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New York state lawmakers introduce bill to ban the herbicide paraquat, linked to Parkinson’s disease Anthony Lacey February 10, 2026

ALBANY, N.Y. – Lawmakers today introduced legislation to ban the use of paraquat, one of the most toxic herbicides allowed for use in the U.S. 

The lawmakers cited overwhelming scientific evidence linking the agrochemical to Parkinson’s disease and other serious health harms.

The bill, A. 10074/S. 9094, would amend the state’s environmental conservation law, banning all uses of paraquat statewide. If enacted, this change would bring New York in line with more than 70 countries that have already outlawed the pesticide, including China, Brazil and the European Union.

The proposal was authored by Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal (D/WF-Assembly District 67) and state Sen. Pete Harckham (D/WF-40th Senate District). The Environmental Working Group is supporting the bill.

“More than 70 countries have already banned the use of paraquat, a clear indication of its toxicity and the serious health issues it can cause in those who have been exposed,” said Rosenthal, chair of the Assembly Committee on Housing. 

“Paraquat has long been linked to Parkinson’s disease, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, kidney and thyroid cancer and other serious health problems, even in people who have never directly handled the chemical,” she said. “The health and safety of farmworkers and rural community members must be prioritized over the use of a notoriously deadly weedkiller, particularly with many safer alternatives already on the market. 

“Working with the Environmental Working Group, I look forward to passing legislation I have introduced to ban the use of paraquat in New York state and protect the health of New Yorkers for decades to come,” Rosenthal added.

“It is mind-boggling to know that paraquat, a toxic herbicide linked to Parkinson’s disease and banned in dozens of countries, is still on the market and available for use in New York state. The long list of health risks associated with this poison can no longer be ignored. Let’s work to pass this bill and rid our environment of this toxin permanently,” said Harckham, chair of the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee.

“Paraquat is so dangerous that it is banned in the countries where it is manufactured and owned – yet it is still used in New York,” said Jessica Hernandez, EWG’s legislative director. “This bill is about protecting farmers, farmworkers and those families who live in rural communities from a chemical that should never have been allowed to remain on the market.”

The New York Department of Environmental Conservation says paraquat is sold in 47 counties and reportedly used in 28 counties across the state, although use has gradually declined. 

Once it’s been sprayed on crops, paraquat builds up in the environment and takes years to break down in soil. Having settled in the soil, it then drifts as contaminated dust, putting neighbors at risk, even those who don’t work in agriculture. 

Evidence of health harms

The science linking paraquat to Parkinson’s disease is clear. Multiple studies have found that people who work in or live near fields where paraquat is sprayed face a much higher risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

“Farmers who handle paraquat face a 150% higher risk of Parkinson’s disease, and the risk doubles for people who live or work near where it is sprayed,” said Dr. Ray Dorsey, professor of neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center and a leader in Parkinson's disease research and care.

“In laboratory studies, paraquat reproduces key hallmarks of the disease, including tremors. Yet this toxic weedkiller is still used across New York state, sowing the seeds of future illness. More than 70 countries, including China, have banned this 60-year-old chemical. It’s long past time for New York and the U.S. to do the same,” he said.

One study using data from the National Institutes of Health found that those who applied the weedkiller on farm fields were twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease as those who handled other crop chemicals.

Paraquat exposure has also been associated with other serious health harms, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma and kidney and thyroid cancer. In rural areas, prenatal exposure is also linked to a higher risk of childhood leukemia.

“Decades of research is clear: exposure to paraquat increases the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease,” said Zach Hardy, senior state government relations manager for The Michael J. Fox Foundation. 

“New York state can lead the nation in combating the public health risk that paraquat poses by banning the use of this dangerous herbicide. Together, we can ensure a healthier future for New Yorkers,” he added.

The Environmental Protection Agency is reviewing the risks of paraquat use, but a final decision by the agency about whether to restrict it – and how – is likely years away. 

Waiting for the EPA to act leaves New Yorkers unnecessarily exposed to the toxic herbicide, the lawmakers and environmental advocates warn.

“New York should not have to wait for federal action when the science is clear and the risks are real,” said Hernandez. “A paraquat ban is the only way to protect those who grow our food and the communities who live near farm fields.”

What other advocates are saying

Adrienne Wald EdD, MBA, RN, MCHES, FNYAM, Northeast Regional Forum organizer for Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments

“Nurses in New York applaud A. 10074/S. 9094 aimed to prohibit the use of the highly toxic weedkiller paraquat. We are glad New York lawmakers are leading to protect citizens from the unsafe risks of exposure to continued paraquat use in agriculture and the potentially devastating health impacts primarily felt by our farmworkers, farmers, and rural communities.

