has historically been pro-Netanyahu, it is now also reporting on the Trump-Netanyahu split and feeding into the speculations.

As for the US operations against Yemen, the US has used the attack on Ansarallah as the perfect excuse to move a large number of military assets to the region.

This has included air defence systems to the Gulf States and most importantly to Israel.

After claiming back in March to have already “decimated” Ansarallah, the Trump administration spent way in excess of US$1 billion dollars (more accurately over US$2 billion) and understood that the only way forward was a ground operation.

Meanwhile, the US has also moved military assets to the Mediterranean and is directly involved in intensive reconnaissance over Lebanese airspace, attempting to collect information on Hezbollah.

An Iran attack imminent?
While it is almost impossible to know whether the media theatrics regarding the reported Trump-Netanyahu split are entirely true, or if it is simply a good-cop bad-cop strategy, it appears that some kind of assault on Iran could be imminent.

Whether Benjamin Netanyahu is going to order an attack on Iran out of desperation or as part of a carefully choreographed plan, the US will certainly involve itself in any such assault on one level or another.

The Israeli prime minister has painted himself into a corner. In order to save his political coalition, he collapsed the Gaza ceasefire during March and managed to bring back his Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to his coalition.

This enabled him to successfully take on his own Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, in an ongoing purge of his opposition.

However, due to a lack of manpower and inability to launch any major ground operation against Gaza, without severely undermining Israeli security on other fronts, Netanyahu decided to adopt a strategy of starving the people of Gaza instead.

He now threatens a major ground offensive, yet it is hard to see what impact it would have beyond an accelerated mass murder of civilians.

The Israeli prime minister’s mistake was choosing the blocking of all aid into Gaza as the rightwing hill to die on, which has been deeply internalised by his extreme Religious Zionism coalition partners, who now threaten his government’s stability if any aid enters the besieged territory.

Netanyahu in a difficult position
This has put Netanyahu in a very difficult position, as the European Union, UK and US are all fearing the backlash that mass famine will bring and are now pushing Tel Aviv to allow in some aid.

Amidst this, Netanyahu made another commitment to the Druze community that he would intervene on their behalf in Syria.

While Syria’s leadership are signaling their intent to normalise ties and according to a recent report by Yedioth Ahronoth, participated in “direct” negotiations with Israel regarding “security issues”, there is no current threat from Damascus.

However, if tensions escalate in Syria with the Druze minority in the south, failure to fulfill pledges could cause major issues with Israeli Druze, who perform crucial roles in the Israeli military.

Internally, Israel is deeply divided, economically under great pressure and the overall instability could quickly translate to a larger range of issues.

Then we have the Lebanon front, where Hezbollah sits poised to pounce on an opportunity to land a blow in order to expel Israel from their country and avenge the killing of its Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah.

Trigger a ‘doomsday option’?
Meanwhile in Gaza, if Israel is going to try and starve everyone to death, this could easily trigger what can only be called the “doomsday option” from Hamas and other groups there. Nobody is about to sit around and watch their people starve to death.

As for Yemen’s Ansarallah, it is clear that there was no way without a massive ground offensive that the movement was going to stop firing missiles and drones at Israel.

What we have here is a situation in which Israel finds itself incapable of defeating any of its enemies, as all of them have now been radicalised due to the mass murder inflicted upon their populations.

In other words, Israel is not capable of victory on any front and needs a way out.

The leader of the opposition to Israel in the region is perceived to be Iran, as it is the most powerful, which is why a conflict with it is so desired. Yet, Tehran is incredibly powerful and the US is incapable of defeating it with conventional weapons, therefore, a full-scale war is the equivalent to committing regional suicide.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The prospect of a second liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal in his once-peaceful corner of southwest Louisiana is unsettling for Allaire, a retired oil and gas engineer whose house sits near Calcasieu Pass. 

“There’s the ongoing noise pollution, ongoing flaring,” he said. “And the light pollution is unbelievable.” 

Venture Global, the U.S.’s second-largest LNG producer, plans to build a second terminal alongside its Calcasieu Pass facility in sparsely populated Cameron Parish. Venture also owns the newly built Plaquemines LNG terminal, about 20 miles south of New Orleans. 

The proposed second Venture terminal in Cameron, dubbed CP2, was recently granted an export permit by the U.S. Department of Energy. The permit was the fifth LNG-related approval from the department since President Donald Trump took office and lifted former President Joe Biden’s pause on new LNG permits.

The Trump administration aims to cut “red tape around projects like CP2” and boost the availability of “affordable, reliable, secure American energy,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement. 

Louisiana has four LNG terminals and two more are under construction. Many more are welcome, said Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry. 

“Every time these projects come to Louisiana, [they] give the people of our state the ability to have their income raised,” he said during a speech last month announcing Australian company Woodside Energy’s decision to invest nearly $18 billion in a stalled terminal project, formerly known as Driftwood LNG, near Lake Charles, about 22 miles north of CP2.

Environmental groups say reviving the LNG building boom has serious consequences for coastal communities, fisheries and the climate. 

“It has been damaging to our coast, damaging to our air quality and our water quality,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “It’s destroyed property values [and] it’s certainly damaging to our health.”

Venture did not respond to a request for comment. 

LNG is natural gas cooled to a liquid state, compressing its volume and making it easier to store and ship long distances. Six of the country’s eight LNG export terminals dot the western Gulf Coast, including the world’s largest, Sabine Pass LNG in west Cameron. LNG shipments from the U.S. have skyrocketed over the past decade, rising from about 16 billion cubic feet in 2014 to just under 4.4 trillion cubic feet last year, making the U.S. the world leader in LNG exports. A little more than half of U.S. LNG goes to Europe, where demand has slowed in recent years, but Asia is hungry for more, with that continent’s share of exports rising to more than 30 percent last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.   

Venture’s Calcasieu Pass terminal had a rocky startup process that began in 2022 and ended last month when the facility sent its first shipments. The company’s construction strategy, which relied on pre-fabricated, modular components to speed construction and cut costs, resulted in power outages, several repairs and dozens of pollution violations, according to company documents and a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. In 2022, the facility exceeded its air pollution permits 139 times, according to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. A March warning letter from DEQ indicated many problems haven’t been fixed. The letter cited recent inspections showing several “areas of concern,” including frequent emissions violations and failures to report air pollution exceedances.

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Much of the pollution comes from flaring, a process often triggered by operational malfunctions that force facilities to burn excess gas to avoid fires or explosions. Flaring emits chemicals that can cause cancer, respiratory illnesses and other health problems. 

The Calcasieu Pass facility is allowed 60 flaring hours annually by DEQ, but nearby residents allege it goes well over that allowance.

“It’s been ongoing, sometimes days in a row,” Allaire said. 

Commercial shrimpers in Cameron and Calcasieu parishes say dredging to deepen waterways for large LNG transport ships has harmed habitat and made fishing harder. 

“The numbers we’re catching now have decreased drastically,” shrimper Travis Dardar said. 

Boosting the U.S.’s LNG export prowess is “part of one of the biggest fossil fuel build-outs in our lifetimes,” and will dampen efforts to shift toward cleaner energy sources like solar and wind, said Ethan Nuss, an organizer with the Rainforest Action Network.

“This will deepen the climate crisis and lock us into decades of emissions,” he said. 

Rolfes said opposing LNG is now doubly hard because both the state and federal government strongly back the industry. Instead of focusing on regulators, environmental groups may attempt to delay projects through lawsuits or convince the industry’s insurers and investors that LNG is a bad long-term bet. 

“We’ll keep getting the word out about their accident history [and] their horrible track records as business partners,” Rolfes said. “But we acknowledge the odds are tremendous.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Louisana already has 4 LNG terminals. It just added another. on May 7, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tristan Baurick.

“Elon Musk and Donald Trump, with the quiet help of Frank Bisignano, have spent the last few months taking a chainsaw to Social Security. This vote was an opportunity for the Senate to reject the decimation of Social Security, and demand that Trump nominate a commissioner who will stop the bleeding. Instead, every Senate Republican just signed off on the DOGE destruction of Social Security.

Bisignano has zero Social Security expertise or experience. But this self-described “DOGE person” is a Wall Street CEO with a long history of slashing the companies he runs to the bone, including massive layoffs.

He is also a liar. He claims he was not involved in all the chaotic and destructive changes at the Social Security Administration: the hollowing out of the agency, the stealing of our most sensitive data, the harmful and poorly rolled out policy changes, their sudden reversals, and more. However, there are well over a dozen long-serving civil servants, identified by a brave whistleblower, who can validate that he is lying.

With Bisignano’s increased power as a confirmed Commissioner, he will accelerate the destruction of our Social Security system. One ray of hope is that the DOGE henchmen running Social Security have reversed course on some of the biggest cuts in the face of massive public outrage. They know how popular Social Security is with voters of all parties.

Together, we can save Social Security from Trump, Musk, and Bisignano. It’s going to take millions of people in the street raising our voices together, saying hands off our Social Security.”

Last night, lawmakers, Social Security beneficiaries, and advocates held a rally at the Senate swamp opposing Bisignano. The full rally, along with shorter clips, can be viewed here.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Two years after Arizona officials revealed a $2.5 billion Medicaid fraud scheme that targeted Native Americans seeking treatment for addictions, the state has recovered just a fraction of the taxpayer funds lost to fraud.

The Arizona attorney general’s office is leading the criminal investigation into the network of behavioral health providers and sober living homes that from 2019 to 2023 exploited the American Indian Health Program to obtain inflated Medicaid payments. Investigators found fraudulent operators didn’t provide the services they’d billed for and sometimes allowed patients to continue the substance use for which they had sought treatment.

The state has so far indicted more than 100 individuals and recouped $125 million — or about 5% of the funds the state estimates it paid to bad actors.

Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a May 1 press conference that she hopes to retrieve “at least hundreds of millions” from fraudsters. But she warned that “it’s hard, because what happens is these … criminals get the money, they buy lavish homes, they buy multiple expensive cars, they hide the money offshore, they spend the money in ways that is unrecoverable.”

“My team is working day in and day out to seize those assets,” Mayes said.

The Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System struggled to rein in the rampant fraud under two governors, leaving more than 11,000 people vulnerable to the chaos that followed. Prior reporting by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica found that at least 40 Indigenous residents of sober living homes and treatment facilities in the Phoenix area died as the state fumbled its response.

The damage also rippled out through the state’s behavioral health industry, which was nearly brought to a standstill when the agency suspended some 300 providers and enacted policies that halted or substantially delayed payments to those still operating. Those reforms included enhanced scrutiny when screening and reimbursing providers.

Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, recently signed legislation further increasing oversight of sober living homes by requiring the facilities to promptly report resident deaths. But advocates like Reva Stewart, a Diné activist who has helped Indigenous victims of the scheme through her group Stolen People Stolen Benefits, don’t think the state has done enough.

“I feel like I’m on a hamster wheel, and we’re still at the beginning,” Stewart said. “They have a lot of indictments and people being charged, but at the same time … they’re just getting a slap on the wrist.”

The U.S. Department of Justice has also indicted several individuals and is conducting parallel investigations into the fraudulent billing schemes under federal statutes.

Yet despite these state and federal efforts, it’s likely that most of the stolen taxpayer money won’t be recovered.

From 2019 to 2023, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System allowed about 13,000 unlicensed providers to enter its system, including some that exploited weak oversight by overbilling or charging for services that were never delivered.

The agency also didn’t act decisively when solutions to stem the fraud were proposed internally. It initially yielded to pressure from special interest groups connected to the behavioral health industry, which argued that reforms to the fee-for-service American Indian Health plan would threaten their financial interests.

Now, AHCCCS says its efforts to unravel the crisis could take many years, describing its investigation as a “highly complex and manual process.”

Officials must review improper payments, whether they were obtained by fraud or not, on a case-by-case basis. Though providers are required to repay AHCCCS as soon as they become aware of overpayments, they often cannot do so in one lump sum. Repayments may occur over months or years.

Because state Medicaid agencies receive much of their funding from the federal government, improper payments come with added financial consequences: States must repay the federal government for its share.

In Arizona, the federal government covered 70% to 76% of Medicaid costs between 2019 and 2023. The rate was even higher for people who received services through the American Indian Health Program.

AHCCCS has repaid $49.1 million to the federal government since January 2023, according to spokesperson Havona Horsefield, who has since left the agency. That amount will likely grow as AHCCCS continues to review fraudulent cases.

The agency is not, however, required to reimburse the federal government for overpayments made to facilities that are now bankrupt or out of business. Of the 322 providers suspended on suspicion of fraud, 90 have closed, according to AHCCCS.

The agency could not provide an estimate of how much those providers were overpaid, but said it notifies the attorney general when a provider goes out of business and provides information to support criminal cases against them.

State Sen. Theresa Hatathlie, a Democrat from Coal Mine Mesa on the Navajo Nation, has been critical of the state’s response and continues to call for stricter regulation of sober living facilities. During a March floor vote, she expressed frustration over the reforms Hobbs later signed into law, contending they did not go far enough.

“It’s time to stop protecting bad actors or even those people who continue to allow bad actors to keep coming back,” she said.

As the state slowly works to untangle the fraud and recover taxpayer funds, national debates over Medicaid’s future are intensifying. Republican majorities in both Arizona’s Legislature and Congress are pushing to cut Medicaid to offset President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts. Among their justifications are fraud and abuse of the system.

Health policy experts, however, say that most Medicaid spending pays for legitimate care, and that fraud is typically committed by a small number of providers — not patients.

Instead of the current system where the federal government covers a larger share of Medicaid costs in lower-income states, conservatives are advocating to cap Medicaid funding tied to inflation, a model that would shift more of the cost to state budgets.

Arizona is one of nine states where such a change could trigger the end of Medicaid expansion, which currently insures 648,000 low-income residents, or about 30% of AHCCCS recipients.

Despite Medicaid’s uncertain future, Arizona officials are pressing forward with efforts to address the lasting damage the fraud scandal inflicted on tribal communities. In November, Mayes announced a $6 million grant initiative offering up to $500,000 per organization to fund victim compensation and housing support for those displaced or otherwise affected by fraudulent treatment centers. Recipients include tribal nations and Native health organizations.

But Stewart says the state’s work is far from over, and many of those harmed have yet to see real accountability or support.

“They call it a travesty … and they want to get justice,” she said. “But where’s the justice when it comes to the amount of deaths that we have, the amount of Native relatives that are still missing?”

Christopher Lomahquahu, a Roy W. Howard fellow at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jasmine Demers, Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.

“People definitely noticed that they were able to get out onto the lake less,” said Liu, who’s now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon. “However, they didn’t necessarily connect this trend to climate change.”

When the university’s alumni magazine featured her research in the winter of 2021, the comment section was filled with wistful memories of skating under the moonlight, pushing past the crowds to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate by the frozen lakeside. Liu began to wonder: Could this kind of direct, visceral loss make climate change feel more vivid to people?

That question sparked her study, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that came to a striking conclusion: Boiling down data into a binary — a stark this or that — can help break through apathy about climate change. 

Liu worked with professors at Princeton to test how people responded to two different graphs. One showed winter temperatures of a fictional town gradually rising over time, while the other presented the same warming trend in a black-or-white manner: the lake either froze in any given year, or it didn’t. People who saw the second chart perceived climate change as causing more abrupt changes. 

Both charts represent the same amount of winter warming, just presented differently. “We are not hoodwinking people,” said Rachit Dubey, a co-author of the study who’s now a professor of communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We are literally showing them the same trend, just in different formats.”

The strong reaction to the black-or-white presentation held true over a series of experiments, even one where a trend line was placed over the scatter plot of temperatures to make the warming super clear. To ensure the results translated to the wider world, researchers also looked at how people reacted to actual data of lake freezing and temperature increases from towns in the U.S. and Europe and got the same results. “Psychology effects are sometimes fickle,” said Dubey, who’s researched cognitive science for a decade. “This is one of the cleanest effects we’ve ever seen.”

The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they should highlight clear, concrete shifts instead of slow-moving trends. That could include the loss of white Christmases or outdoor summer activities canceled because of wildfire smoke.

The metaphor of the “boiling frog” is sometimes used to describe how people fail to react to gradual changes in the climate. The idea is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it’ll immediately jump out. But if you put it in room-temperature water and slowly turn up the heat, the frog won’t realize the danger and will be boiled alive. Although real frogs are actually smart enough to hop out when water gets dangerously hot, the metaphor fits humans when it comes to climate change: People mentally adjust to temperature increases “disturbingly fast,” according to the study. Previous research has found that as the climate warms, people adjust their sense of what seems normal based on weather from the past two to eight years, a phenomenon known as “shifting baselines.”

Many scientists have held out hope that governments would finally act to cut fossil fuel emissions when a particularly devastating hurricane, heat wave, or flood made the effects of climate change undeniable. Last year, weather-related disasters caused more than $180 billion in damages in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet climate change still hasn’t cracked into the ranks of what Americans say they’re most concerned about. Ahead of the 2024 election, a Gallup poll found that climate change ranked near the bottom of the list of 22 issues, well below the economy, terrorism, or health care.

“Tragedies will keep on escalating in the background, but it’s not happening fast enough for us to think, ‘OK, this is it. We need to just decisively stop everything we’re doing,’” Dubey said. “I think that’s an even bigger danger that we’re facing with climate change — that it never becomes the problem.” 

One graph about lake-freezing data isn’t going to lead people to rank climate change as their top issue, of course. But Dubey thinks if people see compelling visuals more often, it could help keep the problem of climate change from fading out of their minds. Dubey’s study shows that there’s a cognitive reason why binary data resonates with people: It creates a mental illusion that the situation has changed suddenly, when it has actually changed gradually. 

The importance of using data visualizations to get an idea across is often overlooked, according to Jennifer Marlon, a senior research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “We know that [data visuals] can be powerful tools for communication, but they often miss their mark, partly because most scientists aren’t trained, despite the availability of many excellent resources,” Marlon said in an email. She said that binary visuals could be used to convey the urgency of addressing climate change, though using them tends to mean losing complexity and richness from the data.

The study’s findings don’t just apply to freezing lakes — global temperatures can be communicated in more stark ways. The popular “climate stripes” visual developed by Ed Hawkins, a professor at the University of Reading in the U.K., illustrates temperature changes with vertical bands of lines, where blue indicates cold years and red indicates warm ones. As the chart switches from deep blue to deep red, it communicates the warming trend on a more visceral level. The stripes simplify a gradual trend into a binary-style image that makes it easier to grasp. “Our study explains why the climate stripes is actually so popular and resonates with people,” Dubey said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Scientists just found a way to break through climate apathy on May 5, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

Green Card–holding students are being abducted from the streets by agents of the state for attending protests and writing op-eds. News outlets are being investigated by the FCC for reporting that displeases the president. Federal web pages are being scrubbed of a lengthy list of words, including “race,” “transgender,” “women” and “climate.”

“Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy Era?” NPR (Morning Edition, 4/7/25) asked—with the argument for the former position being that “conservatives are just, in general, much more willing to speak their mind.”

NPR responded to this shocking government attack on free speech with a Morning Edition series on “The State of the First Amendment,” whose introductory episode’s headline (4/7/25) declared freedom of speech to be “shifting under the Trump administration”; it promised that the show would be “exploring how.”

The wishy-washy language wasn’t a promising start, and the segment only went downhill from there, taking an “on the one hand/on the other hand” framing to an assault on core democratic rights.

Host Leila Fadel explained: “All this week, we are going to look at the state of free speech in the United States. Who feels more free to speak? Who feels silenced?” After offering soundbites from people on “both sides” of this debate, she asked:

Is President Trump a protector of the First Amendment, or is he the biggest threat to it since the McCarthy era in the 1940s and ’50s, when fearmongering around Soviet and Communist influence led to the political persecution of academics and leftists?

It’s a vital question with a very clear and obvious answer—one that NPR, facing an investigation from the FCC into its corporate funding and a drive by Trump to end its federal funding, and laboring under ideological overseers installed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (FAIR.org, 10/24/24), refused to offer its listeners. (Trump signed a new executive order last night to attempt to defund NPR and PBS, accusing them of “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.'”)

‘Too early to tell’

NPR‘s Leila Fadel (4/7/25): “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?” (Photo: Mike Morgan/NPR)

After airing Trump’s claims to have “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” Fadel offered brief descriptions of “attacks on the press” and actions that have “broken other norms as well, often in legally questionable ways.” (The first example: “Universities face uncertain futures as they become targets of the Trump administration.”)

The episode then took its balanced framing to an interview segment featuring two legal scholars, Lee Bollinger, former Columbia University president, and Jonathan Turley, a Fox News regular. Fadel introduced the two by noting that “they see the threats to [the First Amendment] in this moment differently. Bollinger sees danger under Trump,” while “Turley says he thinks this president could be an unexpected advocate.”