“Strong scientific evidence has shown its use poses an unreasonable risk to these communities with numerous studies indicating people who use or are exposed to paraquat are more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease and other adverse health conditions, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma, renal cancer, thyroid cancer, and childhood leukemia. 

“Nurses have a duty to protect public health by opposing the use of dangerous chemicals and this bill will further protect New York residents and public health.”

Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment

“It’s rather shocking that New York still allows toxic paraquat to be used for weed control. This highly toxic chemical has been banned in 70 countries due to its harmful effects to public health as well as mammals, birds, wildlife and bees. It is incredibly toxic and one small sip can be fatal. It lasts up to six years in soil, allowing for exposures to persist. 

“Paraquat has links to Parkinson’s disease and cancers, including childhood leukemia, as well as thyroid and kidney damage. CCE thanks Sen. Harckham and Assemblymember Rosenthal for championing this legislation and fighting to protect New Yorkers from dangerous exposure to paraquat.”

Bobbi Wilding, executive director of Clean+Healthy

“How many people have to suffer the harms of paraquat before we say enough’s enough? How many more nations will have to ban it before we act? Thanks to Sen. Harckham and Assemblymember Rosenthal, New York can say ‘not one more’ by passing their legislation now.

“More than 20% of our state's land is in agriculture. Data shows that paraquat has been in widespread use in our state. But farming without the toxic pesticide paraquat shows the same long-term yields as with it. For the health of New York's 160,000 farmers and farmworkers, their neighbors, and our environment, the Senate and Assembly should pass this bill immediately." 

Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council

“Paraquat is a highly dangerous herbicide that remains on the market only because regulators have ignored clear evidence of its harm, including links to Parkinson’s disease. Disregarding science doesn’t eliminate the risk – it protects corporate profits while putting people in danger. We support New York state’s decision to follow the science and protect New Yorkers with this bill.”

Andi Lipstein Fristedt, executive vice president and chief strategy and policy officer for the Parkinson’s Foundation

“The Parkinson’s Foundation is dedicated to improving care for people living with Parkinson’s disease, advancing research toward a cure, and focusing on prevention. Research has shown a strong link between exposure to paraquat and an increased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

“The Foundation strongly supports A. 10074/S. 9094 to ban paraquat in New York state and calls on its legislature to pass this bill, protect New Yorkers and help create a world where fewer people develop Parkinson’s disease in the first place.”

Margaret Preston, president of Power Over Parkinson’s

“A. 10074/S. 9094 is an instrumental next step in banning the toxic herbicide paraquat, which is linked to Parkinson’s disease in addition to other serious illnesses. If this bill is passed, it will ensure the safety of our farmers in the state of New York.”

Clariss Mancebo, policy and development associate for Re:wild Your Campus

“Re:wild Your Campus is eager to support this bill. Paraquat has been banned in over 70 other countries and is continuously linked to Parkinson’s disease along with several other cancers and reproductive/developmental disorders. There is absolutely no need to continue the use of such a dangerous chemical. A. 10074/S. 9094 will protect all New Yorkers from being exposed to such a hazardous chemical.”

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The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action.

Areas of Focus Farming & Agriculture Farm Pollution Paraquat Pesticides Press Contact Alex Formuzis alex@ewg.org (202) 667-6982 February 10, 2026

Clean Air Council and the Naamans, Marcus Hook, Stoney Creek (NMS) Watersheds Alliance are excited to announce the launch of the new NMS Watersheds Storymap! The storymap is an ArcGIS platform that shares the history, geography, and importance of the NMS Watersheds, as well as the story of the creation of the NMS Watersheds Alliance, and the accomplishments and goals of the group.

Take a Sneak Peak!

The Naamans Creek, Marcus Hook Creek, and Stoney Creek Watersheds 

Naamans Creek, Marcus Hook Creek, and Stoney Creek (NMS) are part of the Delaware River Watershed and represent the last unprotected subwatershed area in Delaware County. The NMS watersheds are situated in and around the municipalities of Marcus Hook, Trainer, Upper and Lower Chichester, and Bethel Township. 

Healthy watersheds are an essential foundation for healthy communities and ecosystems. These subwatersheds are a critical and valuable part of our local communities, but are also subject to ongoing pollution and contamination from local industrial sites. Petrochemical processing plants, refineries, tank farms, and other industrial facilities can leave behind legacy contaminants that persist in local ecosystems. Stormwater runoff can carry pollutants such as oil, gasoline, heavy metals, and other toxins that degrade water quality, harm local wildlife, and even impact drinking water. If left unaddressed, these issues can lead to further harm of the watershed, including reduced biodiversity and diminished access to the natural spaces that residents depend on for physical and mental well-being. 