In her questioning of Turley, Fadel did rebut his claim that the Biden administration and social media companies colluded to censor conservative speech. She then brought up “actions by this administration that seem to be chilling speech,” citing “college professors warning students not to discuss or post opinions about Israel’s war in Gaza or Russia’s war in Ukraine for fear of deportation or arrest.” She noted as well that “government websites have taken down thousands of pages featuring information on vaccines, hate crimes, diversity.” She asked: “Are free speech protections broadening right now under President Trump, or is censorship shifting?”

It’s perhaps meant to be a tough question to make him admit that calling Trump a protector of free speech would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. (Turley responds, “Well, it’s too early to tell whether the Trump administration will make free speech truly part of its legacy in the second term.”) But Fadel’s language—”is censorship shifting?”—turns around and concedes the right’s false claims of censorship under the Biden administration (which she’d just rebutted!). Fadel and NPR offer only two ways of looking at the situation: Trump is increasing free speech, or censorship is just a swinging pendulum whose victims change as administrations change.

The segment wraps up with Bollinger and Turley finding at least one point of agreement: that the arrest and attempted deportation of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil violates, in Turley’s words, “part of the core protections that define us as a people.”

‘They feel more free’

NPR (4/7/25) framed the First Amendment question  as “who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”

The online version of the show (4/7/25), in which the audio transcript is condensed  into an article format, bent even further backwards to find balance. It explained that the series “will explore who felt censored before President Trump returned to office and who feels stifled now.”

That exploration started by naming real censorship that has already taken place: “scrubbing reports and federal grant applications of words the Trump administration has banned,” fears that “participating in protests could lead to deportation,” an online portal where people can “file complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion lessons in class with the US Department of Education.”

If this were a report on a foreign country, it’s hard to imagine NPR offering an “on the other hand” to that list of clearly authoritarian crackdowns on speech. But here comes the next paragraph, trotting out the obligatory balance:

Yet plenty of others—including anti-abortion activists, the far-right activist group Moms for Liberty and members of university Republican clubs—say they feel more free today to express views without fear of a backlash now that President Trump is back in office.

The article eliminates references to Turley and Bollinger, but includes two quotes. One is from a history teacher who feels afraid to answer student questions related to the Trump administration. That’s “balanced” by one from the president of the College Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley, who says they have more members willing to “be outwardly and openly conservative than we did before the election.”

Orwellian redefinition

When you define the threat to free speech, as the New York Times (3/18/22) does, as “being shamed or shunned”—that is, criticized by others’ speech—it opens the door to suppressing speech in the name of free speech.

This absurd and harmful false balance NPR creates is predicated on the idea that “free speech” can mean simply how unconstrained a person feels to speak what might be unpopular opinions, including the various forms of bigotry and disinformation that have been unleashed by the Trump administration. But free speech is not, in fact, about feelings; it’s about consequences. It’s one thing to feel less afraid that your peers will criticize or even yell at you for speaking your opinions on campus. It’s another to fear that expressing your opinions will bring down official sanction, up to and including banishment from the country.

Free speech is not the freedom from “backlash” from those who disagree with your views, despite the MAGA movement’s best efforts to convince people of that—aided and abetted by many “liberal” elites and pundits who feel they have been “canceled” by left-wing criticism of their own (often bigoted) views. If college Republicans, anti-abortion activists or the Moms for Liberty feel constrained by peers harshly criticizing them or not inviting them to speak at public events, that’s not censorship; that’s ideas being contested in the public arena. Their right-wing perspectives still have many, many places to be heard, including the huge right-wing media ecosystem.

NPR concluded its article, “[Trump’s] critics say his concern for free speech is only for speech his administration finds acceptable.” That is, in fact, the only way you can make sense of the claim that Trump stands for “free speech”—by defining it as the ability of the approved people to speak, while those who would criticize (and thereby “cancel”) them are silenced (FAIR.org, 3/4/25).

The Trump administration is bringing the power of the state down on people who express opinions and ideas it finds objectionable. The consequences of that power, for both individuals and democracy, are quite dire. When NPR talks about “who feels more free to speak” and “who feels silenced,” it’s defining free speech the way MAGA wants it to be defined—as a vibe, not as a right. Ultimately, though, NPR‘s complicity in this Orwellian redefinition will not protect them from Trump’s vendetta.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here, or via Bluesky: @kellymcb.bsky.social. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Julie Hollar.

In just about 100 days, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins have significantly constrained that breadth of work. 

Since Trump’s inauguration, the inner workings of the agency have been in a constant state of flux — thousands of staffers were terminated only to be temporarily reinstated; entire programs stripped down; a grant freeze crippled state, regional, and local food systems that rely on federal funding. 

What’s more, the USDA has broadly scrapped equity and climate resilience Biden-era scoring criteria from dozens of programs across multiple subagencies by banning language like “people of color” and “climate change” and tightened eligibility requirements for food benefits. The agency has also announced the cancellation of environmental protections against logging to ramp up timber production, escalated trade tensions with Mexico, eradicated food safety processes like limiting salmonella levels in raw poultry, and begun rolling back worker protections in meat processing plants.  

In order to report on the full scope of the downstream impacts of these actions, Grist interviewed farmers, food businesses, and agricultural nonprofits across seven states about what the first 100 days of the administration has looked like for them. Nearly all of them told Grist that the agriculture department’s various funding cuts and decisions, as well as the moves to shrink its workforce capacity, have changed how much trust they have in the agency — and, by extension, the federal government. 

Food policy analysts and experts throughout the nation also told Grist that this swift transformation of the USDA is unprecedented.

“Multiple parts of our food systems are now under attack,” said Teon Hayes, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy. At the same time, food prices and overall costs of living are continuing to rise. The result, she fears, will be escalating hunger and poverty, which will “come at the expense of Black and brown communities, immigrants, and other historically marginalized groups.”

Elizabeth Lower-Basch, who served on the USDA Equity Commission during the Biden administration, called the decisions made by the USDA in the last 100 days “deeply disheartening” and “unprecedented, even when you compare it to the last Trump administration.” 

It is of significant consequence to note that the money being withheld from grant programs isn’t merely not being spent. Experts say the agency is taking support away from local and regional food systems while at the same time showering industrial agricultural operations with billions of dollars, eliminating nutrition safety nets, and rolling back environmental protections. How will this change the fabric of the nation’s food supply? 

As Rollins and Trump charge forward in undoing how the federal government has long supported those who grow and sell our food, and climate change continues to deepen inequities and vulnerabilities in that very supply chain, one thing is obvious: The USDA, and the communities that rely on it, won’t look the same once they’re done.

January 20

During his first week back in the Oval Office, President Trump issued a series of executive orders that would have far-reaching effects across the nation’s food and farming systems. The first of these actions set out to undo efforts by President Joe Biden to prioritize diversity and equity across the federal government. Signed on January 20, the order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” mandated federal agencies terminate all equity-related plans, programs, grants and contracts within 60 days. 

Accordingly, on January 27, the White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, released a memo calling for a temporary halt to all federal grants and loans. Agencies promptly scrambled to comply. 

The next day, Hannah Smith-Brubaker, the executive director at Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, or Pasa, reached out to the organization’s national program officer at the USDA. After hearing about the OMB memo, she was worried about the status of their largest grant — over $55 million that they were awarded through the agency’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program to provide financial support and technical assistance to some 2,000 farmers in 15 states as they adopt sustainable agricultural practices like cover cropping, silvopasture, and prescribed grazing. (Last year, the USDA increased the award to $59.5 million.) According to the terms of the grant, the organization received some of the money as reimbursements, while other funding was used to pay for expenses in advance. Smith-Brubaker asked the program officer whether they should proceed with the work they had planned. The officer didn’t answer directly, but told them that they were waiting on additional guidance.

Barely two days after it issued the memo, the OMB walked its guidance back after a federal judge blocked it. But much damage was already done: Federal payments to recipients were halted and agencies had begun reviewing existing grants for compliance with the executive order.

No one at the USDA ever officially notified Pasa that their grant was frozen, according to Smith-Brubaker, but within days of the initial memo, the online payment portal for the grant was down. She had to read between the lines. 

February 13 

Brooke Rollins, a longtime Trump ally who served in several roles in his first administration, was sworn in as the 33rd Secretary of Agriculture. Within 24 hours, thousands of workers were fired across all of the agency’s departments and offices, a figure that would climb to nearly 6,000 by the end of the month. At least 10 percent of employees at the Agricultural Research Service were laid off, an estimated 1,200 Natural Resources Conservation Service employees are believed to have lost their jobs, and hundreds of loan officers at the Farm Service Agency were let go. Thousands of other workers took buyouts. 

Following this initial set of layoffs, the U.S. Forest Service dramatically downsized its workforce, cutting about 10 percent of its workers, including around 700 people who make up the backbone of the country’s wildland firefighting force. Job cuts at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service affected officials researching the bird flu outbreak in the nation’s poultry supply chain that has decimated poultry flocks and skyrocketed egg prices at the supermarket, and prompted the departure of several hundred scientists working to prevent disease and invasive pests outbreaks. 

In time, after legal opposition, some USDA staffers would be reinstated to their positions, albeit many temporarily. Others still remain on paid leave and have not been invited back into workspaces. Because of the constant fluctuations, a verifiable, up-to-date public count of the agency’s laid-off workforce does not exist. 

Rodger Cooley, executive director at Chicago Food Policy Action Council, described these “challenges created by the personnel cuts,” as “a huge loss,” especially for rural communities and the agricultural workforce in those places. Meanwhile, said Cooley, the situation is “changing everyday…the biggest issues have been the unknown, and the constant transitions and shifts, trying to monitor what’s going on,” he said. “Information has been inconsistent and hard to know.”  

Looking back, it’s all too clear that the layoffs were just an early signal of the Trump administration’s intentions to overhaul the USDA. Efficiency — the tech-world mantra heralded by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — would also come to justify the agency’s decisions about its vast funding apparatus. That in addition to, the Trump administration has claimed, rooting out corruption and overspending.

In the process, the administration has sped up a deepening trend of farm consolidation, and triggered a domino effect that has been felt throughout the whole food supply chain. 

February 20 

Secretary Rollins announced the release of $20 million in conservation funding that had been withheld from recipients because of the agency’s ongoing review. The tranche of funding represented less than one percent of money owed. All the while, farmers from coast to coast were left waiting on payments and reimbursements, with no clarity on when — and even if — they would get their money. 

“Black box” is how National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition policy specialist Richa Patel described the state of communications from the agency under the new administration. “There’s so little communication and transparency as to how decisions are being made,” said Patel, “and it’s in a field especially where the timing throughout the year is incredibly important.” 

Patel said the coalition, which works with rural farmers nationwide, has been consistently trying to get information however they can, including from the USDA itself. “We’re trying to go through our members of Congress, constituents are reaching out, and it’s very difficult to get answers.”

March 10 

The USDA sent shockwaves throughout the country when it ended future rounds of funding through the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program and the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. The two programs were slated to dole out $1.13 billion to states, tribes, and territories this fiscal year, which would then trickle down to emergency food providers, childcare centers, and schools. 

Without its portion of that funding, a program, in Duffield, Virginia, that provided free, fresh food boxes to those facing food insecurity was forced to shutter.  

In Athens County, Ohio, one food hub is now stuck bearing similar burdens. Over the last two or so years, Shagbark Seed & Mill has distributed nearly 300,000 pounds of locally-grown goods like organic black beans to 12 food banks across the region, which was made possible because of the funding pot. Michelle Ajamian, the principal owner, and her team are confronting what the loss of it means for their work. “We’re going to close 2025 in the red. We’re going to have major losses in revenue,” said Ajamian. “I really like to see the silver lining, and I’m having a hard time doing that here.”

“I mean, I’m just up really late at night and really early in the morning working on this and thinking ‘Okay, how are we going to pivot? How are we going to sell the crop that we have promised to buy? How are we going to keep people employed? How are we going to feed people in our community?’” she said. “This is devastating. And I don’t use that word lightly.”

For Midnight Sun Farm in Capron, Illinois, a village of 1,300, the future appears volatile. A little more than a year ago, the small farm, run by Becky Stark and her husband Nicholas, began to sell their fresh goods like cabbage, turnips, okra, free-range eggs, and tomatoes to a local food pantry. In that time, they provided food for hundreds of community members in need. Those sales were only made possible through the USDA’s local food system grants. 

The fact that the agency established the program to begin with had given Stark “a lot of hope for the future of the USDA.” It was, she said, evidence that the government was finally reaching farmers who have traditionally not received assistance from agencies like the USDA because they don’t have a big enough plot of land or weren’t commodity crop producers. “This was a way where money from the USDA was getting directly to small farmers like me,” said Stark. “This money — it stays in the rural community. It allows us to be in a place where we can raise our children, and where other people can raise their children, with enough food.”

At the end of last year, the two had decided to scale up the amount of crops they would provide the food hub. They had their plan in place and their seeds bought. “And then March happened,” she said. 

March 18

Shortly after cancelling that billion-dollar funding stream, Rollins announced that the USDA was issuing up to $10 billion of assistance directly to the nation’s agricultural producers. But there was a catch: The money — just a third of the disaster assistance Congress had approved — was only intended for farmers growing traditional commodities, such as corn, cotton, and soybeans. Payouts were determined by multiplying a flat commodity rate, based on calculated economic loss, with acres planted. The bigger the farm, the bigger the bailout. 

“I got, like, $160,” said Thomas Eich, a small farmer in Walkerton, Indiana. “I was so insulted.” 

Following the USDA’s announcement, Eich received a letter from the agency, which included a payment application form. Instead of returning the form, he burned it. “I probably shouldn’t have. I need that 160 bucks,” he said. “But I was so mad I just burned it.”

Last year, just one of the food banks Eich supplied earned him about $3,500 for a single bulk order of potatoes, green onions, and beans, which was only made possible through USDA grants that are now cancelled. 

The federal funding freeze and the USDA’s decision to terminate local food programs almost forced Eich into insolvency. In order to pay suppliers and bills, Eich has been forced to take out private loans and turn to family members for financial help. If it wasn’t for that support network, he says his business would have gone under by now.

To try and make up for the losses, which represent around 42 percent of the farm’s projected 2025 sales, Eich has bumped up the number of farmers’ markets they set up at. But the volume of sales isn’t close to the same, and the income nowhere near as consistent. “If we’re there on a Saturday and a thunderstorm comes through, then they shut the market down, and we all go home,” he said. “And now I’ve spent money driving there and setting up to make no money.”

The administration’s decisions, said Eich, “definitely destroyed their credibility” and his willingness to participate in the programs should this or the next administration bring them back. Seeing the USDA continue to release subsidies for the biggest farm businesses, while curbing funding pots used to uplift local farming and food systems, only pours salt on the wound. “How is it going to be worth putting the faith into that, investing into them again, to have the rug pulled out from underneath you?” 

March 19 

Pasa, alongside 10 other community organizations and six U.S. cities, filed a lawsuit against Trump, the USDA, Rollins, and several other federal agencies. The plaintiffs are challenging the legal authority of the government’s grant funding freeze. They are not seeking punitive damages, but rather to be paid for the expenses under these programs that they have already incurred and a reinstatement of the programs and award amounts.

Though Smith-Brubaker is “pretty confident” they will win the case, she’s less certain it will change anything, citing the escalating friction between Trump’s executive branch and the nation’s judicial branch. 

“How is it possible that two years into a five-year grant, just because there was an administration change, everything that had been promised to these farmers can just be cut off?” said Smith-Brubaker. “It’s been months of just utter confusion and rollercoasters and thinking things were moving ahead and then finding out they weren’t.”

Between late March and early April, “we had to use every last penny of our reserve funds just to get through about a three-week period,” she continued. 

Similarly, a coalition in Charleston, West Virginia, which isn’t a party to the Pasa lawsuit, began confronting what they fear may be lasting impacts on their farmer relationships. The funding freeze has left the team at the West Virginia Food & Farm Coalition with a stack of unpaid bills and increasingly frustrated vendors and suppliers. The decisions by the administration, said executive director Spencer Moss, have also delayed their project launches, backed up programs, and perhaps most importantly, eroded farmer trust. 

March 24

State agencies were notified by the USDA that the $10 million that Congress authorized to help bring fresh food to school cafeterias had been cancelled. 

Then, the next day, the USDA announced that it would release some of the grant money that it had frozen earlier in the year. It was the agency’s first real public move regarding gridlocked funding. But, once again, there was a catch.

In the announcement, the USDA invited organizations that had been awarded money through one of three clean-energy programs to voluntarily revise their proposals to align with Trump’s executive order by “eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals.” 

By this point, however, some of the organizations had already laid off employees, delayed projects, or shut down entirely. Meanwhile, dozens of other grants remained locked in limbo. 

Heading into the year, the nonprofit Rhode Island Food Policy Council, which helps farmers and food businesses get started and expand their work, was a team of eight. Because of the freeze, they had to lay off three employees — a decision executive director Nessa Richman described as “heartbreaking” and “gut-wrenching” — while also scrapping plans to hire additional team members. 

April 7

Several USDA officials shared the agency’s plans to slash its D.C. headquarters and “relocate those it does not layoff,” as reported by Government Executive. By this point in Trump’s second term, at least 16,000 of the USDA’s employees have volunteered for a deferred resignation. 

April 14 

Following almost three months of paused payments, the USDA announced the “cancellation” of the climate-smart commodities program — the pool of money that held a portion of what Pasa was suing to be released. In total, the climate-smart commodities program had earmarked nearly $3.1 billion for 135 projects. 

The term “cancel,” in any case, is something of a misnomer. In the same announcement, the agency noted its plan to review existing projects under new scoring criteria to ensure they align with the administration’s priorities and create an entirely new program to distribute the money. That criteria now requires applicants to ensure that a minimum of 65 percent of their funds go directly to farmers, that they enrolled at least one farmer in their program by December 31, 2024, and that they have made a payment to at least one farmer by that same date.   

Later that day, the Pasa team received an email, shared with Grist, from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service that told them the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities grant program was being “relaunched” and their agreement was being “reviewed” to ensure it aligned with the administration’s new criteria.

About two hours after that, they received a second email. Because Pasa, as the agency claimed, “failed” to reach the 65 percent benchmark, its funding had been terminated. Smith-Brubaker contends that figure is closer to 75 percent, and says that the organization most often pays contractors, who, for instance, help farmers develop business plans, aggregate and sell products through a cooperative, or expand their business through marketing support.

The second email included an invitation for Pasa to resubmit its grant application. However, according to National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s policy director Mike Lavender, that tactic poses what he dubs the “big question”: Will reapplying be a waste of time?

Smith-Brubaker asserts that up until this point, the Pasa team had been told by USDA staff to continue working on the project, but with “no guidance on when we will get reimbursed for our expenses.” As of the end of March, she claimed they were owed $3.5 million through the climate-smart grant alone. Because of it all, the nonprofit has been forced to furlough 60 members of their staff. Just 12 employees remain.

April 15

A day later, the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island directed the USDA to immediately resume funding under the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law, granting a preliminary injunction. A status report later filed on behalf of the USDA, as well as the other federal agencies involved, noted that the USDA had previously already begun the process — but asserted that even after the agency finishes its review of pending payment requests there may be some grants “that remain paused.” 

By this point, five USDA programs have had their funding pulled since President Trump’s inauguration, while at least 21 others remained frozen. 

April 23 

Much like any regular morning, Smith-Brubaker woke up early and got ready for the day. But this was not a typical Wednesday, and Smith-Brubaker was not on her pastured-livestock farm in Mifflintown, Pennsylvania, but hundreds of miles away in Charleston, South Carolina. Coffee in hand, she left her rental home and strolled down the city’s cobblestone streets, awash in hints of jasmine drifting from the gardens and archways she passed. 

Thirty minutes later, she rounded the corner to her destination: a granite courthouse flanked by a legion of oaks. She was there for the first hearing of Pasa’s ongoing case. 

She paused in front of the fountain in the courtyard, and her gaze locked on the cascading water. Just then, she said, “it really hit me how monumental this might be.”

“It just seems pretty clear that the federal government doesn’t seem to have any substantive information or evidence available, or at least shared, regarding why the money was frozen, and why some of the grants are being terminated,” she later told Grist. Though Pasa has finally begun to receive payments on some outstanding reimbursements and expenses, as of this story’s publication, Smith-Brubaker says they are still owed $1.96 million across nine federal grants.

Any day now, Rollins will appear before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee focused on agriculture, which oversees USDA spending. It will be the first public opportunity for lawmakers to ask the secretary about the USDA’s workforce cuts, following up on two letters that Democrats have sent to her to voice their opposition to the layoffs.

After multiple requests, the USDA declined to comment to a series of questions regarding all of the events described here.

April 30 

In a press release, the USDA celebrated how, in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, the agency has “put farmers first”; “unleashed American energy dominance through expanded access to mining”; and “sought out and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in all USDA programs.”

“At USDA, I have made bold changes to improve the lives of American producers and consumers,” said Rollins in the release. “I look forward to continuing our work to bring America into a new golden age of prosperity, with American farmers and ranchers leading the way.”

Must the rest of us follow?

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump radically remade the US food system in just 100 days on May 2, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

“Our economy is crumbling under President Trump’s mismanagement, and today’s falling GDP data confirms our slide toward a recession. As growth grinds to a halt, Americans can expect fewer jobs, lower wages, and a worse standard of living. Between slow growth and sticky inflation, Trump is creating the conditions for a particularly brutal recession.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

On Monday, however, the Trump administration told all of the more than 400 volunteer scientists and experts working on the next assessment that it was releasing them from their roles. A brief memo said the scope of the report was being “reevaluated” within the context of the Congressional legislation that mandates it.

The move throws the National Climate Assessment, whose sixth iteration is supposed to be released in late 2027 or early 2028, into even deeper uncertainty. Earlier this month, the Trump administration canceled funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the White House office that produces the report and helps coordinate research across more than a dozen federal agencies.

Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was among the authors who were dismissed on Monday. She and her colleagues had just submitted a draft outline for a chapter about coastlines, with information on how sea level rise could affect communities and urban infrastructure. 

“It was an honor and I was looking forward to contributing,” Cleetus said. “This is the kind of actionable science that people need to help prepare for climate change and address the challenges that climate change is already bringing our way.”

Cleetus said it was “irresponsible” that the administration would dismiss hundreds of experts working on the assessment, seemingly without a plan for creating an alternative. Although the memo says participants may still have “opportunities to contribute or engage,” it doesn’t elaborate and the White House did not respond to a list of questions from Grist. 

The Trump administration is required by the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to, among other things, commission a scientific report every four years on “global change, both human-induced and natural.” The report is supposed to cover the latest science on a wide range of climate and environmental trends and how they might affect agriculture, energy production, human health, and other areas for the next 25 to 100 years.

Since 2000, this report has taken the form of the National Climate Assessment. The last one, released in 2023, broke down climate impacts by topic and geography, with individual chapters on the Northeast, Midwest, Southwest, and so on. It also laid out the state of the science on mitigating and adapting to climate change, including examples of what many cities and states are already doing. The fourth assessment was published in 2018, during Trump’s first term in the White House.

All of the science that informs the national assessments must be peer-reviewed, and the reports themselves don’t endorse specific policies. “They’re not telling anyone what to do,” said Melissa Finucane, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ vice president of science and innovation and an author of the fifth assessment. “They’re just providing information on how to best address problems with effective solutions.”

What’s next for the National Climate Assessment is unclear. Legally, only Congress can scrap it altogether, but experts say the Trump administration could decide to publish a dramatically scaled-back version or use it as a tool for misinformation — by, for instance, downplaying the link between global warming and the use of fossil fuels.

“One might be concerned that the administration will replace it with something much less robust, replacing it potentially with junk science,” Finucane said. 

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a list of policy recommendations that the Trump administration seems to have drawn from during its first 100 days, only mentions the National Climate Assessment in a short section about the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Russell Vought, now director of the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget, recommended that the program be scaled back to a limited advisory role. He wrote that the program typified “climate fanaticism” and “the woke agenda.”

Another possibility is that the experts involved in the assessment will continue their work, even without federal support. That’s what happened earlier this year with what was supposed to be the country’s first National Nature Assessment. When the Trump administration canceled work on it in February, its authors vowed to carry on and publish their results anyway.

Finucane said the Nature Assessment had been farther along than the sixth climate report, and that it wouldn’t be possible for a small group of volunteers to take on the massive amount of work and coordination required to put together the sixth assessment  “I absolutely hope that the work that has been done can continue in some way, but we have to have our eyes wide open,” Finucane said.

Dave White, director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University, said there are some international and state-level climate reports that could fill in the gaps left by a scaled-back or canceled National Climate Assessment. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, synthesizes climate science on a global level every few years (although the Trump administration recently blocked federal scientists from participating in it). 

“I’m disappointed, upset, frustrated on behalf of not only myself and my colleagues, but also on behalf of the American communities that benefit from the knowledge and tools developed by the assessment,” White said. “Those will be taken away from American communities now.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump administration just dismissed all 400 experts working on America’s official climate report on Apr 29, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.

After that, there are the hoarders and smugglers, both Israeli and Palestinian, who will make money, while reserving enough for themselves. They will hide in their closets to eat, and will have to find ways to protect themselves from the starving skeletons that will try to feed themselves by any means possible.

Adults in good health can survive without food for 2-3 months. But how many in Gaza are adults, and how many in good health? And if they don’t have enough clean drinking water, they might last much shorter in their weakened state. That describes the rule, rather than the exception.

That’s Israel’s plan. It has destroyed everything that sustains life: the pitiful attempts at agriculture, the bakeries, the animals, the food storage centers, the water treatment facilities, the sanitary and hygiene infrastructure, the hospitals, the shelters, everything. If they can manage this for 90 days, there will be only two million skeletons and lots of rubble to bulldoze. Not even insects or vermin, which will have long since been consumed by the skeletons. Perhaps even the skeletons will have been consumed by skeletons. The most vulnerable will die in the first month, but the pace will accelerate in the second, and then taper off to nothing by the end of the third.

That’s Israel’s plan. They don’t mind if the population flees Gaza or is carted away by some other country. But it seems unlikely. Gaza’s only borders are with Israel, Egypt and the sea. Egypt will not take them. Israel will not take them. Only the sea will take them, with the same but quicker results as remaining in Gaza.

What will the world do? We know what the US will do. It will supply the weapons and economic support to enable Israel to fulfill its plan. Some of the European nations and their allies will do the same. Most of the rest will sit on their hands while simultaneously wringing them, which is not as difficult as it sounds. Much of the world will follow suit, to the refrain of “What can we do?” Yemen is the only country, along with some non-state actors in the Axis of Resistance, that will do its part to destroy the perpetrator of the greatest crime of our century as it happens before our eyes.

And what will we do? Write letter and articles like this one? Demonstrate? Call corrupt and criminal elected representatives? Obtain legal judgments against Israel and its leadership in court? Resolutions at the UN? Will we destroy the interests and the representatives of the criminal enterprise in our own countries and communities? Will we assure that everything Israeli will be subjected to expurgation from our societies until Israel ceases and desists from committing the unspeakable?

Will we? I’ll check back with you in 90 days.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Larudee.

Trump issued an executive order Thursday declaring that U.S. policy includes “creating a robust domestic supply chain for critical minerals derived from seabed resources to support economic growth, reindustrialization, and military preparedness.” He described seabed mining as both an economic and national security imperative necessary to counter China. 

“Our Nation must take immediate action to accelerate the responsible development of seabed mineral resources, quantify the Nation’s endowment of seabed minerals, reinvigorate American leadership in associated extraction and processing technologies, and ensure secure supply chains for our defense, infrastructure, and energy sectors,” the executive order says. 

Increasingly, mining companies have been eager to scrape the ocean floor for cobalt, manganese, nickel and other metals that could help make batteries for cellphones and electric cars. But scientists have warned that the process could irreparably alter the seabed, kill extremely rare sea creatures that haven’t been named or studied, and — depending on how the metals are carried up to the surface — risk introducing metals into fisheries that many Pacific peoples rely upon. 

The order aims to jump-start the industry that has been spearheaded by small Pacific nations like Nauru seeking economic growth, but has been facing growing pushback from Indigenous advocates who fear the lasting consequences of mining the deep sea. 

“This extraction has no thought in mind about caring for resources,” said Solomon Kahoʻohalahala, who is Native Hawaiian and has been a vocal critic of the potential seabed industry at the United Nations. On Thursday afternoon, he read the executive order while attending the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City, and said he was struck by the language emphasizing U.S. dominance that echoed similar language in another executive order issued last week opening up Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing.

“It seems that there’s no vision for what we do in the long term,” he said. “It doesn’t speak to how we’re looking to take care of resources for the generations that are unborn. That’s a very different perspective that I hold as an Indigenous person.”

Read Next

The deep-sea mining industry got tired of waiting for international approval. Enter Trump.

Anita Hofschneider

Specifically, Trump wants the Commerce Department and the Interior Department to come up with an expedited process for approving seabed mining applications over the next 60 days. The order coincides with mining companies expressing interest in applying for permits through those agencies over the past few weeks.

Last month, the Canada-based Metals Company announced it planned to submit an application to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to mine the seafloor in international waters through the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act. Then last week, the Impossible Metals company announced it had submitted an application to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which falls under the U.S. Department of the Interior, to lease part of the seabed near American Samoa through a 1953 law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.

Both companies switched their strategies to seek U.S. avenues to start mining commercially after getting fed up with delays at the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority, which is in the midst of a yearslong process to come up with regulations to govern the new industry. Mining companies have spent years providing input on proposed rules along with environmental and Indigenous advocates like Kahoʻohalahala.

Trump’s executive order also calls on federal agencies to write up a report on opportunities for deep-sea mining both within U.S. waters and in international waters, and create a plan to map priority areas for seabed mineral extraction. Among other directives, the executive order calls for a report “on the feasibility of an international benefit-sharing mechanism for seabed mineral resource extraction and development” in international waters. 

The Metals Company’s announcement last month that it would bypass the United Nations process to seek mining approval from the U.S. sparked backlash from U.N. members and environmental groups. The environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity said in a press release Thursday that the executive order “directly contradicts efforts by the global community to adopt binding regulations that prioritize environmental protection.”

“The deep ocean belongs to everyone, and protecting it is humanity’s global duty,” said Emily Jeffers, a senior attorney at the center. “The seafloor environment is not a platform for ‘America First’ extraction.”   

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Despite global opposition, Trump just fast-tracked deep-sea mining on Apr 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

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In the past six months, two babies in Louisiana have died of pertussis, the disease commonly known as whooping cough.

Washington state recently announced its first confirmed death from pertussis in more than a decade.

Idaho and South Dakota each reported a death this year, and Oregon last year reported two as well as its highest number of cases since 1950.

While much of the country is focused on the spiraling measles outbreak concentrated in the small, dusty towns of West Texas, cases of pertussis have skyrocketed by more than 1,500% nationwide since hitting a recent low in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaths tied to the disease are also up, hitting 10 last year, compared with about two to four in previous years. Cases are on track to exceed that total this year.

Cases had been decreasing in the years before the COVID-19 outbreak and dropped further when schools were closed in response to the pandemic.

Doctors, researchers and public health experts warn that the measles outbreak, which has grown to more than 600 cases, may just be the beginning. They say outbreaks of preventable diseases could get much worse with falling vaccination rates and the Trump administration slashing spending on the country’s public health infrastructure.

National rates for four major vaccines, which had held relatively steady in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, have fallen significantly since, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent federal kindergarten vaccination data. Not only have vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella fallen, but federal data shows that so have those for pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B and polio.

In addition, public health experts say that growing pockets of unvaccinated populations across the country place babies and young children in danger should there be a resurgence of these diseases.

Many medical authorities view measles, which is especially contagious, as the canary in the coal mine, but pertussis cases may also be a warning, albeit one that has attracted far less attention.

“This is not just measles,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor in New York City and author of the book “Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health.” “It’s a bright-red warning light.”

At least 36 states have witnessed a drop in rates for at least one key vaccine from the 2013-14 to the 2023-24 school years. And half of states have seen an across-the-board decline in all four vaccination rates. Wisconsin, Utah and Alaska have experienced some of the most precipitous drops during that time, with declines of more than 10 percentage points in some cases.

“There is a direct correlation between vaccination rates and vaccine-preventable disease outbreak rates,” said a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. “Decreases in vaccination rates will likely lead to more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in Utah.”

But statewide figures alone don’t provide a full picture. Tucked inside each state are counties and communities with far lower vaccination rates that drive outbreaks.

For example, the whooping cough vaccination rate for kindergartners in Washington state in 2023-24 was 90.2%, slightly below the U.S. rate of 92.3%, federal data shows. But the statewide rate for children 19 to 35 months last year was 65.4%, according to state data. In four counties, that rate was in the 30% range. In one county, it was below 12%.

“My concern is that there is going to be a large outbreak of not just measles, but other vaccine-preventable diseases as well, that’s going to end up causing a lot of harm, and possibly deaths in children and young adults,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, a professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has spent her career studying vaccines. “And it’s completely preventable.”

The dramatic cuts to public health funding and staffing could heighten the risk. And the elevation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine critic, to the secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, several experts said, has only compounded matters.

The Trump administration has eliminated 20,000 jobs at agencies within HHS, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s public health agency. And late last month, the administration also cut $11 billion from state and local public health agencies on the front lines of protecting Americans from outbreaks; the administration said the money was no longer necessary after the end of the pandemic.

Several city and county public health officials had to move quickly to lay off nurses, epidemiologists and disease inspectors. Some ceased vaccination clinics, halted wastewater surveillance programs and even terminated a contract with the courier service that transports specimens to state labs to test for infectious diseases. One Minnesota public health agency, which had provided 1,400 shots for children at clinics last year, immediately stopped those clinics when the directive arrived, court records show.

A federal judge temporarily barred HHS from enacting the cuts, but the ruling, which came more than a week after the grants were terminated, was too late for programs that had already been canceled and employees who had already been laid off. Lawyers for HHS have asked the judge to reconsider her decision in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed the Department of Education to terminate grants for teacher training while that case is being argued in lower courts. The judge in the HHS case has not yet ruled on the motion.

But in tiny storefronts and cozy homes, at school fairs and gas stations, many residents in West Texas, near where the measles outbreak has taken hold, appear unfazed.

“I don’t need a vaccine,” one man sitting on his porch said recently. “I don’t get sick.”

“It’s measles. It’s been around forever,” said a woman making her way to her car. “I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

When asked why they weren’t planning on vaccinating their baby, a husband walking alongside his wife who was 27 weeks pregnant simply said, “It’s God’s will.”

In word and deed, Kennedy has sown doubt about immunizations.

In response to the measles outbreak, Kennedy initially said in a column he wrote for Fox News that the decision to vaccinate is a “personal one.” HHS sent doses of vitamin A alongside vaccines to Texas, and Kennedy praised the use of cod liver oil. Only the vaccine prevents measles.

About a week later, in an interview on Fox News, while Kennedy encouraged vaccines, he said he was a “freedom of choice person.” At the same time, he emphasized the risks of the vaccine.

Only after the second measles death in Texas did Kennedy post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.”

But even that is not the unequivocal message that the head of HHS should be sending, said Ratner, the infectious diseases doctor in New York. It is, he said, a tepid recommendation at best.

“It gives the impression that these things are equivalent, that you can choose one or the other, and that is disingenuous,” he said. “We don’t have a treatment for measles. We have vitamin A, which we can give to kids with measles, that decreases but doesn’t eliminate the risk of severe outcomes. It doesn’t do anything for prevention of measles.”

In the past, Kennedy has been a fierce critic of the vaccine. In a foreword to a 2021 book on measles released by the nonprofit that he founded, Kennedy wrote, “Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to ‘do something.’ They then inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children for the sole purpose of fattening industry profits.”

A spokesperson for HHS said, “Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety, pro-transparency and pro-accountability.” Kennedy, the spokesperson said, responded to the measles outbreak with “clear guidance that vaccines are the most effective way to prevent measles” and under his leadership, the CDC updated its pediatric patient management protocol for measles to include physician-administered vitamin A.

Kennedy, the spokesperson added, “is uniquely qualified to lead HHS at this pivotal moment.”

Late last month, leaders at the CDC ordered staff to bury a risk assessment that emphasized the need for vaccines in response to the measles outbreak — in spite of the fact the CDC has long promoted vaccinations as a cornerstone of public health. While a CDC spokesperson acknowledged that vaccines offer the best protection from measles, she also repeated a line Kennedy had used: “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one.”

Among the approximately 2,400 jobs eliminated at the CDC was a team in the Immunization Services Division that partnered with organizations to promote access to and confidence in vaccines in communities where coverage lagged.

The National Institutes of Health, which is also under HHS, recently ended funding for studies that examine vaccine hesitancy. In early April, researchers, the American Public Health Association and one of the largest unions in the country sued the NIH and its director, Jay Bhattacharya, along with HHS and Kennedy, alleging they terminated grants “without scientifically-valid explanation or cause.” The government hasn’t filed a response in the case.

The NIH cancellation notices stated that the agency’s policy was not to prioritize research that focuses on “gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment.”

“These grants are being canceled in the midst of an outbreak, a vaccine-preventable outbreak,” said Rupali Limaye, an associate professor at George Mason University who has spent the past decade studying vaccine hesitancy. “We need to better understand why people are not accepting vaccines now more than ever. This outbreak is still spreading.”

That vaccines prevent diseases is settled science. For decades, there was a societal understanding that getting vaccinated benefited not only the person who got the shot, but also the broader community, especially babies or people with weakened immune systems, like those in chemotherapy.

An investment in public health and a sustained, large-scale approach to vaccines is what helped the country declare the elimination of the measles in 2000, said Lori Tremmel Freeman, the CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

But she has watched both deteriorate over the last few months. Nearly every morning since notices of the federal funding cuts began going out to local public health agencies, she has woken up to texts from panicked public health workers. She has led daily calls with local health departments and sat in on multiple emergency board meetings.

Freeman has compiled a list of more than 100 direct consequences of the cuts, including one rural health department in the Midwest that can no longer carry out immunization services. That’s vital because there are no hospitals in the county and all public health duties fall to the health department.

“It’s relentless,” she said. “It feels like a barrage and assault on public health.”

More than 1,600 miles away from Washington, D.C., in Lubbock, Texas, the director of the city’s health department, Katherine Wells, sighed last week when she saw the most recent measles numbers. She would have to alert her staff to work late again.

“There’s a lot of cases,” she said, “and we continue to see more and more cases.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but that night would mark the state’s second measles death this year. An earlier death in February was the country’s first in a decade. Both children were not vaccinated.

Kennedy said he traveled to Gaines County to comfort the family who lost their 8-year-old daughter and while there met with the family of the 6-year-old girl who died in February.

He also visited with two local doctors he described as “extraordinary healers,” he said in his post on X. The men, he claimed, have “treated and healed some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children” using aerosolized budesonide — typically used to prevent symptoms of asthma — and clarithromycin — an antibiotic. Medical experts said neither is an effective measles treatment.

State health officials have traced about two-thirds of the measles cases in Texas to Gaines County, which sits on the western edge of the state.

Seminole, one of the county’s only two incorporated towns, has emerged as the epicenter of the outbreak, with Tina Siemens acting as a community ambassador of sorts.

Siemens, a tall woman with glasses and a short blonde bob, runs a museum that combines the area’s Native American history and Mennonite community with traditional skills like calligraphy and canning fruit.

On a recent Tuesday, atop the museum’s dark coffee table, notes scrawled onto white paper listed the latest shipments of vitamin C and Alaskan cod liver oil.

The supplies, Siemens said, were for one of the local doctors who met with Kennedy.

As measles tears through the community, Siemens said families have to decide whether to get vaccinated.

“In America, we have a choice,” she said, echoing Kennedy’s messaging. “The cod liver oil that was flown in, the vitamin C that was flown in, was a great help.”

Dr. Philip Huang, director and health authority for the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department, is working to keep the measles outbreak from reaching his community, just five hours east of Seminole. He wrote letters to the public school superintendents and leaders of private schools that had large numbers of unvaccinated or undervaccinated students offering to set up mobile vaccine clinics for them.

“Overall, the rates can look OK,” he said, “but when you’ve got these pockets of unvaccinated, that’s where the vulnerability lies.”

Huang has had to lay off 11 full-time employees, 10 temporary workers and cancel more than 50 vaccine clinics following the HHS cuts. The systemic dismantling of the CDC and other federal health agencies, he said, will have a grave and lasting impact.

“This is setting us back decades,” Huang said. “Everyone should be extremely concerned about what’s going on.”

Across the country, pediatricians are petrified, said Dr. Susan Kressly, who serves as president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest professional organization of pediatricians in the country.

“Many of us are losing sleep,” Kressly said. “If we lose that progress, children will pay the price.”

She’s carefully watching the spread of several vaccine-preventable diseases, including an increase in whooping cases that far outpace the typical peaks seen every few years. Although the whooping cough vaccine isn’t as effective as the ones for measles and protection wanes over time, the CDC says it remains the best way to prevent the disease.

Babies under the age of 1 are among the most at risk of severe complications from whooping cough, including slowed or stopped breathing and pneumonia, according to the CDC. About one-third of infants who get whooping cough end up in the hospital. Newborns are especially vulnerable because the CDC doesn’t recommend the first shot until two months. That’s why experts recommend pregnant mothers and anyone who will be around the baby to get vaccinated.

The number of whooping cough cases dropped significantly during the pandemic, but it exploded in recent years. In 2021, the CDC reported 2,116 cases; last year, there were 35,435.

The numbers this year appear set to eclipse 2024. So far in 2025, 7,111 cases have been reported, which is more than double this time last year. Cases tend to spike in the summer and fall, which adds to experts’ concern about high numbers so early in the year.

States on the Pacific Coast and in the Midwest have reported the most cases this year, with Washington leading the country with 742 cases so far, more than five times as many as at this time last year.