The Creation of the NMS Watersheds Alliance

In 2024, with the support of the Clean Air Council and Marcus Hook Area Neighbors for Public Health, residents came together to develop a local watershed group to protect the NMS subwatershed areas. The NMS Watersheds Alliance is a nonpartisan group of residents committed to the protection, restoration, and conservation of the Naamans, Marcus Hook, and Stoney Creek (NMS) watersheds. The Alliance aims to encourage community stewardship and to promote connection, enjoyment, and respect of the watershed by all who live, work, play, and visit. NMS Watersheds Alliance initiatives address conservation, recreation, and water pollution issues in the watershed through outreach and education, advocacy, and stewardship. 

Learn more about the NMS Watersheds Alliance by checking out our new brochure!

Introducing the NMS Watersheds Storymap

To tell the unique story of the NMS and virtually bring people into the watershed, the NMS Watersheds Alliance launched the Naamans, Marcus Hook and Stoney Creek Watersheds Alliance Storymap in early 2026.  The creation of this storymap provides visualization of the watershed for residents and serves as an important tool for understanding our local water resources. The storymap details the history and geography of the NMS creeks, Delaware River Watershed, and pollution threats the NMS faces. 

Residents can take a virtual tour of the watershed and learn more about the NMS Watersheds Alliance’s initiatives. This includes storm drain marking workshops, tree plantings, creek clean-ups, stream salinity testing, revitalization of local parks, advocating for the mitigation of pollution in our local streams, and more! The NMS Watersheds Alliance will regularly update the storymap with new projects, initiatives, and information about our creeks and watersheds. Check out the storymap to visit the NMS Watersheds virtually and learn more!  

Get Involved with the NMS Watersheds Alliance! Follow us on Facebook to stay up to date, and if you’d like to join the NMS Watersheds Alliance’s monthly meetings, contact Alyssa Felix-Arreola at afa@cleanair.org.

Donald Trump’s designs on Venezuela and Greenland have sent shock waves around the world. Canadian premier Mark Carney said they have created a “rupture in the world order”, as political alliances that have held for over 80 years are thrown aside.

And as the US seeks to carve out a Western Hemispheric sphere of influence, questions about the dollar’s future as the lynchpin of the global economy are growing louder. Many other parts of the world are switching to green energy sources as renewable energy becomes cheaper than fossil fuels, and countries forced to pay back loans in dollars are eyeing alternative currency options to free themselves from the penalty of fluctuating exchange rates amid unpredictable policy shifts.

As a result, the continued relevance of the petrodollar system – in which oil is traded in dollars and guarantees demand for US currency – may be less than assured.

What is the petrodollar system?

The petrodollar system was established in the 1970s following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and is one of the most consequential monetary arrangements in modern history.

In 1944, the Bretton Woods agreement made the US dollar the anchor of the global monetary system, pegged to gold and with other currencies fixed to the dollar. The framework aimed to provide global financial stability following the economic fragmentation of the Second World War and cemented the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

US President Richard Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971 to curb inflation after foreign central banks – increasingly reluctant to hold depreciating dollars – began converting their dollar reserves into gold. The petrodollar system emerged as an alternative means of keeping the dollar as the backbone of international transactions.

The petrodollar system refers to the pact that Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia – made with the US, agreeing to price oil in dollars and to recycle revenues into US Treasury securities in return for military protection and sales of advanced weaponry.

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Andrés Arauz, former Ecuadorian minister and central bank director, told Green Central Banking that ramifications for the global economy were immense: “So oil and gas [are traded in dollars], but then also downstream with all the derivatives, but then also all the chemical elements derived from the oil industry and petrochemical industry. And then likewise, upstream with all the technology and inputs required to extract the oil, [it] created a dollar-denominated value chain with global and international repercussions.”

Arauz also notes that international accounting standards set by institutions like the IMF reinforce the system by requiring central banks and organisations to report reserves in dollars, solidifying the greenback as the default unit of account.

For decades, this system delivered guaranteed demand for dollars, recycled oil revenues into safe-haven US debt markets, and provided outsized geopolitical leverage to the US Federal Reserve given the need of other countries to accumulate dollars to conduct global transactions.

Fadhel Kaboub, associate professor in economics at Denison University, explains how this “exorbitant privilege” distorted the global economy in the US’s favour. “All countries operate … within a system where they have to accumulate reserves not in gold anymore but in dollars and countries that have debt, their debt is denominated in dollars. So that created a locked-in system that gives the US dollar a privilege as the dominant payment system and gives the opportunity to weaponise this system.”