The Washington child who died of whooping cough had no underlying medical conditions, according to a spokesperson for the Spokane Regional Health District. The death was announced in February but occurred in November.

While Washington’s overall vaccination rate for whooping cough has remained relatively steady over the last decade at around 90%, pockets of low vaccination rates have allowed the disease to take root and put the wider community at risk, said Dr. Tao Sheng Kwan-Gett, a pediatrician and chief health officer of the Washington State Department of Health.

This is the time to strengthen the public health system, he said, to build trust in those areas and make it easier for children to get their routine vaccines.

“But instead, we’re seeing the exact opposite happen,” he said. “We’re weakening our public health system, and that will put us on a path towards more illness and shorter lives.”

Washington was one of 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued HHS and Kennedy following the $11 billion cuts, which rescinded approximately $118 million from the state. Doing so, the state said in court records, would impact 150 full-time employees and cause an immediate reduction in the agency’s ability to respond to outbreaks.

Washington’s Care-A-Van, a mobile health clinic that travels across the state to provide vaccinations, conduct blood pressure screenings and distribute opioid overdose kits, was a key element in the department’s vaccination efforts.

But that, too, has been diminished.

An alert on the department’s website cataloged the impact.

“Attention,” it began.

As a result of the unexpected decision to terminate grant funding, “all Care-A-Van operations have been paused indefinitely, including the cancellation of more than 104 upcoming clinics across the state.”

The department had anticipated providing approximately 2,000 childhood vaccines as part of that effort.

The frustration came through in Kwan-Gett’s voice. Many people think that federal cuts to public health mean shrinking the federal workforce, he said, but those clawbacks also get passed down to states and cities and counties. The less federal support that trickles down to the local level, the less protected communities will be.

“It really breaks my heart,” he said, “when I see children suffering from preventable diseases like whooping cough and measles when we have the tools to prevent them.”

Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Duaa Eldeib and Patricia Callahan, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney.

Legal experts and Māori advocates say the fight to protect Te Tiriti is only just beginning — as the controversial Treaty Principles Bill is officially killed in Parliament.

The bill — which seeks to redefine the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi — sparked a nationwide hīkoi and received more than 300,000 written submissions — with 90 percent of submitters opposing it.

Parliament confirmed the voting down of the bill yesterday, with only ACT supporting it proceeding further.

• READ MORE: The Treaty Principles Bill : Here’s what’s in it
• The Regulatory Standards Bill: What you need to know
• What you need to know about Māori wards
• Māori ward councillors prepare for election and referendum

The ayes were 11, and the noes 112.

Riana Te Ngahue, a young Māori lawyer whose bite-sized breakdowns of complex issues — like the Treaty Principles Bill — went viral on social media, said she was glad the bill was finally gone.

“It’s just frustrating that we’ve had to put so much time and energy into something that’s such a huge waste of time and money. I’m glad it’s over, but also disappointed because there are so many other harmful bills coming through — in the environment space, Oranga Tamariki, and others.”

Most New Zealanders not divided
Te Ngahue said the Justice Committee’s report — which showed 90 percent of submitters opposed the bill, 8 percent supported it, and 2 percent were unstated in their position — proved that most New Zealanders did not feel divided about Te Tiriti.

“If David Seymour was right in saying that New Zealanders feel divided about this issue, then we would’ve seen significantly more submissions supporting his bill.

“He seemed pretty delusional to keep pushing the idea that New Zealanders were behind him, because if that was true, he would’ve got a lot more support.”

However, Te Ngahue said it was “wicked” to see such overwhelming opposition.

“Especially because I know for a lot of people, this was their first time ever submitting on a bill. That’s what I think is really exciting.”

She said it was humbling to know her content helped people feel confident enough to participate in the process.

“I really didn’t expect that many people to watch my video, let alone actually find it helpful. I’m still blown away by people who say they only submitted because of it — that it showed them how.”

Te Ngahue said while the bill was made to be divisive there had been “a huge silver lining”.

“Because a lot of people have actually made the effort to get clued up on the Treaty of Waitangi, whereas before they might not have bothered because, you know, nothing was really that in your face about it.”

“There’s a big wave of people going ‘I actually wanna get clued up on [Te Tiriti],’ which is really cool.”

‘Fight isn’t over’
Māori lawyer Tania Waikato, whose own journey into social media advocacy empowered many first-time submitters, said she was in an “excited and celebratory” mood.

“We all had a bit of a crappy summer holiday because of the Treaty Principles Bill and the Regulatory Standards Bill both being released for consultation at the same time. A lot of us were trying to fit advocacy around summer holidays and looking after our tamariki, so this feels like a nice payoff for all the hard mahi that went in.”

She said the “overwhelming opposition” sent a powerful message.

“I think it’s a clear message that Aotearoa as a whole sees Te Tiriti as part of this country’s constitutional foundation. You can’t just come in and change that on a whim, like David Seymour and the ACT Party have tried to do.

“Ninety percent of people who got off their butt and made a submission have clearly rejected the divisive and racist rhetoric that party has pushed.”

Despite the win, she said the fight was far from over.

“If anything, this is really just beginning. We’ve got the Regulatory Standards Bill that’s going to be introduced at some point before June. That particular bill will do what the Treaty Principle’s Bill was aiming to do, but in a different and just more sneaky way.

‘The next fight’
“So for me, that’s definitely the next fight that we all gotta get up for again.”

Waikato, who also launched a petition in March calling for the free school lunch programme contract to be overhauled, said allowing the Treaty Principles Bill to get this far in the first place was a “waste of time and money.”

“Its an absolutely atrocious waste of taxpayers dollars, especially when we’ve got issues like the school lunches that I am advocating for on the other side.”

“So for me, the fight’s far from over. It’s really just getting started.”

ACT Party leader David Seymour continued to defend the Treaty Principles Bill during its second reading on Thursday, and said the debate over the treaty’s principles was far from over.

After being the only party to vote in favour of the bill, Seymour said not a single statement had grappled with the content of the bill — despite all the debate.

Asked if his party had lost in this nationwide conversation, he said they still had not heard a good argument against it.

‘We’ll never give up on equal rights.”

He said there were lots of options for continuing, and the party’s approach would be made clear before the next election

Eyes on local elections – ActionStation says the mahi continues
Community advocacy group ActionStation’s director Kassie Hartendorp, who helped spearhead campaigns like “Together for Te Tiriti”, said her team was feeling really positive.

“It’s been a lot of work to get to this point, but we feel like this is a very good day for our country.”

At the end of the hīkoi mō Te Tiriti, ActionStation co-delivered a Ngāti Whakaue rangatahi led petition opposing the Treaty Principles Bill, with more than 290,000 signatures — the second largest petition in Aotearoa’s history.

They also hosted a live watch party for the bill’s second reading on Facebook, joined by Te Tiriti experts Dr Carwyn Jones and Tania Waikato.

Hartendorp said it was amazing to see people from all over Aotearoa coming together to reject the bill.

“It’s no longer a minority view that we should respect, but more and more and more people realise that it’s a fundamental part of our national identity that should be respected and not trampled every time a government wants to win power,” she said.

Looking to the future, Hartendorp said Thursday’s victory was only one milestone in a longer campaign.

Why people fought back
“There was a future where this bill hadn’t gone down — this could’ve ended very differently. The reason we’re here now is because people fought back.

“People from all backgrounds and ages said: ‘We respect Te Tiriti o Waitangi.’

“We know it’s essential, it’s a part of our history, our past, our present, and our future. And we want to respect that together.”

Hartendorp said they were now gearing up to fight against essentially another version of the Treaty Principles Bill — but on a local level.

“In October, people in 42 councils around the country will vote on whether or not to keep their Māori ward councillors, and we think this is going to be a really big deal.”

The Regulatory Standards Bill is also being closely watched, Hartendorp said, and she believed it could mirror the “divisive tactics” seen with the Treaty Principles Bill.

“Part of the strategy for David Seymour and the ACT Party was to win over the public mandate by saying the public stands against Te Tiriti o Waitangi. That debate is still on,” she said.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Inspiring an imagination for change is one of the hardest things to accomplish in the classroom. My students are brilliant at understanding social problems. They can connect causes of inequality across the globe and analyze how the past informs the present. However, it is hard for them, and sometimes me, to see beyond a slightly better version of the status quo when it comes to figuring out how justice and equity might work.

When we don’t go far enough in our imagination of what could be, we get compromises like workplace diversity programs. These programs began in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration loosened equal opportunity enforcement. Human resources departments, needing to justify their continued existence, turned to diversity management to stay organizationally relevant. Advocates of just workplaces followed this change because it was better than nothing. Yet, diversity didn’t fill the place of equal opportunity enforcement; diversity’s metrics were largely decided within individual workplaces and lacked links to what would be effective for the advancement of women and employees of color. What’s more, they were tied to the business case for diversity, which is “the proposition that a diverse workforce is essential to serve a diverse customer base, to gain legitimacy in the eyes of a diverse public, and to generate workable solutions within a global economy.” The problem in the business case is more about what it doesn’t say than what it does. Workers and what benefits them are nowhere to be found in this justification for diversity programs.

So, what has resulted from this compromise? By interviewing 60 Black, Asian, and Latine/x employees across diverse churches, universities, and corporations, I found that diversity programs often have unintended negative consequences for them. Far from receiving an undeserved gift in the form of DEI, these employees end up paying the cost for their workplaces to appear diverse.

The costs of diversity that I find are threefold. First are heavy work burdens. Employees of color often must attend meetings, pose for pictures, or even go on trips just so their department won’t show up with only white employees. Beyond the use of their images and bodies to display diversity, employees of color are often made responsible for diversity committees, work beyond their job description that usually goes unlauded and unpaid.

The second cost of diversity derives from how employees of color perceive the rightness of their employer’s actions, something we call legitimacy. These employees see how their workplace purports to be diverse to outside parties, yet doesn’t meet that standard in daily reality. The distance between the image and the facts on the ground creates feelings of guilt for employees of color and disillusionment from being part of something that isn’t quite true.

Finally, employees of color experience their identity being subsumed to what their employer needs for the image of diversity. This often entails employees being visibly non-white enough to display diversity, but not so non-white as to make their coworkers uncomfortable through speech or standards of dress. This intrusion into identity makes it difficult for employees of color to develop a holistic professional and personal identity. These three costs result in physical, mental, and emotional strains on employees of color in diverse workplaces.

While employers gained in reputation and customers from workplace diversity initiatives, employees of color paid for them in their workload, well-being, and opportunities for advancement. In this time of upheaval with companies either walking away from or doubling down on their DEI initiatives, I believe we can imagine another way.

What if, in place of the business case for diversity, we focused on equity and organizational justice? Organizational justice is when there are fair processes, fair outcomes, and fair interactions within the workplace. Equity is where every employee has what they need to succeed. In the workplace, a focus on justice and equity would alleviate heavy work burdens by matching job descriptions to the work done by employees. An explicit recognition of systemic racial inequality would ensure that employees who take on more work by virtue of their minoritized identities could be recognized for that work. It would also require that workplaces focus on the actions done internally to support all employees rather than the image projected externally. Finally, just and equitable workplaces would enable employees’ holistic identities by promoting leaders who use inclusive practices including focused, supportive, and fair treatment of all employees. Alongside these activities, regular assessments could ensure that the workplace climate remained employee-focused and surface pain points for remediation.

Unlike the business case for diversity, organizational justice and equity benefit workers through improved well-being, job satisfaction, and commitment. They also benefit workplaces through reduced employee turnover and increased capacity of employees. Organizational justice and equity are both morally laudable and financially smart because they include all of us.

As Sociologist Eric Olin Wright once wrote, “While we live in a social world that generates harms, we also have the capacity to imagine alternative worlds where such harms are absent.”^[1] Imagining employee-centered changes to our workplaces can be difficult because for too long, we haven’t seen it. Yet, it is an urgent task that we cannot neglect. When we begin to think better is possible in the workplace, we are less likely to accept compromises and more likely to fight collectively for a just future.

Notes.

^[1] Wright, Eric O. 2011. “Real Utopias.” Contexts 10(2): 36–42.

The post Imagining Just and Equitable Workplaces appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Oneya Fennell Okuwobi.

President Donald Trump’s first-term push to open the Gulf of Mexico and other federal waters to fish farming has come to a halt in the early days of his second term. 

A federal judge in Washington state ruled against a nationwide aquaculture permit the Trump administration sought in 2020. The wide-ranging permit would have allowed the first offshore farms in the Gulf and the likely expansion of the aquaculture industry into federally managed waters on the East and West coasts. 

The ruling, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Kymberly K. Evanson on March 17, was applauded by several environmental groups.

“A nationwide permit isn’t at all appropriate because our federal waters are so different,” said Marianne Cufone, executive director of the New Orleans-based Recirculating Farms Coalition, a group opposed to offshore aquaculture. “Florida is not Maine. California is not Texas. And in just the Gulf of Mexico, there are significantly different habitats [and] different fish species that could be affected.”

Offshore aquaculture, which involves raising large quantities of fish in floating net pens, has been blamed for increased marine pollution and escapes that can harm wild fish populations. In the Gulf, there’s particular concern about the “dead zone,” a New Jersey-size area of low oxygen fueled by rising temperatures and nutrient-rich pollution from fertilizers, urban runoff and sewer plants. Adding millions of caged fish would generate even more waste and worsen the dead zone, Cufone said. 

Fish farming is an “existential threat” to the Gulf’s fishing industry, said Ryan Bradley, executive director of the Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United. Besides the “cascading negative impacts” on the environment, offshore aquaculture often undercuts the prices of wild-caught fish and shrimp, he said. The Gulf’s fishers are already facing intense competition from foreign fish farms. 

“Offshore aquaculture poses too much risk and not enough reward,” Bradley said. 

The aquaculture industry says fish farming is the only way to meet surging demand for seafood, particularly high-value species like salmon and tuna. As wild fish stocks struggle under climate change, offshore farming could help the U.S. adapt, producing food in a managed environment less affected by ecological conditions, aquaculture advocates say.

Late last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration identified five areas in the Gulf that the agency said are best suited for offshore aquaculture. The development of these “aquaculture opportunity areas” near the coasts of Texas and Louisiana received a strong push during Trump’s first term but slowed under President Joe Biden. Evanson’s decision blocks what might have been a speedy approval process for fish farms in opportunity areas.

A cumbersome permitting process and opposition from environmentalists and catchers of wild seafood had long stymied plans for fish farms in the Gulf, which Trump recently renamed the Gulf of America. In 2020, the aquaculture industry got a big boost when Trump signed an executive order that directed federal agencies to “identify and remove unnecessary regulatory barriers” restricting farming in federal waters. 

Read Next

How Trump could bring fish farms to the Gulf of Mexico

Tristan Baurick

Trump’s order led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to issue the sweeping national permit to open nearly all federal ocean waters to aquaculture. The Center for Food Safety and other environmental groups sued, arguing that the permit failed to analyze fish farming’s threats to water quality and marine life, including several species protected under the Endangered Species Act. 

In October, an initial decision by Evanson, who was appointed by Biden, faulted the Corps for failing to acknowledge aquaculture’s adverse environmental impacts. Evanson’s latest decision vacates, or sets aside as unlawful, the nationwide permit. 

The Corps declined to comment on the decision.

Federal courts have also struck down efforts to establish offshore aquaculture in the Gulf in 2018 and 2020. 

The repeated legal setbacks should send a clear signal to the industry, said George Kimbrell, the Center for Food Safety’s legal director. 

“It has no place in U.S. ocean waters,” he said.

The aquaculture industry isn’t giving up. Paul Zajicek, executive director of the National Aquaculture Association, said expanding U.S. fish farming is critical for meeting the growing American appetite for seafood. He noted that the U.S. consumed nearly 7 billion pounds of seafood in 2022, the most recent year data was available. About 83 percent of the seafood was imported, contributing to a trade deficit of about $24 billion, Zajicek said. 

“The heavy reliance on imports for a foodstuff critical to people’s health not only creates a massive trade imbalance, it also creates food security and food safety issues for our country,” he wrote in an email. 

Tilting the balance of international trade is a keen interest for Trump, who on Wednesday announced far-reaching and expensive tariffs that the president says will help U.S. producers and boost the country’s economy.

Read Next

The world is farming more seafood than it catches. Is that a good thing?

Frida Garza

The U.S. has a robust land-based aquaculture industry, producing pond-raised catfish, trout and other fish. No fish are raised commercially in federal waters, and fish farming operations are increasingly rare in state-managed marine waters. Washington state once had a large salmon farming industry, but large-scale escapes of non-native Atlantic salmon and concerns about pollution and the spread of disease led to a halt on fish farm leases in 2022 and a full ban in January. Hawaii’s state waters host the only offshore fish farm in the U.S.

Other countries have embraced offshore aquaculture on a large scale. China accounts for more than half of global aquaculture production, according to NOAA. Asian countries and Ecuador supply most of the shrimp consumed in the U.S., while farms in Canada, Norway and Chile produce two-thirds of the salmon Americans eat. 

Companies have tried to open the Gulf to aquaculture for more than a decade, yet none of the proposals for floating pens filled with redfish, amberjack and other high-value species have managed to take hold. In 2017, the federal government helped fund a pilot project that would have placed a floating farm about 45 miles from Sarasota, Fla. The project was derailed after regulators received nearly 45,000 public comments opposing it, according to Zajicek. 

Proposed farms face “a permitting system that is too lengthy, too costly, and too subject to legal challenges from groups opposed to commercial aquaculture,” he said. 

Last month’s court decision means companies may now narrow their focus and seek permits for individual projects, Zajicek said. 

That approach also won’t be easy, Cufone warned. The process for permitting each project will likely be slower and more deliberative, giving more consideration to a proposed farm’s impacts on the surrounding environment and nearby communities. 

“Claiming one size fits all doesn’t seem realistic, and the court agreed,” she said. “Now they can’t use one big permit to speed these things through.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A federal judge just hit the brakes on Trump’s plan to fast track industrial fish farming in the Gulf on Apr 4, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tristan Baurick.

Image by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen.

President Trump’s latest hint of using the U.S. military to annex Greenland if its leaders and 55,772 (2025) violently disagree (anti-U.S demonstrations have begun). It’s also a predictor of his annexing plans for Canada’s 40.1 millions . Indeed, 85 percent of both countries in late March opposed his neo-colonization plan.

Considering that both have significant national debts for their size, both could certainly use the money. Canada’s deficit for FY 2024-25 is expected to be more C$60 billion . Removal of Denmark’s annual subsidy to Greenland would require at least US$564 million. Too, Denmark was generous enough never to charge the U.S. rent since 1951 for building the 150-person Pituffik Space base (formerly Thule Air base). And add a bonus of nearly 75 years of back rent with a few retroactive billion or two to Denmark for smoothing over Trump’s imperious rant :

“No, I never take military force off the table. But I think there’s a good possibility that we could do it without military force. We have an obligation to protect the world. This is world peace, this is international security. And I have that obligation while I’m president. No, I don’t take anything off the table.”

Strategic chokepoint aside, Greenland’s other monumental attraction to the Trump regime is its significant mining resources for American corporations: coal, oil, gas, iron ore, gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, graphite, olivine, cryolite, and marble. Not to mention the discoveries of uranium, thorium and the Earth’s largest deposits of rare-earth elements for technologic products such as yttrium, scandium, neodymium and dysprosium.

Canada also has a vast amount of similar resource reserves that could be rented without a single U.S. boot on the ground or dropping 2,000-ton bombs on those two targets. No more bloody casualties or billions worth of property and infrastructure damage that only war-lovers and munition-makers savor. The rental expense to the American taxpayer would be a fraction of yet another exploitive war.

Let’s consider other aspects of renting rather than annexing:

In an imitation of his admiration of the high-tariff, colonizing president William McKinley , Trump has turned to the forced annexation idea for Greenland, Canada, Mexico, and Panama. Somehow he overlooked the results of McKinley’s annexation of the Philippines ‘ small islands as a war prize from Spain in 1899. It set off a three-year guerilla insurrection—deaths: 4,200 out of 125,000 U.S. troops, 220,000 Filipinos—that cost taxpayers $14,775,395,348 (2025 values).

Annexing Canada is another matter. At 3.8 million square miles , it’s the world’s second largest country, currently with 40,126,723 people . Most polls show an overwhelming majority of Canadians don’t want to become the 51^st state no matter how much economic and political pressure the Trump administration applies.

Like the bare-knuckled deal he’s trying to force on Ukraine’s prime minister Volodymyr Zelinsky for past and present military aid and past: the U.S. would “control investments into Ukraine in projects including roads and railways, ports, mines, oil and gas and extraction of critical minerals.” Plus reap all the profits.

Indeed, in February when Trump began threating a 25 percent tariff on Canadian imports, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau and Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum responded by beefing up border security . Trump backed off with a “pause” in the tariff deadline. On the eve of April 2’s deadline, new prime minister Mark Carney declared if the U.S. tariffs went forward, Canada would “put in place retaliatory measures.”