The petrodollar system has also encouraged and amplified US consumption of fossil fuels and its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Kaboub, who is also a member of the United Nations High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, says the system has “rewired” the global economy into an extractive model that promotes environmentally destructive industries.

But as decarbonisation accelerates and renewable energy displaces fossil fuel value chains, the petro-lynchpin of dollar dominance faces unprecedented strain.

Is the petrodollar in decline?

Signs of discontent are increasing, placing the dollar’s decades-long dominance under unprecedented pressure.

BRICS countries are discussing new financial mechanisms that will make trading within the bloc easier but may also reduce reliance on existing dollar-dominated channels. Both India and Brazil have denied that linking BRICS digital currencies is part of moves towards de-dollarisation, but such a move will likely cause concern in the US.

Meanwhile, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde made headlines in May 2025 with her blunt assessment that the current global landscape presents a significant opportunity for a “global euro moment”, as investors “unsettled by unpredictable US economic strategies” increasingly reduce their exposure to dollar-denominated assets.

These developments reflect deeper structural shifts. The dollar’s share of global reserves has declined from 71% to 56.3% since 2008, with central banks purchasing over 1,000 metric tons of gold annually for three consecutive years. China slashed its US Treasury holdings from US$1.3tn in 2013 to just $682bn by November 2025, while simultaneously expanding yuan-based trade across Asia.

Africa records fastest-ever solar growth, as installations jump in 2025

This shift was triggered by what Arauz describes as “eroding trust” in US financial systems.

“Perhaps the most serious element that has accelerated this diversification has been the weaponisation of the hegemonic banking system,” Arauz said. “[Through] sanctions, through asset freezes, through confiscation of international reserves in many countries … [these] have definitely stirred things up and made countries reflect about the reliance on this previously thought of neutral system that is now, on the other hand a threat, to their national sovereignty and economic policies.”

The climate crisis is also acting as a catalyst. As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, structural strain is placed on the demand for dollars, and the more the US clings to fossil fuel dependency in order to maintain monetary dominance, the deeper the cracks become.

Gulf states have long-term plans to diversify away from oil and reinvest a substantial portion of their oil revenues in green value chains, challenging the core pact which upholds the petrodollar system that US currency dominance has long depended on.

And while economists expect the dollar to remain the primary reserve currency in the near term, it has also been noted that once transitions to a new system are underway, they can happen very quickly. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Jeffry Frieden, political science professor at Columbia University, warned of “an erosion of confidence in the dollar” amid mounting doubts about the safety of US Treasuries as “the most important financial asset in the world”.

‘US pulling itself out of the picture’

The Trump administration’s response to a shift away from the dollar has been to double down on arms sales and fossil fuel infrastructure – what Kaboub calls a “long-term strategic failure” that fundamentally misreads the changing dynamics of global power.

Trump’s recent $142bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia aims to tether Gulf revenues to the dollar through military exports. However, economists like Maya Senussi at Oxford Economics and John Sfakianakis of the Gulf Research Centre warn that financing such deals alongside decarbonisation projects will strain GCC budgets, and Bloomberg estimates it will require oil prices to be at least $96 a barrel just to break even. Brent oil prices currently hover around $67-68.

And in the Global South, higher oil prices may inadvertently threaten dollar dominance by exacerbating debt burdens by increasing repayment costs, pushing countries towards cheaper (and greener) energy systems. America’s transition to net fossil fuel exporter status means higher oil prices now strengthen rather than weaken the dollar, creating a triple blow for dollar-indebted countries in Latin America and Africa: higher energy costs, escalating debt servicing and constrained fiscal space.

The very mechanism designed to strengthen dollar ties – expensive arms deals premised on elevated oil prices – accelerates the search for alternatives among countries holding critical transition minerals like lithium, copper and cobalt. This pushes the US further from the green value chains of the future.

“The US is pulling itself out of the picture, it’s divesting from the green technologies and green industries. Which means it’s moving away from its interest in critical minerals,” says Kaboub. “So the remaining big player is China, and it’s a friend of the Global South.”

Today, China controls 85-90% of global rare earth processing and offers renewable energy equipment that remains attractive to the GCC despite US and EU tariffs. This is thanks to competitive pricing and comprehensive infrastructure approaches that western competitors have largely failed to match.

‘America needs you’: US seeks trade alliance to break China’s critical mineral dominance

Kaboub says that Trump’s minerals-for-security deals, such as in Greenland and elsewhere, may secure short-term market access but erode global trust in US foreign policy, a cornerstone of confidence in the dollar. “The isolated backwards technology bloc is going to be the United States,” he says.