Meantime, Congress was roiled by the Senate’s Democrat bill to block Trump’s tariffs altogether on Canada. Yet even if the House passed it, Trump is unlikely to sign it into law. But it’s the thought that counts because most Americans told many pollsters they opposed these enforced annexations. They seem to sense the bloody backlash and ruinous expense they will cause.

Now, with the national debt hovering at $36.22 trillion, how could the U.S. Treasury possibly pay rent for annexations? One source to tap is certainly foreign aid, too often used to bully or bribe recipient countries into supporting administration policies and strategies. Foreign aid’s latest disbursement totaled $71.9 billion . Out of it in 2024, distributions to be counted already as rent to potential annexed landlords are:

• $668,500 to Greenland

• $251,600 to Canada

• $74,700,000 to Mexico

• $10,300,000 to Panama

Another obvious source for rent money is the Pentagon, of course, which otherwise would have to enforce an occupation at far, far greater cost. Congress just voted it an allocation of $833 billion for FY 2025. And then there’s the State Department, awarded $18.47 billion. It perhaps could claw back the $2.22 billion “saved” when Trump approved the death of its USAID program (U.S. Agency for International Development).

Having enraged those countries with annexation plans, Trump would have to expect a hefty rental price from each. But the savings in blood, treasure, and reestablishing relationships would be well worth it.

The post Wouldn’t It Be Better, Cheaper Just to Rent Greenland, Canada, Mexico, and Panama? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Barbara G. Ellis.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Shiva Gounden in Majuro

Family isn’t just about blood—it’s about standing together through the toughest of times.

This is the relationship between Greenpeace and the Marshall Islands — a vast ocean nation, stretching across nearly two million square kilometers of the Pacific. Beneath the waves, coral reefs are bustling with life, while coconut trees stand tall.

For centuries, the Marshallese people have thrived here, mastering the waves, reading the winds, and navigating the open sea with their canoe-building knowledge passed down through generations. Life here is shaped by the rhythm of the tides, the taste of fresh coconut and roasted breadfruit, and an unbreakable bond between people and the sea.

• READ MORE: Marshall Islands: How the Greenpeace Rongelap evacuation changed the course of history
• Eyes of Fire — the Rongelap evacuation story microsite — David Robie
• Other Rongelap reports

From the bustling heart of its capital, Majuro to the quiet, far-reaching atolls, their islands are not just land; they are home, history, and identity.

Still, Marshallese communities were forced into one of the most devastating chapters of modern history — turned into a nuclear testing ground by the United States without consent, and their lives and lands poisoned by radiation.

Operation Exodus: A legacy of solidarity
Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands — its total yield roughly equal to one Hiroshima-sized bomb every day for 12 years.

During this Cold War period, the US government planned to conduct its largest nuclear test ever. On the island of Bikini, United States Commodore Ben H. Wyatt manipulated the 167 Marshallese people who called Bikini home asking them to leave so that the US could carry out atomic bomb testing, stating that it was for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars”.

Exploiting their deep faith, he misled Bikinians into believing they were acting in God’s will, and trusting this, they agreed to move—never knowing the true cost of their decision

On March 1, 1954, the Castle Bravo test was launched — its yield 1000 times stronger than Hiroshima. Radioactive fallout spread across Rongelap Island about 150 kilometers away, due to what the US government claimed was a “shift in wind direction”.

In reality, the US ignored weather reports that indicated the wind would carry the fallout eastward towards Rongelap and Utirik Atolls, exposing the islands to radioactive contamination. Children played in what they thought was snow, and almost immediately the impacts of radiation began — skin burning, hair fallout, vomiting.

The Rongelap people were immediately relocated, and just three years later were told by the US government their island was deemed safe and asked to return.

For the next 28 years, the Rongelap people lived through a period of intense “gaslighting” by the US government. *

Forced to live on contaminated land, with women enduring miscarriages and cancer rates increasing, in 1985, the people of Rongelap made the difficult decision to leave their homeland. Despite repeated requests to the US government to help evacuate, an SOS was sent, and Greenpeace responded: the Rainbow Warrior arrived in Rongelap, helping to move communities to Mejatto Island.

This was the last journey of the first Rainbow Warrior. The powerful images of their evacuation were captured by photographer Fernando Pereira, who, just months later, was killed in the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior as it sailed to protest nuclear testing in the Pacific.

From nuclear to climate: The injustice repeats
The fight for justice did not end with the nuclear tests—the same forces that perpetuated nuclear colonialism continue to endanger the Marshall Islands today with new threats: climate change and deep-sea mining.

The Marshall Islands, a nation of over 1,000 islands, is particularly vulnerable to climate impacts. Entire communities could disappear within a generation due to rising sea levels. Additionally, greedy international corporations are pushing to mine the deep sea of the Pacific Ocean for profit. Deep sea mining threatens fragile marine ecosystems and could destroy Pacific ways of life, livelihoods and fish populations. The ocean connects us all, and a threat anywhere in the Pacific is a threat to the world.

But if there could be one symbol to encapsulate past nuclear injustices and current climate harms it would be the Runit Dome. This concrete structure was built by the US to contain radioactive waste from years of nuclear tests, but climate change now poses a direct threat.

Rising sea levels and increasing storm surges are eroding the dome’s integrity, raising fears of radioactive material leaking into the ocean, potentially causing a nuclear disaster.

Science, storytelling, and resistance: The Rainbow Warrior’s epic mission and 40 year celebration

At the invitation of the Marshallese community and government, the Rainbow Warrior is in the Pacific nation to celebrate 40 years since 1985’s Operation Exodus, and stand in support of their ongoing fight for nuclear justice, climate action, and self-determination.

This journey brings together science, storytelling, and activism to support the Marshallese movement for justice and recognition. Independent radiation experts and Greenpeace scientists will conduct crucial research across the atolls, providing much-needed data on remaining nuclear contamination.

For decades, research on radiation levels has been controlled by the same government that conducted the nuclear tests, leaving many unanswered questions. This independent study will help support the Marshallese people in their ongoing legal battles for recognition, reparations, and justice.

The path of the ship tour: A journey led by the Marshallese
From March to April, the Rainbow Warrior is sailing across the Marshall Islands, stopping in Majuro, Mejatto, Enewetak, Bikini, Rongelap, and Wotje. Like visiting old family, each of these locations carries a story — of nuclear fallout, forced displacement, resistance, and hope for a just future.

But just like old family, there’s something new to learn. At every stop, local leaders, activists, and a younger generation are shaping the narrative.

Their testimonies are the foundation of this journey, ensuring the world cannot turn away. Their stories of displacement, resilience, and hope will be shared far beyond the Pacific, calling for justice on a global scale.

A defining moment for climate justice
The Marshallese are not just survivors of past injustices; they are champions of a just future. Their leadership reminds us that those most affected by climate change are not only calling for action — they are showing the way forward. They are leaders of finding solutions to avert these crises.

Since they have joined the global fight for climate justice, their leadership in the climate battle has been evident.

In 2011, they established a shark sanctuary to protect vital marine life.

In 2024, they created their first ocean sanctuary, expanding efforts to conserve critical ecosystems. The Marshall Islands is also on the verge of signing the High Seas Treaty, showing their commitment to global marine conservation, and has taken a firm stance against deep-sea mining.

They are not only protecting their lands but are also at the forefront of the global fight for climate justice, pushing for reparations, recognition, and climate action.

This voyage is a message: the world must listen, and it must act. The Marshallese people are standing their ground, and we stand in solidarity with them — just like family.

Learn their story. Support their call for justice. Amplify their voices. Because when those on the frontlines lead, justice is within reach.

Shiva Gounden is the head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific. This article series is republished with the permission of Greenpeace.

* This refers to the period from 1957 — when the US Atomic Energy Commission declared Rongelap Atoll safe for habitation despite known contamination — to 1985, when Greenpeace assisted the Rongelap community in relocating due to ongoing radiation concerns. The Compact of Free Association, signed in 1986, finally started acknowledging damages caused by nuclear testing to the populations of Rongelap.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The lunch spot’s seasonal menus are planned at least three months in advance, said Andrew Torrens, Dig’s director of supply, meaning the avo smash has been in the works for a while. However, if the United States decides to escalate a global trade war next month, Dig will have to come up with a backup plan fast.

“If avocado prices explode, what’s our backup? How do we pivot?” said Torrens on a recent phone call. 

Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada — creating confusion for restaurant owners, food distributors, grocers, and consumers who rely on the United States’ neighbor to the south for fruits and vegetables year-round. On February 1, the president signed an executive order levying a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico. However, he has twice pushed back the start date; earlier this month, he paused tariffs on most goods coming in from Mexico and Canada until April 2. What will actually happen on that date — which Trump has dubbed “Liberation Day” — is still largely unclear.

A tariff on goods from Mexico, the single largest supplier of horticultural imports to the U.S., would almost certainly mean higher prices at the grocery store. It could also, according to experts, increase food waste along the supply chain.

Dig sources most of its avocados from Mexico, where the warm climate is ideal for growing these fruits. This is common — in fact, about 90 percent of avocados consumed in the U.S. come from Mexico, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “We rely on imports, from Mexico in particular, on things like fresh fruit and vegetables in order to meet year-round consumer demand,” said David Ortega, a professor focused on agricultural economics and policy at Michigan State University. Tariffs have the potential to send those prices soaring by raising the cost of production. But the lack of clarity around U.S. trade relations is already impacting operations in the food and beverage industry.

“There’s so much uncertainty, you don’t know how to operate your business and you don’t know how to plan for it,” said Torrens. “If you knew what the new reality was, you’d adapt to it.”

Other food chains are reeling from the Trump administration’s policies. In an annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the salad chain Sweetgreen listed “international trade barriers” as one factor that could spike the cost of ingredients like avocados; it also mentioned the threat of mass deportation of undocumented workers as a supply chain disruption. Asked about tariffs, Scott Boatwright, the CEO of the Mexican-inspired burrito giant Chipotle, told reporters that the company would not pass on higher costs to the customer. “​​It is our intent as we sit here today to absorb those costs,” Boatwright told NBC Nightly News on March 2, just days before Trump announced a one-month pause in tariffs for goods covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, the trade agreement he negotiated during his first term. 

Much has been written and said about the economic impacts of tariffs. One lesser-known side effect — which could also have environmental consequences — is the potential for more food loss and waste. This can happen at various points along the food supply chain, from the farm to the U.S.-Mexico border to grocery store shelves. “I think tariffs are a bit of a supply chain disruption,” not unlike the ones felt during the pandemic, said Brenna Ellison, professor of agribusiness management at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The trouble stems from the fact that fruit and vegetables are highly perishable. 

“If we’re having trouble getting them in the country because it costs more, if that creates more hesitation among U.S. buyers to get those products into the country, the clock is ticking really fast,” said Ellison. Items that normally would make their way to U.S. consumers will “go to waste quickly unless we can find some alternate use for them.”

Food loss and waste are measured by looking at how much edible food grown for human consumption doesn’t end up feeding people — whether that’s at the harvesting and processing stage or further along the way to the consumer, like in stores or kitchens. When organic matter, like fruits and vegetables, is thrown out, it often winds up in landfills — where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as it rots. In the U.S., a majority of wasted food — about 60 percent — goes to landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA also found that every year, 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents are emitted from food waste in landfills. 

During the pandemic, there were reports of farmers leaving food to rot in the fields, as restaurants shut down and growers lost access to their regular customers. Ellison states this could happen again, if tariffs raise the price of agricultural goods to the point that growers are not confident they’ll be able to sell as much product as they’re used to and recoup the cost of harvesting. 

But she noted that it does not necessarily mean those crops are sent to a landfill. “In some cases, depending on the crop, it can be tilled back into the soil,” sending plant nutrients back to the earth, said Ellison.

However, more waste can happen further along the supply chain — on the way to market or in grocery stores. If tariffs lead to delays in processing at the border, that could lead to more produce spoiling before or as it meets the consumer, said Ortega. He also mentioned that when the Trump administration first announced tariffs, “a lot of importers started to do what we call ‘front-loading’; they started to get as much product over the border in an effort to beat the tariff.”

Ordering fresh produce in excess means you have to sell it. Multiple Whole Foods Market stores in New York City in mid-March had a promotion on Mexican produce, including avocados and mangos. Whole Foods did not respond to a request for comment about whether the sale was related to tariff announcements. United Natural Foods Inc. — the importer for Whole Foods — had no comment, said Kristin Jimenez, the corporation’s vice president of corporate communications.

When food is left on grocery store shelves, it can also lead to food waste, said Ellison at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. That can happen when retailers over-order produce and can’t sell all of it — or when prices go up and “people just can’t afford” to buy it, Ellison added. 

There’s also a chance that consumers could end up seeing more limited availability of goods as retailers try to switch up their sourcing to avoid tariffs.

While Trump campaigned on lowering the cost of goods at the grocery store, a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico could make basics like fruits and vegetables even more expensive. That has hunger relief organizations worried, too. 

“We’re obviously concerned that anytime there’s a potential disruption in the supply chain, particularly with fruits and vegetables, it could impact our ability to feed those in need,” said Jen Cox, the chief development officer at Food Forward, a food rescue operation focused on redistributing fresh produce to food banks, after-school programs, and more. She added that tariffs could exacerbate an already challenging cost-of-living situation for many people in the U.S., leading to an increase in hunger. 

The U.S. set a goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030 — we’re nowhere near that. Should tariffs drive an increase in food sent to landfills, it will be one of multiple knock-on effects that trade barriers will have on consumers. “It’s sort of a conflation of all of these situations,” said Cox. Those compounding crises — economic, social, and environmental — mean that organizations like hers could have their hands full in the coming months, working to fill the gaps that “America First” trade policies will likely create. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Tariffs won’t just hit your wallet. They could also increase food waste. on Mar 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

The lunch spot’s seasonal menus are planned at least three months in advance, said Andrew Torrens, Dig’s director of supply, meaning the avo smash has been in the works for a while. However, if the United States decides to escalate a global trade war next month, Dig will have to come up with a backup plan fast.

“If avocado prices explode, what’s our backup? How do we pivot?” said Torrens on a recent phone call. 

Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada — creating confusion for restaurant owners, food distributors, grocers, and consumers who rely on the United States’ neighbor to the south for fruits and vegetables year-round. On February 1, the president signed an executive order levying a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico. However, he has twice pushed back the start date; earlier this month, he paused tariffs on most goods coming in from Mexico and Canada until April 2. What will actually happen on that date — which Trump has dubbed “Liberation Day” — is still largely unclear.

A tariff on goods from Mexico, the single largest supplier of horticultural imports to the U.S., would almost certainly mean higher prices at the grocery store. It could also, according to experts, increase food waste along the supply chain.

Dig sources most of its avocados from Mexico, where the warm climate is ideal for growing these fruits. This is common — in fact, about 90 percent of avocados consumed in the U.S. come from Mexico, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “We rely on imports, from Mexico in particular, on things like fresh fruit and vegetables in order to meet year-round consumer demand,” said David Ortega, a professor focused on agricultural economics and policy at Michigan State University. Tariffs have the potential to send those prices soaring by raising the cost of production. But the lack of clarity around U.S. trade relations is already impacting operations in the food and beverage industry.

“There’s so much uncertainty, you don’t know how to operate your business and you don’t know how to plan for it,” said Torrens. “If you knew what the new reality was, you’d adapt to it.”

Other food chains are reeling from the Trump administration’s policies. In an annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the salad chain Sweetgreen listed “international trade barriers” as one factor that could spike the cost of ingredients like avocados; it also mentioned the threat of mass deportation of undocumented workers as a supply chain disruption. Asked about tariffs, Scott Boatwright, the CEO of the Mexican-inspired burrito giant Chipotle, told reporters that the company would not pass on higher costs to the customer. “​​It is our intent as we sit here today to absorb those costs,” Boatwright told NBC Nightly News on March 2, just days before Trump announced a one-month pause in tariffs for goods covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, the trade agreement he negotiated during his first term. 

Much has been written and said about the economic impacts of tariffs. One lesser-known side effect — which could also have environmental consequences — is the potential for more food loss and waste. This can happen at various points along the food supply chain, from the farm to the U.S.-Mexico border to grocery store shelves. “I think tariffs are a bit of a supply chain disruption,” not unlike the ones felt during the pandemic, said Brenna Ellison, professor of agribusiness management at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The trouble stems from the fact that fruit and vegetables are highly perishable. 

“If we’re having trouble getting them in the country because it costs more, if that creates more hesitation among U.S. buyers to get those products into the country, the clock is ticking really fast,” said Ellison. Items that normally would make their way to U.S. consumers will “go to waste quickly unless we can find some alternate use for them.”

Food loss and waste are measured by looking at how much edible food grown for human consumption doesn’t end up feeding people — whether that’s at the harvesting and processing stage or further along the way to the consumer, like in stores or kitchens. When organic matter, like fruits and vegetables, is thrown out, it often winds up in landfills — where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as it rots. In the U.S., a majority of wasted food — about 60 percent — goes to landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA also found that every year, 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents are emitted from food waste in landfills. 

During the pandemic, there were reports of farmers leaving food to rot in the fields, as restaurants shut down and growers lost access to their regular customers. Ellison states this could happen again, if tariffs raise the price of agricultural goods to the point that growers are not confident they’ll be able to sell as much product as they’re used to and recoup the cost of harvesting. 

But she noted that it does not necessarily mean those crops are sent to a landfill. “In some cases, depending on the crop, it can be tilled back into the soil,” sending plant nutrients back to the earth, said Ellison.

However, more waste can happen further along the supply chain — on the way to market or in grocery stores. If tariffs lead to delays in processing at the border, that could lead to more produce spoiling before or as it meets the consumer, said Ortega. He also mentioned that when the Trump administration first announced tariffs, “a lot of importers started to do what we call ‘front-loading’; they started to get as much product over the border in an effort to beat the tariff.”

Ordering fresh produce in excess means you have to sell it. Multiple Whole Foods Market stores in New York City in mid-March had a promotion on Mexican produce, including avocados and mangos. Whole Foods did not respond to a request for comment about whether the sale was related to tariff announcements. United Natural Foods Inc. — the importer for Whole Foods — had no comment, said Kristin Jimenez, the corporation’s vice president of corporate communications.

When food is left on grocery store shelves, it can also lead to food waste, said Ellison at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. That can happen when retailers over-order produce and can’t sell all of it — or when prices go up and “people just can’t afford” to buy it, Ellison added. 

There’s also a chance that consumers could end up seeing more limited availability of goods as retailers try to switch up their sourcing to avoid tariffs.

While Trump campaigned on lowering the cost of goods at the grocery store, a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico could make basics like fruits and vegetables even more expensive. That has hunger relief organizations worried, too. 

“We’re obviously concerned that anytime there’s a potential disruption in the supply chain, particularly with fruits and vegetables, it could impact our ability to feed those in need,” said Jen Cox, the chief development officer at Food Forward, a food rescue operation focused on redistributing fresh produce to food banks, after-school programs, and more. She added that tariffs could exacerbate an already challenging cost-of-living situation for many people in the U.S., leading to an increase in hunger. 

The U.S. set a goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030 — we’re nowhere near that. Should tariffs drive an increase in food sent to landfills, it will be one of multiple knock-on effects that trade barriers will have on consumers. “It’s sort of a conflation of all of these situations,” said Cox. Those compounding crises — economic, social, and environmental — mean that organizations like hers could have their hands full in the coming months, working to fill the gaps that “America First” trade policies will likely create. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Tariffs won’t just hit your wallet. They could also increase food waste. on Mar 28, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

While New York City’s law functions differently from Berkeley’s, legal experts say that this month’s decision provides strong legal footing for all types of local policies to phase out gas in buildings — and could encourage cities to once again take ambitious action.

“It’s a clear win in that regard, because the 9th Circuit decision has had a really chilling effect on local governments,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Now there’s something else to point to, and a good reason for hope for local governments that may have back-burnered their building electrification plans to bring those to the forefront again.”

In 2021, New York City adopted Local Law 154, which sets an air emissions limit for indoor combustion of fuels within new buildings. Under the law, the burning of “any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy” is prohibited. That standard effectively bans gas-burning stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and any other fossil-fuel powered appliances. Instead, real estate developers have to install electric appliances, like induction stoves and heat pumps. The policy went into effect in 2024 for buildings under seven stories, and will apply to taller buildings starting in 2027.

Berkeley’s law, on the other hand, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction. The first-of-its-kind policy was passed in 2019 and inspired nearly a hundred local governments across the country to introduce similar laws. But the ordinance quickly faced a lawsuit by the California Restaurant Association, which argued that gas stoves were essential for the food service industry. In April 2023, the 9th Circuit court ruled in favor of the restaurant industry, holding that federal energy efficiency standards preempted Berkeley’s policy. In January 2024, a petition by the city of Berkeley to rehear the case on the 9th Circuit was denied.  