As Lagarde observed, investors increasingly seek “geopolitical assurance in another form” by directing investments toward regions perceived as “dependable security allies” – but this no longer automatically defaults to the US as its government criticises its one-time allies and jeopardises the future of NATO.

Yet the petrodollar system faces challenges that extend far beyond the geopolitics of sanctions; climate change has introduced structural pressures making the core foundations of dollar dominance increasingly untenable.

However, given Trump’s bellicose stance on Venezuela and Greenland, there is a risk that American policymakers will not recognise this new reality until it is too late.

This article was originally published by Green Central Banking.

The post Explainer: What is the petrodollar and why is it under pressure? appeared first on Climate Home News.

United States Antimony (NYSE-A: UAMY) and Americas Gold and Silver (TSX: USA; NYSE-A: USAS) are joining forces to build a hydromet processing plant in Idaho that they see anchoring a domestic supply chain of critical minerals.

The plant, to be built in Idaho’s Silver Valley next to active silver, copper and antimony mines owned by Americas Gold, will process antimony feed material from the Toronto-based miner’s permitted Galena complex, according to separate statements issued Tuesday. It will also have the potential to process feed from other sources. Galena produced 561,000 lb. of antimony last year.

“We view this as a positive update as it’s in line with Americas Gold and Silver’s strategy of unlocking value of its antimony production as the only antimony producer in the US,” Desjardins Capital Markets mining analyst Allison Carson said Tuesday in a note.

Americas Gold will control 51% of the joint venture, compared with 49% for US Antimony, with the latter serving as the managing member, the companies said. All major decisions will be made by a newly formed committee of equal representation from both partners.

Greater control

The partnership’s main objective is to exert greater control over the processing necessary for copper, silver and antimony – the three primary critical minerals being mined by Americas Gold. The partners want to generate greater overall recoveries at a “significantly” lower cost, which would boost the venture’s profitability.

News of the partnership comes as the Trump administration steps up efforts to secure a domestic supply of antimony amid increasingly tense relations with China, which the United States Geological Survey estimated last week provides 55% of the country’s antimony.

US mineral supply chains remain exposed to China chokehold: USGS report

Washington last year fully permitted the Stibnite project held by Perpetua Resources (TSX, Nasdaq: PPTA) in Idaho, which is said to host one of the largest reserves outside Chinese control. 

Antimony has been designated by the US as a mineral that is critical to its national and economic security. The grey-colored metal is used in a variety of high-tech and defence products, including flame-retardant materials, certain semiconductors and ammunition hardening. No antimony has been produced in the US on a commercial scale since 2016.

Direct alignment

Since the new project “directly aligns” with Washington’s strategy of building a US critical minerals supply chain, the partners have already prepared the necessary paperwork for submittal “to hopefully achieve government funding,” US Antimony CEO Gary Evans said.

Americas Gold, the largest antimony producer in the US, will get the opportunity to become a significant player in the downstream antimony market “and realize value being left on the table under our current offtake terms for by-product antimony” contained in silver concentrate, CEO Paul Huet said in the statement.

“All minerals being mined by Americas [Gold] are deemed ‘critical,’” Evans said. “As we all know, our country is playing ‘catch-up’ today with our adversaries and we are combining today both of our financial and management resources to more quickly make advancements in the US based critical mineral space.”

Dual triggers

The new processing plant is expected to take 18 months to build, with both partners contributing capital based on their respective ownership stakes, Americas said. Neither partner said how much the new plant might cost.

After 18 months, Americas Gold can trigger its right to buy out its partner at the higher of fair market value and 120% of US Antimony’s capital contributions. US Antimony, for its part, can trigger its right to sell out under certain conditions.

The Idaho property that will house the new facility has already obtained all necessary primary permits, except for construction permits.

Under the terms of the agreement, Americas Gold will sell antimony feed material mined from the Galena complex to the JV on market terms. It will also capture 51% of the profits from the processing side of the JV business.

US Antimony, whose namesake metal is used to harden bullets, will buy the antimony produced by the JV at market terms. The company owns an antimony oxide smelter in Thompson Falls, Montana, near the border with Idaho.

United States Antimony kicks off mining operations in Montana

Dallas-based US Antimony last year was awarded a $245 million contract from the US Defense Logistics Agency to supply antimony metal ingots for the national defense stockpile. The contact win came a few weeks after the company appointed retired four-star US Army general Jack Keane to its board.

Americas Gold shares rose 2.7% to C$11.15 Tuesday morning in Toronto, giving the company a market value of about C$3.6 billion ($2.7 billion). US Antimony rose 1.8% to $8.38 in New York for a market value of about $1.2 billion.