Last year’s denial of a rehearing included a detailed dissent by eight of the 29 judges on the 9th Circuit, who argued that the court’s ruling had been decided “erroneously” and “urge[d] any future court” considering the same argument “not to repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.” Writing a dissent at all is unusual for an action as procedural as denying a rehearing, Turner noted. “It was clearly drafted to give a road map to other courts to find differently than the 9th Circuit did.” 

One year later, that’s exactly what happened. In the New York City lawsuit, building industry groups and a union whose members work on gas infrastructure used the same logic that prevailed in the Berkeley case, arguing that the city’s electrification law is preempted by energy efficiency standards under the federal Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975, or EPCA. This law sets national efficiency standards for major household appliances like furnaces, stoves, and clothes dryers. Under the law, states and cities can’t set their own energy conservation standards that would contradict federal ones. The trade groups argued that EPCA should also preempt any local laws, like New York’s, that would prevent the use of fossil-fuel powered appliances that meet national standards. 

“By design, the city set that level so low as to ban all gas and oil appliances,” the groups wrote in their complaint. “The city’s gas ban thus prohibits all fuel gas appliances, violating federal law” and “presents a significant threat for businesses in New York City that sell, install, and service gas plumbing and infrastructure.”

Citing the 9th Circuit’s dissent, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed those claims. The plaintiffs’ argument broadens the scope of EPCA beyond reasonable bounds, District Judge Ronnie Abrams wrote in the court’s opinion. Regulating fuel use within certain buildings is standard practice in states and cities, she noted: New York City, for example, has banned the indoor use of kerosene space heaters for decades. “Were plaintiffs correct about the scope of EPCA, these vital safety regulations would likewise be preempted — an absurd result that the court must avoid,” Abrams wrote.

The decision could help reassure some states and cities that withdrew electrification plans after the Berkeley case, said Dror Ladin, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit that submitted an amicus brief on behalf of local environmental groups in the lawsuit. “This ruling demonstrates that there’s absolutely no reason to interpret the Berkeley decision so broadly,” he said. The argument brought forth by trade groups “is one that would bar a whole host of health and safety regulations, and alter the power of cities and states in a way that we’ve never seen in this country.”

By agreeing with the 9th Circuit dissent’s interpretation of EPCA, last week’s decision bolsters all types of electrification policies, including the one in New York City and those modeled after Berkeley, Turner noted. “This decision we’ve just gotten from the Southern District is more broadly protective,” she said. “Even if the air emissions route is not right for a city for whatever reason, other variations of a building electrification requirement or incentive could pass muster.”

The trade groups behind the lawsuit have said they will appeal the decision. Meanwhile, legal challenges using the same arguments brought against Berkeley’s gas ban have been launched against New York’s statewide building code and electrification policies in places like Denver, Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. 

Judges in those cases will inevitably refer to the Berkeley decision and last week’s ruling by the Southern District of New York, said Ladin — and he hopes they’ll give more weight to the latter. “Berkeley is not a well-reasoned decision, and this judge saw right through it, and I think many other judges will see through it too.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can cities ban natural gas in new buildings? A federal judge just said yes. on Mar 25, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Akielly Hu.

The post In Fox’s Wonderland, the Economy is Just Fine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ari Paul.

The New Republic (2/13/25)

Janine Jackson: The difficult and disturbing political moment is throwing some underlying fissures in US society into relief. Along with which side some folks turn out to be on, we’re learning what levers of power regular people actually have and how we can use them. And we’re reminded that the antidote to fear and confusion is one another, is community, including the particularly powerful form of community that is a labor union. Indeed, workers can wield power even shy of a union, though that’s not a story you will often read about in major media. 

Eric Blanc is a longtime labor activist and organizer as well as assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. He’s author of Red State Revolt: The Teacher Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics from Verso and, out this year, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big from UC Press. He also writes the newsletter laborpolitics.com. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Eric Blanc.

Eric Blanc: Thanks for having me on.

JJ: Well, let me ask you to start with federal workers, who are, as we see, a primary target of Trump and Musk, but you remind us federal workers are also a key force of resistance here. Tell us about that.

EB: It’s hard to exaggerate the stakes of the fight right now around federal workers. There’s a reason that Musk and Trump have started by trying to decimate federal services and decimate federal unions, and that’s because they understand that these are blockages on their attempt to have sort of full authoritarian control over the government and to be able to just impose their reactionary agenda irrespective of the law. And they know that they need to not just fire the heads of these agencies, but they need to be able to have a workforce that is so terrified of the administration that they’ll comply even when the law is being broken. 

And so they have to go out after these unions and break them. And in turn, the stakes for, really, all progressive, all working people, anybody who has a stake in democracy, are very high because this is the first major battle of the new administration. And if they’re able to mass fire federal workers despite their legal protections to have job protections, despite the reality that millions of Americans depend on these services—Social Security, Medicaid, just basic environmental health and safety protections—if they’re able to destroy these services upon which so many people depend, this is going to set a basis for them to then go even harder on the rest of society. So think about immigrants and trans people and all of that. So the implications of this battle are very high. It is the case, fortunately, that federal workers are starting to resist, but there’s going to need to be a lot more to be able to push back.

JJ: Well, I grew up outside of DC. Both my parents worked at federal agencies. All of my summer jobs were at federal agencies, and anyone with direct experience knows that, with 0.0 illusions about perfection—but we understand that there are widespread misunderstandings and myths about government, generally, and about federal workers, specifically. Trump says, “We’re bloated, we’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job.” How do we push back against that narrative?

USA Facts (12/19/24)

EB: Yeah, I think the basic response is straightforward, which is to highlight just how important these services are and to note that, far from having a massively expanded bureaucracy, the federal services, like most public services, have actually been starved over the last 50 years. The percentage of the workforce that works for the federal government has continued to decline for the last four decades. And so it’s just not the case that there’s this massively expanding bureaucracy. And if anything, many of the inefficiencies and the problems in the sector are due to a lack of resources and then the lack of ability to really make these the robust programs that they can and should be, and oftentimes in the past were. 

So it’s just not the case that either there’s a massively expanded bureaucracy or that these services are somehow not important. The reality is that the American people, in some ways, don’t see all of these services. They take them for granted. They’re somewhat invisible. So the fact that, up until recently, planes weren’t crashing, well, that’s because you have federal regulators and have well-trained federal air traffic controllers. And so when you start to destroy these services, then all of a sudden it becomes more visible. What will happen if you stop regulating companies on pollution, for instance? Well, companies can go back and do what they did a hundred years ago, which is to systematically dump toxins into the soil, into water, and all of these other things that we almost take for granted now that are unacceptable. Well, if there’s no checks and balances on corporations, who’s going to prevent them from doing all of this? 

And so I do think that there’s just a lot of basic education that needs to be put out there to counter these lies, essentially, of the Trump administration. For instance, the vast majority of federal workers don’t live in DC. This idea that this is all sort of rich bureaucrats in DC—over 80% of federal workers live all across the country, outside of DC. And just monetarily, it’s not the case these are people making hundreds of thousands of dollars, they’re making decent working class wages. Overwhelmingly, you can look at the data. 

So we need to, I think, be really clear both of the importance of these services, but then also just to say it’s a complete myth that the reason that ordinary working class people are suffering is due to federal workers. It’s a tiny part of the federal budget, first of all, the payroll of federal workers. And if you just compare the amount of money that goes to federal workers to, say, the wealth of Elon Musk, there’s no comparison. Elon Musk, richest man on earth, has over $400 billion net worth. That’s almost double what federal workers, 2.3 million federal workers as a whole, make every year. So you just see the actual inequality is not coming from federal workers, it’s coming from the richest in our country and the world.

JJ: Well, an arm we have, a lever we have, is worker organizing to push back against this, besides us at home being angry and throwing our shoes at the TV. We can work together and we have historical models, we have contemporary models and examples of how that can work and how that can play out. 

I want to ask you to talk about the 2018 teacher strikes, because I see that you have lifted that up as a kind of analog, that there are lessons to be learned about places like West Virginia and Oklahoma, red states that in 2018 had this strike by teachers that, against all odds, one would say, were popular, connected with community, and were, in their measure, successful. I wonder what you think some of the tactical lessons were learned there. What did we learn from those strikes?

Jacobin (3/9/18)

EB: That’s a good question, and I think it’s important to start by just noting that these strikes are a good example of why we shouldn’t just succumb to despair now. There’s an overall sense of doom and gloom that nothing can be done because Trump’s in power, but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s accurate that nothing can be done. And the example of the red state strikes are a prime indicator that even when you have very conservative people in power, in government, workers have an ability to use their workplace leverage and their community leverage to win. 

And so in 2018, hundreds of thousands of teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and beyond went on strike. Even though those strikes were illegal, even though these were states in which the unions are very weak, right-to-work states, and even though the electorates in all of these states had voted for Donald Trump, nevertheless they got overwhelming support from the population because they had very simple, resonant demands, like more funding for schools, decent pay for teachers, make sure that there’s enough money so that students can get a decent education. 

These things cut across partisan lines in a way that, similarly, I think that the defense of basic services like Social Security and Medicaid today really does cut across party lines. And the tactics, then, that they used were, well, first they had to get over the fear factor, because these were illegal strikes, so they had to find ways to start generating momentum amongst teachers. They did things like really basic escalating actions like asking people to wear red on one day. So they didn’t start by saying, “Let’s go on strike.” They said, “Can you do this one simple action together? Can we all wear the same color on a given day?” And then they asked the community to come in. They said, “Community members, can you meet us after school on this day? We’re going to talk about our issues together. We’re going to hold up some signs. We’re going to provide some information.” 

So they built with escalating action towards eventually a mass strike. And they used a lot of social media because they couldn’t rely on the unions as much. Social media was very important for connecting workers across these states, for generating momentum. And eventually they were able to have extremely successful walkouts that, despite being illegal, nobody got retaliated against. They won, they forced the government to back down and to meet their demands. And so I do think that that is more or less the game plan for how we’re going to win around Musk and Trump. You have to essentially create enough of a backlash of working people, but then in conjunction with the community, that the politicians are forced to back down.

JJ: Well in worker-to-worker organizing, it seems like what you’re talking about here, I think a lot of us who have worked with organized labor or have that memory think of it as a top-down enterprise. And so worker-to-worker organizing is not just like a bright spot, something to look at, but a way forward, something that can be replicated. You direct something called the Worker to Worker Collaborative. Can you maybe just tell us a little bit about what worker-to-worker organizing is or how it’s different from a model that some folks may hold in their head?

We Are the Union (UC Press, 2025)

EB: Yeah. The basic problem with more traditional, staff-intensive unionism is that it’s just too expensive. It’s too costly, both in terms of money and time, to win big, to organize millions of workers. And whether it’s on offensive battles like unionizing Starbucks or Amazon, or whether it’s defensive battles right now, like defending federal workers, if you’re going to organize enough workers to fight back, there’s just not enough staff to be able to do that. And so part of the problem with the traditional method is that you just can’t win widely enough. You can’t win big enough. 

Worker-to-worker organizing is essentially the form of organizing in which the types of roles that staff normally do are taken on by workers themselves. So strategizing, training and coaching other workers, initiating campaigns—these are things that then become the task and responsibility of workers themselves with coaching and with support, and oftentimes in conjunction with bigger unions. But workers just take on a higher degree of responsibility, and that has been shown to work. The biggest successes we’ve had in the labor movement in recent years, from the teacher strikes, which we talked about, to Starbucks, which has organized now over 560 stores, forced one of the biggest companies in the world to the bargaining table. We’ve seen that it works. 

And it’s just a question now of the rest of the labor movement really investing in this type of bottom-up organizing. And frankly, there is no alternative. The idea that so many in the labor leadership have, that we’re just going to elect Democrats and then they’ll turn it around—well, Democrats are sort of missing in action, and who knows when they’re going to come back into power. And so it’s really incumbent on the labor movement to stop looking from above and start looking, really, to its own rank and say, “Okay, if we’re going to save ourselves, that’s the only possible way. No one’s going to come save us from above.”

JJ: And it seems that it develops also with just a more organic, if I could say, understanding of what the issues are because it’s workers themselves formulating that message rather than leadership saying, “We think this is what will sell, or we think this is what we can get across.” It seems more likely to actually reflect workers’ real concerns.

In These Times, 11/22/24

EB: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, workers are best placed to understand each other’s issues. They’re also the best placed to convince other workers to get on board. One of the things bosses always say whenever there’s a union drive or union fight is, “Oh, the union is this outside third party.” And sometimes there’s a little bit of truth to that. I don’t want to exaggerate the point, but there could be an aspect of the labor movement that can feel a little bit divorced from the direct ownership and experiences of workers. But when workers themselves are organizing, oftentimes in conjunction with unions, but if they really are the people in the lead, then it becomes much harder for the bosses to third-party the union because it’s clear the union is the workers.

JJ: Right, right. Well, how much does it matter, for this kind of bottom-up organizing, whatever it is that’s happening at the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board]? What role—I don’t even actually know what’s happening, it’s in flux as is everything. But you think that maybe not that we shouldn’t worry about it, not that we shouldn’t think about it, but we shouldn’t over-worry about machinations at the NLRB, yeah?

EB: Well, I do think that the Biden NLRB was very good and it helped workers unionize. So the fact that we don’t have that NLRB anymore is a blow to the labor movement. I think we just have to acknowledge that. That being said, it’s still possible to unionize. You don’t need the NLRB to unionize. The labor movement grew and fought for many years before labor law was passed. And even today it’s very ambiguous. The NLRB is sort of paralyzed on a national level, but on a local level you can still run elections. And so it’s not even completely defunct. And I think it’s probably still possible to use it to a certain extent. 

But the reality is that the legal terrain is harder than it was. On the other hand, the urgency is even higher, and you still see workers fighting back and organizing in record numbers. I’ve been really heartened by, despite the fact that the legal regime is harder, you’ve had some major union victories just in the last few weeks under Trump. For instance, in Philadelphia, Whole Foods workers unionized despite Trump, despite an intense union busting campaign coming straight on down from Jeff Bezos. This was only the second time Amazon—because Amazon’s the owner of Whole Foods now—has lost a union election, and that was just a few weeks ago in Philadelphia. 

And so it shows that there is this real anger from below. And I think that there’s something, actually, about the Trump administration, that because it’s so fused to some of the richest people on earth with the administration in an oligarchic manner, but then unionization itself becomes almost a direct way to challenge the Trump regime. Because you’re going up against both their destruction of labor rights, and then also, frankly, it’s just the same people are up top. The bosses and the administration are almost indistinguishable at this point.

JJ: And I feel like entities like Amazon, like Whole Foods, have presented themselves as sort of the future of business, the future of the way we do things. And so I think labor actions, first of all, recognizing that it’s still workers doing this and it’s not happening in a lab somewhere, they just seem like especially important places to call attention to in terms of labor activity.

Eric Blanc: “ I think that the Achilles heel of Trump and his whole movement is that it claims to be populist and it appeals to working class people, but in reality is beholden to the richest people on the planet. So the best way to expose that is by waging battles around economic dignity.”

EB: Yeah. And I think that the Achilles heel of Trump and his whole movement is that it claims to be populist and it appeals to working class people, but in reality is beholden to the richest people on the planet. So the best way to expose that is by waging battles around economic dignity, right? And the labor movement is the number one force that can do that, and force the politicians to show which side they’re on. Are you on the side of Jeff Bezos or are you on the side of low wage workers who are fighting back? Waging more and more of those battles, even if it’s harder because of the legal regime, I think is going to be one of the most crucial ways we have to undermine the support of MAGA amongst working people of all backgrounds.

JJ: Well, and we need one another for that support as we go forward. Well, finally, unless you’re living in a hole or unless you actually like what’s happening, it’s very clear that business as usual isn’t going to do, kind of wherever you’re walking in life, we need to be doing something bigger, bolder. But we know that there are people, to put it crudely, who are more afraid of disruption than they are of suffering. Disruption sounds very scary, doing things the way they haven’t been done yesterday, even though we do have history that we can point to, is scary. 

And I think that makes the stories we tell one another and the stories we tell ourselves so important, the coherence of the vision of the future that we’re able to put out there is so crucial. And of course, that brings me back to media. You mentioned the importance of social media, independent media, just the stories that we tell, the stories that we lift up, the people that we lift up. It seems so important to this fight. It’s not meta phenomena. So I just wonder, finally, what you see as a role for different kinds of media going forward?

Federal Unionists Network

EB: Okay. I think it’s absolutely crucial. One of the reasons why the right has made the inroads it has is that it’s been better at getting its story out there and waging the battles of ideas through the media, through social media, and through more mainstream media. And frankly, our side has trailed. Maybe it’s because we don’t have the same resources, but I think it’s also there’s an underestimation of how important it is to explain what is going on in the world, to name who the real enemies are, and to provide an explanation for people’s real anger and their real anxiety about what’s happening. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely crucial. And I think we need to, as a labor movement, as progressives, as left, really push back and provide an alternative explanation that all of these problems are rooted in the power of billionaires. It’s not rooted because of the immigrants, not because of the federal workers, not because of trans kids.

And I’ll just say that one of the things I find to be hopeful is that social media is being used pretty effectively now by this new federal workers movement, and I’ll give you one plug, which is that they have a new website, go.savepublicservices.com, through which anybody can sign up to get involved in the local actions happening nearby. It’s going to be a rapid response network to stop all of the layoffs that happen locally, wherever you live, and to save the services on which we depend. So people can go to that website, go.savepublicservices.com, and take advantage of that media opportunity to get involved locally.

JJ: Alright then, we’ll end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Eric Blanc. The new book is We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big That’s out now from UC Press, and you can follow his work at laborpolitics.com. Thank you so much, Eric Blanc, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

EB: Thanks for having me on.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Illustration by Paola Bilancieri.

This is just a reminder

That those who make of cheating

A way of life

Those who betray and lie

Who are inured to the pain of others

While continuing to cause pain,

Who destroy livelihoods

Without regret,

Who abuse the weak and unprotected

And deprive them of the most basic rights

To food, to health, to clean air

To justice, to education,

Who make friends of tyrants

And betray the Constitution

Those, I remind

You are not

What one would call

Honorable

People.

The post Just a Reminder appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

The fingerprints of antebellum slavery can be found all over the modern prison system, from who is incarcerated to the methods used behind bars to repress prisoners. Like its antecedent system, mass incarceration also fulfills the function of boosting corporate profits to the tune of $80 billion a year. Bianca Tylek, Executive Director of Worth Rises, joins Rattling the Bars to discuss her organization’s efforts to combat prison profiteering across the country, and expose the corporations plundering incarcerated people and their communities to line the pockets of their shareholders.

Producer / Videographer / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

In the heart of downtown Baltimore lies the Maryland Reception, Diagnostic and Classification Center, commonly called Diagnostic, which is a place where people convicted of a crime go to be classified to a particular prison based on their security level.

December the 5th, 2019, I was released from Reception Diagnostic Classification Center after serving 48 years. I was given $50, no identification, and no way of knowing how to get home. I’m not from Baltimore, I’m from Washington, D.C, and I heard my family member called me. I realized then that I had a way home. This is the state that most people are released from the Maryland system, and prison in general. No source of income, no identification, and no place to stay. So I had a few items, so I had to go get my stuff from my apartment. So they let everybody else look… Everybody came out the back, but they let them go “pew, pew, pew.” So most of them dudes wasn’t long term, they was familiar with the layout, right? Me, I know… I’m familiar with Green Mountain Madison, right? Me and another dude stand down here on the corner. I’m like, “Man…”, because I ain’t know my people. I ain’t know my people here was going to be, I ain’t know if they had got… Because they wouldn’t let me make no collect calls. Right? So every time, and I had money.

Speaker 2:

You’ve been released, and they…

Mansa Musa:

I had money on the books. I’m serious. They wouldn’t even let you make the call. So I kept on dialing, and it would go to a certain point, then it cut off, but my sister say, “Look, come on. Something going on. Let’s go down there.” This is what this show is about. This show is about giving a voice to the voiceless.

As we venture into the segments and the stories that we’ll be telling, we want people to take away from these stories, the human side of these stories. More than anything else, this is not about politics. This is about humanity. We’re trying to address the concerns of people, their families, their friends, and their loved ones that’s affected by the prison industrial complex, be it labor, be it medical, be it the food, be it being released with all identification and just a minimal amount of money to get home, and you don’t even live in the city that they released you from. Rattling the Bars will be covering a multitude of subject matters and a multitude of issues, and we ask that you stay tuned and tune in.

Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. Recently, I had an opportunity to talk to Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises. Worth Rises is an organization whose mission is to complete abolishment of the prison industrial complex as it now exists, they have a strategy where they identify major corporations that are investing in or exploiting labor out of the prison industrial complex. You’ll be astonished at how many corporations have their tentacles in the prison industrial complex and the amount of money they’re sucking out of it in astronomical numbers, but first, we’ll go to this interview I had with Lonnell Sligh, who was on one of our previous episodes to talk about the impact the prison industrial complex is having on the communities at large.