S&P Global Ratings revised First Quantum Minerals’ (TSX: FM) outlook to positive from negative on Tuesday, citing progress toward restarting its Cobre Panama copper mine and stronger liquidity management.

While the mine remains shut, the credit ratings agency now expects a restart in the first half of 2026, followed by a production ramp-up later in the year. 

Momentum has improved in recent months after Panama’s government signalled a more accommodating stance, including plans that could allow First Quantum to process low-grade stockpiles at the site. 

While full authorization has yet to be granted, President José Raúl Mulino has said his government is taking a more constructive approach to resuming operations, which S&P views as a positive step in negotiations. 

The company has continued to position the mine for a restart by selling idled inventory, exporting copper concentrate, restarting the power plant in the fourth quarter of 2025, and advancing an independent audit.

CEO Tristan Pascall on the future of First Quantum Minerals

These steps have strengthened expectations that operations could resume in the second quarter of 2026, with ramp-up beginning shortly after, S&P said.

Under current assumptions, Cobre Panama could contribute about 120,000 tonnes of copper and 40,000 ounces of gold in fiscal 2026, with production accelerating into the third quarter.

The restart is central to First Quantum’s credit profile. S&P said formal government approval and a successful ramp-up would likely strengthen the company’s financial position over the next 18 months. Once the mine reaches sustained commercial production and operates at full capacity for several months, the rating could move above the current B+ level, assuming liquidity remains adequate and debt continues to decline.

Prices on First Quantum’s side

Supportive metal prices add to the positive outlook. S&P forecasts fiscal 2026 copper prices averaging $10,500 per tonne and gold prices at $3,300 per ounce, levels that would significantly benefit First Quantum as a primary copper producer. A $500-per-tonne increase in copper prices is estimated to add about $200 million to adjusted EBITDA in 2026.

That upside will be partially offset by hedging. Roughly half of first-half 2026 production is hedged through copper and gold collars, which could reduce adjusted EBITDA by about $100 million if prices remain near current levels. S&P nonetheless views the hedging program as supportive of cash flow stability.

Given uncertainty around the timing and scale of Panama’s contribution next year, S&P did not include a base-case production forecast from Cobre Panama for 2026. Once the mine reaches full production, however, EBITDA could exceed $5 billion annually at current copper prices, which would likely reduce adjusted debt-to-EBITDA to below 2.0x after excess cash above $1 billion.

Zambian backup

S&P’s positive outlook reflects expectations that First Quantum will receive official approval to restart Cobre Panama and move into a full ramp-up phase, with a formal announcement anticipated within three months. Until then, financial performance in 2026 is expected to be driven primarily by the company’s Zambian operations.

An upgrade to B+ within six months would depend on approval to process existing stockpiles, the ability to export about 40,000 tonnes of copper concentrate per month, clarity on the mine’s legal and fiscal framework, and a clear path to full production within six to twelve months. Maintaining debt-to-EBITDA below 3x would also be required, with a further upgrade to BB- possible once full production is achieved, potentially by mid-2027.

Renewed delays or a breakdown in talks with Panama could reverse the outlook or lead to a downgrade, particularly if combined with disruptions at the company’s Zambian operations. 

For now, S&P said progress at Cobre Panama remains slow but constructive, keeping a 2026 restart firmly in view.

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Can nearby solar farms reduce property values?

Property values can decline from close proximity with utility-scale solar farms, but the losses are modest and less than from nearby fossil fuel plants.

One 2023 study of 1.8 million homes found minor impacts on property values. Homes within 0.5 miles of solar farms experienced around 1.5% price reductions; homes more than one mile away received no significant effects.

Another study of 400,000 transactions found an average value decrease of 1.7% within one mile of a solar farm. Most recently, 2025 research indicated a slightly higher decrease of 4.8% for residential property within three miles of utility-scale solar projects.

Declines largely occur in suburban areas with greater population density and thus competition for space; rural communities experience little comparable impact.

In comparison, a study of 92 plants found property value decreases of up to 7% within two miles of a fossil fuel plant.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.

Sources

Energy Policy Journal Shedding light on large-scale solar impacts: An analysis of property values and proximity to photovoltaics across six U.S. states

MIT Review of Economics and Statistics The Effect of Power Plants on Local Housing Values and Rents

Kirkland Appraisals Grandy Solar Impact Survey

University of Rhode Island PROPERTY VALUE IMPACTS OF COMMERCIAL-SCALE SOLAR ENERGY IN MASSACHUSETTS AND RHODE ISLAND

The University of Texas at Austin An Exploration of Property-Value Impacts Near Utility-Scale Solar Installations

CohnReznick Property Value Impact Study Proposed Solar Farm McLean County, IL

National Academy of Sciences Economic Sciences Journal Impact of large-scale solar on property values in the United States: Diverse effects and causal mechanisms

Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles

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More than two thousand registered nurses in Los Angeles, Calif. will be on strike beginning Thursday, Feb. 19. Nurses at USC Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center will be on strike for seven days. Centinela Hospital Medical Center nurses will be on strike for one day.