We’re in East Baltimore at Latrobe Projects talking about how, in the shadow of the Maryland Penitentiary and Diagnostic, the housing projects are affected by the existence of these prisons. Many women walk out of their houses in Latrobe into the Maryland prison system, and why? Because of the devastation of the social conditions that exist in this particular community.

Now, my interview with Lonnell Sligh.

When I first got out, I never thought I’d be out and not be in the van. These vans right here, this is all our modes of transportation, three-piece shackle, and that’s how we’re being transported.

Lonnell Sligh:

What we said about the gloom and doom, one of the first things that I noticed when I got to MRDC was the projects and the kids playing outside of their area. Looking out and seeing the kids, and they looking up at this place. So I’m making a connection of that pipeline, because this all they see.

Mansa Musa:

Then when… That’s what he’s seen. What I seen when I came here, this building wasn’t right here. This was a parking lot. This building wasn’t right here. This was a lot. So the kids had a clean shot to the Maryland Penitentiary. So every kid that lived in these projects right here, this is what they seen. They see barbed wire on the Maryland Penitentiary. Then they seen another big building come up, there’s another prison. Then they seen this is a prison, and outside their front door, what they see when they come out their house is barbed wire and a wall.

Lonnell Sligh:

So it might be ill concealed to us, but for them and their mindset, this was a perfect, “Oh man, we got our clients and our…”, what’d you call it when you check in the hotel? Our patrons, you know what I mean, right here, because they got their industry, they got their pipeline, they got everything that they designed this to be.

Mansa Musa:

As you can see from my conversation with Lonnell Sligh, the prison industrial complex has a devastating impact on everyone. The men and women that’s in prison, the communities that they come from, the infrastructure they build on, the entire system has devastating consequences that should be recognized and addressed.

Some communities that they’re building, it’s the major source of their industry, like in Attica and Rikers, Hagerstown, Maryland, Louisiana, but some communities that they’re building, they’re building it for one reason only. To occupy the psyche of the community. So people walk out of their houses every day, this is all they see, and ultimately they find themselves in these spaces, but now you are going to see who’s behind this, the corporations that’s responsible for this exploitation.

I have the list right here. The Prison Industrial Corporation Database put out by Worth Rises. Super Ammo, Visa Outdoors, Warburg Pincus, 3M, T-Mobile, Tyson Foods, SS Corporation, Advanced Technology Groups, major corporations that are using prison labor to exploit it, profit, and profit alone, with no regard to human life.

Now my conversation with Bianca Tylek.

Yeah, we’re talking to Bianca Tylek from Worth Rises. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Bianca, and how you got in this space.

Bianca Tylek:

Sure. Thank you so much again, Mansa, for having me, and so great to meet you, and I’m glad that you’re home. My name is Bianca Tylek, as you noted. I am based in the New York area, and I’m the executive director and founder of Worth Rises. We are a non-profit criminal justice advocacy organization that works nationally to end the exploitation of people who are incarcerated and their loved ones and dismantle the prison industry.

I came to this where I founded the organization, it’s seven and a half years ago now, and we’ve been doing a tremendous amount of work all over the country towards our mission, and I come to this work through a few different sort of paths. I think most recently, I’m an attorney. Before that, I was on Wall Street, and so I actually worked in the investment banking and corporate sector, and then I think previously, what really makes me passionate about this issue is that I was myself an adjudicated youth and had others in my life who had experienced incarceration and were touched by this system, and all of those sorts of experiences collectively have brought me to this point.

Mansa Musa:

Worth Rises is dedicated to dismantling the prison industrial complex, it’s an abolition group, and as I listened to some of the things that you talked about, I thought about the war in Vietnam when the North first became known for their ferocious fighting where they had what they call a Tet offense, and the Tet offense was like when they had their initial salvo of repelling or resisting the United States and South Vietnam, and I thought when I heard some of the ways you was attacking this industry, that came to mind how systematic your group is in terms of dismantling, as you say, dismantling this group.

Bianca Tylek:

Yeah, I appreciate that so much. So I would say we have a three part strategy that we deploy at the organization, and it is narrative policy and corporate, and so each one of those tentacles is sort of a part of how we approach the industry, and specifically not so much guilting it as much as demanding and forcing it and pressuring it into better getting out or not exploiting our people in the same way, and so just to expand a little bit on each, our narrative work is really designed to help educate the populace, the American people and beyond on the harms that the prison industry is committing.

I think in particular, we know that the prison industry is an $80 billion industry, more than that these days, and a lot of people just simply do not know and are not familiar with it. Folks who have done time, like yourself, are familiar with, for example, the cost of phone calls in prison, but a lot of people walking the streets are not. They don’t know that phone calls are so expensive, they don’t know the cost of commissary, they don’t know that people pay medical co-pays, they don’t know that people are making pennies, if anything, an hour for work, and I think often, when we talk about these things, people are pretty surprised, because all of the modern media has people convinced that you go to prison, you get everything you need, and it’s some kind of luxurious, pushy place to be.

So a lot of our role is to simply… Through our narrative work, what we’re trying to do is get people to understand the reality of prisons and jails, both what the experiences are of people there, the exploitation that happens, and then importantly, at the hands of who, and that’s the industry, and so we do everything from published research to storytelling and beyond to help people really understand what the prison industry is.

So that’s sort of the narrative work, and that really builds the foundation, because we need informed people in order to be able to cultivate their outrage into action, and that leads us to our policy work. Our policy work is really designed to undermine the business model of the industry, and so we work to change legislation and regulations that would sort of hinder the ability of these companies to continue to exploit people in the exact same ways, and so for example, what that means is when it comes to prison telecom, where we know that one in three families with an incarcerated loved one is going into debt over the simple cost of calls and visits, and the large majority of those folks are women who are paying for these calls.

So what we have done in the last about five or so years is we have started a sort of movement to make communication free in prisons and jails. We passed the first piece of legislation in New York City in 2018 to do so, and since then, we’ve been able to pass legislation at the county, state and federal level to make communication entirely free, and today, over 300,000 people who are incarcerated have access to free phone calls, and so that changes the business model and revolutionizes the space entirely.

We also managed to pass game-changing regulations at the FCC to curb the exorbitant charging of phone calls in those places that still do charge for calls, and then finally, in our corporate side of the work, we sort of harness the work we do on the narrative side and the policy side to bring these corporations that are exploiting our communities to account, and really, in some cases, shut them down.

So we have companies that we’ve gone… We’ve had investors divest, we have removed their executives from the boards of cultural institutions like museums. We have blocked mergers and acquisitions. I mean, we’ve done all types of corporate strategies when it comes to those who are exploiting folks who are incarcerated and their loved ones, and we’re bringing some of them to their knees fully to bankruptcy, and so that is the kind of work that we do and really stress that it’s time that this system stopped responding to the profit motives of a few.

Mansa Musa:

Okay, let’s throw in this examination because in California, they was trying to get a proclamation passed about the 13th Amendment, because the genesis of all this has come out of the legalization of slavery under the 13th Amendment. I think that a lot of what we see in concerns of us versus the interest of them comes out of the fact that they can, under… Anyone duly convicted of a crime can be utilized for slave labor, and in California, they voted against this proclamation. How do you see… Is this a correlation between the 13th Amendment prison industrial complex, and if it is and you recognize that, how do y’all look at that? Because this industry is always fluid, it’s continuing to grow, it’s got multiple tentacles, and it’s all designed around profit. So when it comes to profit and capitalism, profit is profit is profit. That’s their philosophy. So however they get it, whoever they get it from, but in this case, they got a cash cow. Talk about that.

Bianca Tylek:

So we actually run a national campaign called End the Exception campaign that is specifically about the 13th Amendment. So we’re very close to this particular part of the fight. So if you visit EndTheException.com, you’ll see that entire campaign, which is, like I said, a campaign to pass a new constitutional amendment that would end the exception in the 13th Amendment.

While we run the national campaign at the federal level, which has over 90 national partners, a lot of states are taking on similar causes, including the state of California, and so California was one of several states in the last five or six years that brought a state constitutional amendment through a ballot initiative. Eight others have won in the last five years. So I do think despite the fact, and I have thoughts about California, despite the fact that California lost, other states like Alabama, Tennessee, Oregon, Vermont have all passed, and so I remained hopeful that it’s something that we can do both at the state level, but also at the federal level.

I think unfortunately, California lost, I think for various reasons, both the moment in time in California. There was also Proposition 36, which was expanding sort of tough on crime policies, and I think Prop 6 got a little bit mixed up into that. The language of Prop 6 was really not particularly helpful, and I think some of the local efforts also needed to coalesce and have those things happen, maybe, and hopefully it would’ve passed. It lost by a relatively small margin, albeit it did lose.

So I think your question, though, about how do these things relate, I mean, I guess what I’d say which degree with you, which is that I think that exploitation in prisons and jails is absolutely rooted in antebellum slavery, right? I think that what the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment in large part did was certainly, obviously, free a lot of people, but it also transitioned slavery behind walls, where you can’t see it, and then our carceral system, because in the years that followed during reconstruction, the prison population went from being 99% white to being 99% black. Many of the practices of antebellum slavery were shifted into the carceral setting and became normalized in that setting and continue today.

I tell people all the time, when you think of solitary confinement, which, as you know, is often referred to as the hole or the box, those are terms that come from antebellum slavery. When enslaved people disobeyed, their enslavers, they would be put in what was called the hot box or a literal hole.

Mansa Musa:

A hole, exactly.

Bianca Tylek:

And held there in darkness, in solitary without food, separation affairs, things like that, and those are essentially punishments that we’ve just modernized, but don’t actually change the true function of them. They’re meant to break down people into obedience, and the same terminology is used and the same practices are used.

Consider another example. When people who are enslaved again would disobey their enslavers, they would often be separated from their families. Their children would be sold off or their spouse would be sent away. Well, similarly, when people who are incarcerated exhibit what the system would call disobedience, they can be denied visits and phone calls with their families, contact, right? All of these sort of penal sanctions that exist today were the same ones that existed then, just in a newer 2025 version, and so I’d say I think much of… And that’s not to obviously mention the most obvious aspect, which people in prison are forced to work and they’re forced to work often for essentially nothing, and then are expected to be grateful for crumbs when given 15 cents or 30 cents on the hour or something like that, and so I think it would be foolish for anyone to suggest that the system isn’t once that was adapted from antebellum slavery.

Mansa Musa:

As you can see from our conversation with Bianca Tylek, the extent to which the prison industrial complex and corporate America merge is beyond imagination.

She was once involved with the criminal justice system. This in and of itself helped her to focus on what she wanted to do. She worked on Wall Street, and while on Wall Street, she started seeing the impact that corporate America was having on the prison industrial complex, the profit margin. From this, she developed this strategy and this organization on how to attack it. As you can see, she’s very effective, as is her organization, in dismantling the prison industrial complex.

Recently, I had the pleasure and opportunity to speak to some young people at the University of Maryland College Park. The group is the Young Democrat Socialists of America. You’ll see from these clips how engaging these conversations were, and when they say we look to our future, remember, our movement started on the college campuses. The intelligent element of society started organizing. As they started organizing, they got the grassroots communities involved, and this is what we’re beginning to see once again.

Student:

So today we have a speaker event with Mansa Musa, AKA Charles Hopkins. He is a former Black Panther, political prisoner. He’s done a lot of activism after re-entering society. He spent nearly five decades in prison, and that kind of radicalized him in his experience, and you can learn a lot more about him today during this meeting.

Mansa Musa:

We’re about completely abolishing the prison system. What would that look like? We was having this conversation. What did that look like? You’re going to open the doors up and let everybody out? I’ve been in prison for their year. It’s some people that I’ve been around in prison. If I see him on the street today or tomorrow, I might go call the police on it, because I know that’s how their thinking is, but at the same token, in a civil society, we have an obligation to help people, and that’s what we should be doing.

People have been traumatized, and trauma becoming vulgar, everybody like, “Oh, trauma experience.” So trauma becoming vulgar, people have been traumatized and have not been treated for their trauma. So they dial down on it, and that become the norm. So we need to be in a society where we’re healing people, and that’s what I would say when it comes to the abolition. Yeah, we should abolish prisons as they exist now. They’re cruel, they’re.

You got the guards in Rikers Island talking about protesting and walk out, wild cat strike, because they saying that the elimination of solitary confinement is a threat to them. How is it a threat to you that you put me in a cell for three years on end, bringing my meal to me, and say that if you eliminate this right here, me as a worker is going to be threatened by that not existing? How is that? That don’t even make sense, but this is the attitude that you have when it comes to the prison industrial complex.

The prison industrial complex is very profitable. The prison industrial complex, it became like an industry in and of itself. Every aspect of it has been privatized. The telephone’s been privatized, the medical has been privatized, the clothing’s been privatized. So you got a private entity saying, “I’m going to make all the clothes for prisons.” You got another private entity saying, “I want the telephone contract for all the prisons.” You got another company saying, “I want to be responsible for making the bids, the metal,” and all that. Which leads me to Maryland Correction Enterprise.

Maryland Correction Enterprise is one of the entities that does this. There’s a private corporation that has preferential bidding rights on anything that’s being done in Maryland. I’m not going to say these chairs, but I’m going to say any of them tags is on your car, that’s Maryland, it’s Maryland Enterprise. I press tags. So I know that to be a fact. A lot of the desks in your classroom come from Maryland Correction Enterprise. So what they giving us? They gave us 90 cents a day, and you get a bonus. Now, you get the bonus based on how much you produce. So everybody… Now you trying to get, “Okay, I’m trying to get $90 a month. I just started.” So somebody’s been there for a while, might be getting $2 a day and some. We pressing tags till your elbows is on fire, because you’re trying to make as much money as you possibly can, you’re trying to produce as many tags as you possibly can to make money, but they’re getting millions of dollars from the labor.

Student:

In your previous podcast episode, you interviewed the state senator, and he mentioned the 13th amendment and the connection between prison labor and slavery. So what do you think are some of the connections between the prison abolition movement and the historical movement for the abolition of slavery?

Mansa Musa:

Right now, the 13th Amendment says that slavery is illegal except for involuntary servitude if you’re duly convicted of a crime. So if you’re duly convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave, and the difference between that and the abolition movement back in the historical was the justification. The justification for it now is you’ve been convicted of a crime. Back then, I just kidnapped and brought you here and made you work. So the disconnect was, this is a human, you’re taking people and turn them into chattel slaves, versus, “Oh, the reason why I can work you from sunup to sundown, you committed a crime,” but the reality is you put that in there so that you could have free labor. All that is is a Jim Crow law, black code. It’s the same. It’s the same in and of itself. It’s not no different.

You work me in a system… In some states, they don’t even pay you at all. South Carolina, they don’t even pay you, but they work you, and Louisiana, they still walk… They got police, they got the guards on horses with shotguns, and they out there in the fields.

In some places, in North Carolina and Alabama, they work you in some of the most inhumane conditions, like freezers. Women and men. Put you to work in a meat plant in the freezer and don’t give you the proper gear to be warm enough to do the work, and then if you complain, because they use coercion, say, “Okay, you don’t want to work? We’re going to take the job from you, transfer you to a prison, where now you’re going to have to fight your way out.” You are going to literally have to go in there and get a knife and defend yourself. So this is your choice. Go ahead and work in these inhumane conditions, or say no and go somewhere and be sent back to a maximum security prison where you have to fight your way out.

So now it’s no different. Only difference is it’s been legislated, it’s been legalized under the 13th Amendment, and in response to abolition, so we’ve been trying to change the 13th amendment. We had an attempt in California where they put a bill out to try to get it reversed, and the state went against it. The state was opposed to it. Why would I want to stop having free labor? The firefighters in California, they do the same work that the firefighters right beside them… They do the same work, the same identical work. They’re fighting fire, their lives in danger, they getting 90 cents a day, maybe $90 a month. They don’t have no 401k, they don’t have no retirement plan, and they’re being treated like everybody else. “Oh, go out there and fight the fire.”

So yeah, in terms of abolition, the abolition movement is to try to change the narrative and get the 13th Amendment taken off out of the state constitution, because a lot of states, they adopted it. They adopted it in their own state constitution, a version of the 13th Amendment, that says that except if you’ve been duly convicted for a crime, you can be treated as a slave. If you’ve been convicted of a crime, you can be treated as a slave. That’s basically the bottom line of it. That’s our reality.

So as we move forward, my message to y’all is don’t settle for mediocrity. Don’t settle for nothing less. Whatever you thinking that you think should be done, do it. If you think that, but more importantly, in doing it, make sure it’s having an impact.

There you have it. Rattling the Bars. As you can see from these conversations, the seriousness that corporations have on the prison industrial complex, how they’re exploiting prison labor with impunity. We’ve seen this from the conversation we had with Bianca Tylek, who talked about her involvement with the criminal justice system, but more importantly, how she worked on Wall Street, how she developed this strategy of dismantling the prison industrial complex by going straight to the heart of the matter, corporate America. Her strategy, the organization’s strategy is to dismantle it one corporation at a time.

We’ve also seen it from our conversation with Lonnell Sligh, as we talked about the impact that these corporations have on the community, how most communities live in the shadow of major prisons, like in East Baltimore, the troll projects, where kids come out every day and see these buildings and ask their parents, “What is that?”, and their parents say, “Oh, that’s where you going to go if you keep doing what you’re doing,” or, “That’s where your uncle’s at,” or, “You don’t want to go there.” At any rate, it has no positive value to their psyche, but more importantly, we’ve seen how the youth are taking the stand to change and find this place in the struggle.

The exception clause and exception movement to abolish the 13th Amendment is constant, and on the rise. We have suffered some major setbacks, we’re trying to get legislation passed, but the fact that we have a consensus on, “This has to go,” because this is the reason why we find ourselves in this situation, where corporations have unlimited access to free prison labor with impunity. We ask that you give us your feedback on these episodes. More importantly, we ask that you tell us what you think. Do you think the exception clause should be passed? Do you think they should abolish the 13th Amendment, or do you think that corporations should be able to profit off of free prison labor? Do you think that communities should not be overshadowed by prisons? That our children should have the right to be in an environment that’s holistic? Or do you think that our youth that’s taking a stand against corporate America, fascism and imperialism should be given coverage? That institutions of higher learning should be held accountable for who they invest in? Tell us what you think. We look forward to hearing from you.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mansa Musa.

Walter Salles’ new film I’m Still Here, is a moving, true-story, Oscar-nominated portrait of a middle-class, leftwing family in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s struggling to come to terms with the father’s disappearance – 25 years later confirmed as murder – by the Brazilian military dictatorship.

The mother and a teenage daughter spend time inside a regime torture camp too, before being released.

What struck me powerfully in the film was the endless supply of compliant regime officials who impassively, conscientiously carried out the abuse of men, women and children.

It was a reminder that plenty of these people live among us – and that they have been doing very little to hide who they are over the past 16 months.

They are the politicians mangling language and international law by terming as “self-defence” the collective punishment of the people of Gaza through carpet bombing and starvation – crimes against humanity.

They are the police officers raiding people’s homes, and detaining and arresting independent journalists and human rights activists, including Jewish ones, for protesting the slaughter in Gaza.

They are the establishment journalists pretending the carnage inflicted on the people of Gaza is just another routine news story, less important than the death of an elderly actor, or the latest outburst from serial misogynist Andrew Tate.

And, more than anything, they are the army of ordinary people on social media:

• Mocking the families of children shredded by US-supplied bombs;
• Reciting endless claims of “Gazawood” (Gaza-Hollywood), as if the levelling of the tiny territory, visible from outer space, is a fiction and that the only victims are Hamas fighters;
• Defending as a legitimate legal procedure the abduction of hundreds of doctors and nurses from Gaza’s hospitals into “detention camps” where torture, sexual abuse and rape are routine;
• Justifying the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals – leaving premature babies, pregnant women, the sick and the elderly to die – on the basis of entirely unsubstantiated, and self-serving, Israeli government claims that each is a Hamas “command and control centre”;
• Cheering the erasure of the only documentary on Gaza humanising its children because the father of the 13-year-old narrator is a scientist appointed by the Hamas government to oversee what was the agricultural sector before Israel destroyed all the enclave’s vegetation.

These people live among us. They grow more confident by the day.

And one day, if we don’t fight them now, they will be putting a hood over our head to take us to a secret location.

They will be across the desk, asking us the same questions over and over again, making us pore over photo albums to find faces we recognise, people we can inform on.

They will lead us to dirty cells, where there is a hard shelf for a bed, no blanket to keep us warm, no chance to shower, a hole in the ground for a toilet, and one meal to sustain us through the day.

They will escort us silently through long dark corridors to a room where they will be waiting for us.

There will be a chair in the centre of an empty room. They will nod for us to sit down. And then it will begin.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

The first vault opening of the year came Tuesday, when government officials and scientists, traveling great distances from countries like Brazil, Malawi, and the Philippines gathered to make a deposit. Their contribution of 14,022 samples from 21 gene banks around the world added to what is already the planet’s largest collection dedicated to long-term seed storage. Organizers say Svalbard’s growing stockpile, which includes traditional crops such as millet and drought-tolerant legumes, known colloquially as “opportunity crops,” will ensure future farmers have what they need to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable climate. 