Chef Johanna Hellrigl joins EWG board of directors Anthony Lacey February 10, 2026

WASHINGTON – Today the Environmental Working Group announced that Johanna Hellrigl, acclaimed chef-owner of the Washington, D.C., celebrated restaurant Ama and a 2026 James Beard Award semifinalist, has joined its board of directors. 

A longtime supporter of EWG’s work, Hellrigl brings her nationally recognized leadership in food, public health and sustainability to EWG.

Hellrigl is the visionary behind Ama, a mission-driven Northern Italian restaurant located just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Ama, which means “love,” has earned recognition for both culinary excellence and environmental leadership. 

Hellrigl uses EWG’s science-based research, including the Dirty Dozen™ and Clean Fifteen™ lists of pesticides on produce, to guide produce sourcing and menu decisions. These values extend throughout the restaurant, which operates without single-use plastics and features an all-electric, water-efficient kitchen designed to reduce its environmental footprint.

“Johanna is an extraordinary leader whose work sits at the intersection of food, health and sustainability,” said Ken Cook, EWG co-founder, president and board chair.

“She brings a rare combination of lived experience, values-driven leadership and practical insight into how food systems affect people’s health, workers’ well-being and the environment. 

“Her belief in food as a powerful force for connection and change make her perspective incredibly valuable to EWG, and we’re truly excited to have her advising our board as we move our mission forward,” said Cook.

Dialogue and collaboration 

Hellrigl joins the board at a pivotal moment. Her work is grounded in the belief that food systems, labor, agriculture, the environment and human health are deeply connected and that real change requires breaking down silos. She regularly convenes policymakers, farmers, chefs and community leaders at Ama to foster dialogue and collaboration. 

As EWG continues to lead national conversations on the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, pesticide regulation, food chemicals and ultra-processed foods, Hellrigl will provide a critical boots-on-the-ground perspective on how these issues affect consumer behavior.

“As a business owner, chef, mother and advocate, I see firsthand how environmental toxins impact our bodies, our food and our communities,” said Hellrigl. “Joining the Environmental Working Group feels like a natural extension of my life’s mission. 

“I’m honored to contribute to EWG’s efforts to reduce harmful exposures, increase transparency, and help build a healthier, more resilient future for people and the planet, because combining our platforms allows us to reach chefs, the food industry, our farmers, and families at home, and move the needle toward meaningful, systemic change,” she added.

Protecting health and the environment

Founded in 1993, EWG is led by experts dedicated to protecting public health and the environment. Its board of directors helps guide the organization’s work to ensure clean water, safer food and healthier consumer products for communities nationwide.

Hellrigl joins Cook, David Baker, Natasha Beck, Brandon Beck, Suzan Bymel, Arianne Callender, Rob Fetherstonhaugh, Christine Gardner, Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Bojana Jankovic Weatherly, Dr. Harvey Karp, C.J. Kettler, Karen Malkin, Nina Montée Karp, Elise Museles, Randy Paynter, Michelle Pfeiffer, Drummond Pike, William Ross Jr., Kim Rozenfeld, Laura Turner Seydel and Shazi Visram.

###

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action.

 

Areas of Focus Food & Water Food James Beard Award semifinalist brings culinary leadership and sustainability expertise to EWG Press Contact Monica Amarelo monica@ewg.org (202) 939-9140 February 10, 2026

Plans by the Donald Trump administration to fund right-wing groups in Europe have been slammed by policymakers and campaigners as an effort to “usurp European democracy”.

According to the Financial Times, the U.S. State Department plans to bankroll think tanks and charities in the UK and Europe which share President Trump’s agenda, with particular focus on blocking attempts to regulate U.S. social media platforms.

Daniel Freund, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Greens, told DeSmog that the funding had “one clear aim: to divide and destabilise Europe.”

“We must clearly name, criticise, and reject such foreign interference,” he added.

Sarah Rogers, U.S. under secretary of state for public diplomacy, is leading this effort, having visited the UK, France, and Italy in early December.

Her visit coincided with the publication of a new U.S. national security strategy, which called for “cultivating resistance” in Europe to liberal, democratic politics.

“The U.S. has a long history of covert manipulation of politics across the globe. But to see it happen in Europe is new, and we should be worried,” said Kenneth Haar of the transparency watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory. “Big Tech regulation is set to be the first testing ground of the new American way of imposing their will on Europe.”