Even as the Trump administration slashes support for climate-related research and guts the U.S. Agency for International Development and Department of Agriculture, safeguarding crop diversity remains a priority for much of the international community.

This deposit is “about more than storing seeds,” said Stefan Schmitz, executive director of Crop Trust, the nonprofit organization that helps manage the vault alongside the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center. “It’s about defusing a ticking time bomb that threatens our global food system … protecting crop diversity is a global imperative. We must defend and preserve these genetic resources to prevent our fragile world from becoming even more unstable.” He told Grist that now is the time for “decision-makers around the world to recognize the urgency and take action together to secure the future of food.”

The latest additions include sorghum and pearl millet shipped from Sudan’s crop gene bank, nearly destroyed during the country’s civil war. The delegation from Malawi, where a barrage of extreme weather events have throttled subsistence farmers and deepened a hunger crisis, provided “velvet beans,” a nitrogen-fixing legume that acts as a natural fertilizer. Staple varieties of rice, beans and maize came from Brazil, where such crops are seeing major yield losses. And the Philippines deposited sorghum, eggplant, and lima beans from a gene bank already ravaged by typhoons.

“In the face of climate change, which we are already feeling with all the extreme weather conditions in the Philippines, it becomes more pressing to duplicate these collections in other gene banks like Svalbard to safeguard [them],” Hidelisa de Chavez, a researcher at the University of the Philippines’ National Plant Genetic Resources Laboratory, or NPGRL, told Grist. 

For 16 straight years, the Philippines has ranked highest on the World Risk Index, which measures countries’ vulnerability to extreme weather. In 2006, Typhoon Xangsane flooded the laboratory’s main research building in Los Baños, almost wiping out the collection, said de Chavez: “The whole gene bank was submerged in mud and water.” The damage and subsequent loss of power caused the “irreversible” loss of several traditional varieties of crops, with some 70 percent of the collection ruined. 

The NPGRL has sent roughly 1,000 genetic samples of crops to Svalbard as part of an initiative led by Crop Trust to help “future-proof the world’s food supply.” Ahead of Tuesday’s deposit, de Chavez’s team prepared a selection of sorghum, lima beans, eggplant and rice beans. Each is woven into the livelihoods and food culture of Indigenous and rural communities across the Philippines.

Even so, the lab is not contributing about half as many samples as it would like to because climate change is making it harder to grow what it would like to preserve. This trip saw de Chavez deposit just 75, as compared to 983 last year.

Haunted by the lingering ghosts of one disastrous typhoon and the looming specters of those to come, every storm season sees de Chavez increasingly fearful for the vulnerable crops she works to preserve. It gives her peace of mind to know samples of Filipino food staples now sit in an underground safe near the North Pole. Though the vault faces escalating risks and speculation over its ability to withstand the wrath of a warming planet, she still thinks the seeds stored at Svalbard have a much greater shot at prevailing there than anywhere else on Earth. 

“Given climate change and the extreme weather conditions, we cannot say that these crops will still be available for future generations, so we have to continue conserving,” said de Chavez. “If this disappears in the field, what would be our alternative, if we don’t have it conserved? We cannot go back.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ‘doomsday’ seed vault in Svalbard just added thousands of climate-hardy crops on Feb 26, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Ayurella Horn-Muller.

Most people didn’t like the spectacle, an attempt to grab public attention by vandalizing a celebrated work of art, but that was kind of the point. After decades of peaceful protests, climate activists hadn’t gotten anything close to what they wanted. Even as people around the world had begun to experience the sobering effects of climate change firsthand — sweating through heat waves and breathing in acrid smoke from wildfires — global carbon dioxide emissions were still increasing, and elected governments were still signing off on new oil and gas projects. Activists felt like they had to try something different: What could they do to shake things up and get people’s attention?

That question is only becoming more pressing as President Donald Trump begins his second term in office, declaring an “energy emergency” in his inaugural address on Monday to expand fossil fuel production. “This moment is so incredibly far from anywhere close to even where we want to be fighting on,” said Keanu Arpels-Josiah, a 19-year-old organizer with Fridays for Future NYC, a youth-led climate activist group, in the days after the November presidential election. 

When Trump entered the White House for the first time in 2017, climate activism was infused with a fresh wave of energy, building on the momentum of the broader “American Resistance” that rose up against his policies. A movement once tied to pipeline protests and university divestment started attracting widespread attention, with brand-new groups led by young people like the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour staging marches and occupying Congressional offices. The Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg started skipping school on Fridays in 2018 to protest the lack of government action, inspiring teenagers around the world to participate in “school strikes.” Calling for a “Green New Deal” became a popular slogan among progressives.

But when President Joe Biden took office in 2021, some of that energy fizzled out, and the climate movement fractured. Big environmental organizations like the Sierra Club tried to influence federal policy — and succeeded for once, with Congress passing the largest investment in climate action in United States history in 2022 — while radical grassroots activists from Climate Defiance demanded more, heckling the White House climate adviser, Ali Zaidi, on multiple occasions.

“We were seeing this crazy, very, very fractured climate movement, which was in abeyance, where most Americans, while they said they cared about climate change, were not willing to march in the streets for it,” said Dana Fisher, a professor at American University who has studied climate activism for more than two decades. “That all is over.” 

With Trump back in the White House, she expects climate advocates will start working together again, alongside people representing other progressive causes, since they’ll have a common enemy. “Will the Resistance rise again? Yes,” Fisher said. “Will the Resistance look the same? Absolutely not.” 

The first sign that progressive activists would respond to the new Trump administration by banding together came two days before the presidential inauguration, when an estimated 50,000 people participated in the People’s March in Washington, D.C., on January 18, protesting for reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and racial justice, along with other causes. Of the 453 protesters that Fisher’s team surveyed at the event, 70 percent named climate change as one of their top motivations for participating. 

“All the different things we’re fighting for really are under attack,” Arpels-Josiah said. “I think we have no other option than to organize in a moment like this, right?” His organization, Fridays for Future NYC, is planning to hold a Youth Climate Justice Convergence on March 1 to discuss how to push for change in New York at the local and state level.

Climate activists expressed an appetite to try something new, but they haven’t nailed down an overall strategy for the next four years. “There’s definitely a sentiment that we’ve struggled to turn marches and mass mobilizations in one place into meaningful political change that changes people’s lives,” said Saul Levin, the director of campaigns and politics at the Green New Deal Network, a coalition of climate, labor, and justice organizations. “And so it’s not that we’re giving up on those methods, but we’re testing out different things.” Levin didn’t offer specifics about what the coalition will try out, but said he wouldn’t rule any tactics out, since there are different approaches across the movement.

In recent years, activists have blocked traffic in streets, spray-painted Stonehenge, and interrupted events to shame politicians they call “climate criminals.” These are signs that the climate movement is growing a “radical flank,” an offshoot that’s more confrontational and more disruptive. Experts say civil disobedience, even if it alienates people, can sometimes serve to focus attention on a cause and make tamer protests appear more socially acceptable. It’s not the same as establishing cause and effect, but anecdotes suggest there’s something to the idea. Two weeks after activists with Just Stop Oil spent a week blocking traffic in London in November 2022, for instance, surveys found that people in the United Kingdom were more likely to support the more moderate group Friends of the Earth, according to a study last fall. 

“Climate activists will absolutely be staying peaceful, but they will not be staying non-disruptive,” Fisher said. A Trump administration hostile to action could provide more fuel for groups like Climate Defiance, whose activists frequently get arrested for confronting oil executives and politicians.

Of course, civil disobedience is just one tool among many, and activists are leaning into more popular forms of organizing, like rallies, in order to attract a big crowd. “We need everyone right now, and to build real power on climate justice, we need a bigger coalition than we’ve ever had or ever seen,” Levin said at a mass organizing call for climate groups the day after the inauguration. “And that starts by gathering people in communities to build power for people by people.” In February, the Climate Action Campaign, a coalition of environmental and health organizations, plans to hold “Climate Can’t Wait” rallies in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, hoping to “mobilize the largest possible number of people to demand action.”

Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, has been working with organizers in Los Angeles on a number of actions in response to the devastation brought by recent wildfires. In the week before the presidential inauguration, members from the L.A. hub of Sunrise led a multi-day demonstration outside of the Phillips 66 oil facility in Carson, California, demanding that fossil fuel companies “pay up” for their contributions to the climate crisis, which made recent fires more dangerous. 

“If we are to have any hope at truly winning, at truly turning the tides of society, at moving our economy away from the most powerful industry in history, the fossil fuel industry, we must build up the organizing power that it takes to actually disrupt the people in power,” Shiney-Ajay said during the call for climate groups.

Over the course of the five-day protest outside the Phillips 66 facility, neighbors stopped by to show their support — and even the oil refinery’s guards told the group they agreed with them, according to Shiney-Ajay. “Those are the moments that felt the most meaningful,” she said. In the aftermath of the wildfires, the sit-in created an opportunity to meet “people who had never encountered the climate movement at their doorstep before finding themselves in support.”

The Sunrise Movement is drawing inspiration from historical examples of people successfully agitating for change, such as the Civil Rights Movement’s Montgomery bus boycotts of the 1950s, and the United Auto Workers Union strikes in Michigan in the 1930s, according to Dejah Powell, Sunrise’s membership director. “When we look at change and transformation [in society], a lot of it has come from labor: 40-hour workweek, the weekend, paid sick leave,” she said. “It comes from disrupting or threatening capital.” 

Powell said the organization is looking to build on the success of the Friday school strikes that began in 2018, experimenting with sustained, month-long student strikes. The group also seems poised to expand its direct action efforts: Members of Sunrise recently interrupted the confirmation hearing for Trump’s nominee to run the Energy Department, Chris Wright, the CEO of a fracking company. No politician is off-limits, said Shiney-Ajay. “We have a saying: ‘No permanent friends, no permanent enemies.’” The executive director said the organization is open to an array of tactics, though it draws the line at violent protest. 

Despite the peaceful nature of these kinds of demonstrations, Fisher says climate organizers should prepare for a crackdown on protests, with the potential for repression and violence. “I think that what we’re going to see is the Trump administration pushing back and pushing back hard against civil disobedience for sure, and potentially all forms of protest,” she said. “And that is going to quickly escalate what’s going to happen on the streets.” On top of that, over the past decade, more than 20 states have passed laws increasing penalties for protesting near so-called critical infrastructure such as oil and gas facilities, now sometimes punishable by years in prison.

Some of the training that climate activists have been participating in over the past couple of months has focused on nonviolent direct action and defusing tense situations, according to Levin from the Green New Deal Network. “We think that we need a new set of tools and refreshed trainings, because no one can fully predict the level of chaos and repression that’s going to come from this extremist administration.”

Amid that chaos, the climate movement will be looking not just for new tactics, but also an updated message. Some of the economic concerns that are credited with driving Trump into the presidency, such as inflation and the rising cost of living, are connected to climate change, Levin said. The fires in L.A. are one example of how disasters like these threaten people’s livelihoods and financial security, he said. “We’ve talked about these things for years, but we need to update how we’re talking about them.”

Shiney-Ajay sees the L.A. wildfires as an opportunity to connect the dots between the climate crisis and other pressures facing the city, like runaway rent prices and a need for more resilient infrastructure, as well as a chance to bring more people into the movement. “People want to believe something will work or have something to believe in,” she said. Actions like the one at the Phillips 66 oil refinery help with that. 

“Here is a way we can respond after disasters that is humane and kind and makes your life better and helps you believe in your government, helps you believe in a better world,” Shiney-Ajay said. The movement’s task will be to “hold that up in contrast to the vision of the world that Trump is proposing.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is just getting started. What are climate activists supposed to do? on Jan 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

The New York Times‘ Jess Bidgood (1/17/25) suggests Democrats should be wary of criticizing Donald Trump’s wealthy friends, “given the popularity of some of those billionaires.” (Elon Musk, pictured, is viewed unfavorably by 52% of poll respondents, with 36% having a positive opinion.)

Sometimes the headline says it all, as with the New York Times on January 17: “If Democrats Attack Trump’s Rich Pals as ‘Oligarchs,’ Will It Stick?”

The piece presents Elon Musk’s influence on the new administration as something “Democrats…have suggested”; the role of Trump’s billionaire allies is something Democrats “plan to invoke” in the fight over tax cuts; and the idea that Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos might be front and center at the inauguration isn’t meaningful in itself, so much as something Democrats saw as “an irresistible opportunity to further highlight those connections.”

Is it true that the Trump administration, slated to be the richest presidential administration in history, not even counting Elon Musk, represents “oligarchy“? Not the point. The important question is: Will such a charge (clearly defined as partisan) “stick”? What it means for a charge to “stick,” and what role media like themselves have in making it stick, are not things the Times would have you consider.

For its part, AP went with the headline (1/20/25): “Trump, a Populist President, Is Flanked by Tech Billionaires at His Inauguration,” over a piece noting it as a “shift from tradition, especially for a president who has characterized himself as a champion of the working class.” Is it a wacky juxtaposition—or a sign that elite media see the story as, not whether Trump actually is a champion of the working class, but whether he characterizes himself that way?

It would be work enough to counter the actual things actually happening without news media dedicating themselves to putting up a rhetorical scrim between us and the things we need to understand and resist.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

The New York Times‘ Jess Bidgood (1/17/25) suggests Democrats should be wary of criticizing Donald Trump’s wealthy friends, “given the popularity of some of those billionaires.” (Elon Musk, pictured, is viewed unfavorably by 52% of poll respondents, with 36% having a positive opinion.)

Sometimes the headline says it all, as with the New York Times on January 17: “If Democrats Attack Trump’s Rich Pals as ‘Oligarchs,’ Will It Stick?”

The piece presents Elon Musk’s influence on the new administration as something “Democrats…have suggested”; the role of Trump’s billionaire allies is something Democrats “plan to invoke” in the fight over tax cuts; and the idea that Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos might be front and center at the inauguration isn’t meaningful in itself, so much as something Democrats saw as “an irresistible opportunity to further highlight those connections.”

Is it true that the Trump administration, slated to be the richest presidential administration in history, not even counting Elon Musk, represents “oligarchy“? Not the point. The important question is: Will such a charge (clearly defined as partisan) “stick”? What it means for a charge to “stick,” and what role media like themselves have in making it stick, are not things the Times would have you consider.

For its part, AP went with the headline (1/20/25): “Trump, a Populist President, Is Flanked by Tech Billionaires at His Inauguration,” over a piece noting it as a “shift from tradition, especially for a president who has characterized himself as a champion of the working class.” Is it a wacky juxtaposition—or a sign that elite media see the story as, not whether Trump actually is a champion of the working class, but whether he characterizes himself that way?

It would be work enough to counter the actual things actually happening without news media dedicating themselves to putting up a rhetorical scrim between us and the things we need to understand and resist.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

The New York Times‘ Jess Bidgood (1/17/25) suggests Democrats should be wary of criticizing Donald Trump’s wealthy friends, “given the popularity of some of those billionaires.” (Elon Musk, pictured, is viewed unfavorably by 52% of poll respondents, with 36% having a positive opinion.)

Sometimes the headline says it all, as with the New York Times on January 17: “If Democrats Attack Trump’s Rich Pals as ‘Oligarchs,’ Will It Stick?”

The piece presents Elon Musk’s influence on the new administration as something “Democrats…have suggested”; the role of Trump’s billionaire allies is something Democrats “plan to invoke” in the fight over tax cuts; and the idea that Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos might be front and center at the inauguration isn’t meaningful in itself, so much as something Democrats saw as “an irresistible opportunity to further highlight those connections.”

Is it true that the Trump administration, slated to be the richest presidential administration in history, not even counting Elon Musk, represents “oligarchy“? Not the point. The important question is: Will such a charge (clearly defined as partisan) “stick”? What it means for a charge to “stick,” and what role media like themselves have in making it stick, are not things the Times would have you consider.

For its part, AP went with the headline (1/20/25): “Trump, a Populist President, Is Flanked by Tech Billionaires at His Inauguration,” over a piece noting it as a “shift from tradition, especially for a president who has characterized himself as a champion of the working class.” Is it a wacky juxtaposition—or a sign that elite media see the story as, not whether Trump actually is a champion of the working class, but whether he characterizes himself that way?

It would be work enough to counter the actual things actually happening without news media dedicating themselves to putting up a rhetorical scrim between us and the things we need to understand and resist.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

A new study in the journal Renewable Energy that looked at California’s deployment of renewable power highlights just how reliable the future of energy might be. It found that last year, from late winter to early summer, renewables fulfilled 100 percent of the state’s electricity demand for up to 10 hours on 98 of 116 days, a record for California. Not only were there no blackouts during that time, thanks in part to backup battery power, but at their peak the renewables provided up to 162 percent of the grid’s needs — adding extra electricity California could export to neighboring states or use to fill batteries. 

“This study really finds that we can keep the grid stable with more and more renewables,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Stanford University and lead author of the new paper. “Every major renewable — geothermal, hydro, wind, solar in particular, even offshore wind — is lower cost than fossil fuels” on average, globally.

Yet Californians pay the second highest rates for electricity in the country. That’s not because of renewables, but in part because utilities’ electrical equipment has set off wildfires — like the Camp Fire started by Pacific Gas and Electric’s power lines, which devastated the town of Paradise and killed 85 people — and now they’re passing the costs that come from lawsuits and burying transmission lines to their customers. While investigators don’t know for sure what sparked all of the wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles this month, they’ll be scrutinizing electrical equipment in the area. Power lines are especially prone to failing in high winds, like the 100-mile-per-hour gusts that turned these Southern California fires into monsters.

Even with the incessant challenge of wildfires, California utilities are rapidly shifting to clean energy, with about half of the state’s power generated by renewables like hydropower, wind, and solar. The study compared 116 days in 2024 to the same period in 2023 and discovered California’s output from solar was 31 percent higher and wind 8 percent. After increasing more than 30-fold between 2020 and 2023, the state’s battery capacity doubled between 2023 and 2024, and is now equivalent to the juice produced by more than four nuclear power plants. According to the study, all that new clean tech helped California’s power plants burn 40 percent less fossil fuel for electricty last year.

Those batteries help grid operators be more flexible in meeting demand for electricity, which tends to peak when people return home in the early evening and switch on appliances like air conditioners — just when the grid is losing solar power. “Now we’re seeing the batteries get charged up in the middle of the day, and then meet the portion of the demand in the evening, especially during those hot summer days,” said Mark Rothleder, chief operating officer of the California Independent System Operator, the nonprofit that runs the state’s grid.

Another pervasive myth about renewables is that they won’t be able to support a lot more electric vehicles, induction stoves, and heat pumps plugging into the grid. But here, too, California busts the myth: Between 2023 and 2024, demand on the state’s grid during the study period actually dropped by about 1 percent.

Why? In part because some customers installed their own solar panels, using that free solar energy instead of drawing power from the grid. In 2016, almost none of those customers had batteries to store that solar power to use at night. But battery adoption rose each of the following years, reaching 13 percent of buildings installing solar in 2023, then skyrocketing to 38 percent last year. (That is, of the 1,222 megawatts of solar capacity added last year, 464 megawatts included batteries.) That reduces demand on the grid because those customers can now use their solar power at night. 

Batteries also help utilities get better returns on their investments in solar panels. A solar farm makes all its money selling electricity during the day. But if it has batteries attached to the farm, it can also provide energy in the evening, when electricity prices rise due to increased demand. “That evening battery contribution is very key to the economics working out well,” said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. 

So utilities are incentivized to invest in batteries, which also provide reliable backup power to avoid blackouts. But like any technology, batteries can fail. Last week, a battery storage plant caught fire on California’s central coast, the largest of its kind in the world, but it only knocked out 2 percent of the state’s energy storage capacity. A grid fully running on renewables will have a lot of redundancy built in, beyond multiple battery plants: Electric school buses and other EVs, for instance, are beginning to send power back to the grid when a utility needs it — a potentially vast network of backup energy.

But here’s where the economics get funky. The more renewables on the grid, the lower the electricity prices tend to be for customers, according to the new study. From October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024, South Dakota, Montana, and Iowa provided 110 percent, 87 percent, and 79 percent, respectively, of their electricity demand with renewables, particularly wind and hydropower. Accordingly, the three have some of the lowest electricity prices in the country. 

California, on the other hand, got 47 percent of its power from renewables over the same period, yet wildfires and other factors have translated into higher electricity prices. The California Public Utilities Commission, for instance, authorized its three largest utilities to collect $27 billion in wildfire prevention and insurance costs from ratepayers between 2019 and 2023.

Climate change is making California ever more prone to burn — a growing challenge for utilities. But the state’s banner year for solar and batteries just poked a whole lot of holes in the notion that renewables aren’t reliable.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California just debunked a big myth about renewable energy on Jan 24, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Matt Simon.