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The new U.S. fund would be the latest attempt by Trump and his allies to thwart EU regulations. DeSmog last week reported on a gathering of pro-Trump groups in the European Parliament, during which they turned their fire on the EU’s Digital Safety Act, which aims to tackle the harms caused by social media.

Trump was re-elected in November 2024 following a $270 million donation from the owner of social media platform X Elon Musk, and received $1 million each from the heads of Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon for his inauguration fund.

The event in Brussels was attended by the Heritage Foundation, the radical right-wing think tank which drafted Project 2025 – the authoritarian, anti-climate blueprint for Trump’s second term.

The Heritage Foundation has been one of the key MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) groups attempting to influence European politics since Trump’s re-election.

As reported by DeSmog, the group gathered hardline conservative groups last year to discuss ideas for dismantling the EU. It also attempted to influence Albania’s election in favour of its conservative candidate in May 2025.

The group has been joined by the Heartland Institute, which has been leading the campaign to spread climate science denial across the UK and EU. The group claims to be advising Nigel Farage’s anti-climate party Reform UK, while it has been forging alliances with far-right parties and campaigners in an attempt to gain a foothold in Europe.

Both groups lobbied aggressively – and successfully – for the dilution of EU laws designed to hold large companies, including U.S. firms, to account for their environmental impacts. They also forcefully oppose the EU’s digital safety laws.

Raphael Kergueno, senior policy officer at Transparency International, said that the new pro-Trump fund adds to growing concern about MAGA’s influence over EU laws. 

“Transparency loopholes are allowing the MAGA movement’s illiberal organisations to usurp European democracy from the inside,” he said. “As a matter of urgency, the rules must be changed to compel them to register on the EU’s lobby register and declare their funding, so that their blatant attempts to bring authoritarianism to Europe can be scrutinised, and thwarted.”

Patrick ten Brink, secretary-general of the European Environmental Bureau, added: “The reporting in the Financial Times confirms what many civil society organisations have been warning about for some time: there is a coordinated effort to import US-style culture-war politics into Europe, using funding, think-tanks and so-called ‘charitable’ fronts to weaken democratic safeguards.

“Europe’s response should be clear-eyed and proportionate. Defending transparency, independent NGOs and evidence-based policymaking is essential to the EU’s democratic resilience and its ability to govern in the public interest. EU policymakers should take care not to weaken environmental and social protections or undermine public well-being in ways that ultimately serve external deregulation agendas.”

MAGA UK

MAGA’s influence is also being felt in the UK, where climate and digital safety regulations are likewise under fire.

Farage is a close Trump ally, stating repeatedly that he is the “bravest man”.

The Reform leader has also been helping to import the architects of Trump’s agenda into the UK, having urged the Heartland Institute to set up a branch in the UK and Europe.

As revealed by DeSmog, Farage has received £150,000 from his donors to attend pro-Trump events or cheerlead for his agenda since he was elected to Parliament in July 2024.

A new Reform-linked think tank, the Centre for a Better Britain, was launched last year by James Orr, a close friend of U.S. vice president J.D. Vance and now a senior Reform advisor. The Centre for a Better Britain, set up by Reform donors, is reportedly seeking to raise millions from Trump backers.

Jordan Peterson speaks with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at ARC. Credit: Marc Fawcett-Atkinson

During her visit to the UK in December, head of the new U.S. fund, Sarah Rogers, was hosted at an event by the Prosperity Institute (formerly Legatum Institute). The conservative think tank is run by UAE-based investment firm Legatum Group, which co-owns right-wing broadcaster GB News, Farage’s principal employer.

The event related to the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), which requires U.S. social media companies to remove illegal content such as child pornography. Along with the EU’s DSA, the OSA has been attacked by the Trump administration for what it calls the “censorship” of Americans’ free speech.

Rogers spoke at the event alongside Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of policy, and Conservative peer Toby Young, who runs the Free Speech Union, a conservative pressure group.

It is not clear which groups Rogers met with in France or Italy. In Washington D.C. in December she hosted Markus Frohnmaier, a Member of the German Parliament for the far-right Alternative für Deutchland (AfD) party, according to a post she shared on social media platform X.

The Legatum Group also helps to run the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a radical right-wing network group led by Canadian activist Jordan Peterson. ARC has been a key platform for MAGA figures and far-right European politicians, with its latest London conference planned for this summer. 

Speakers at ARC events have included U.S. energy secretary Chris Wright, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson, and Republican donor and Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Last year’s ARC event in London was also attended by several oil and gas executives.

“It is time to consider what can be done legally,” Haar of Corporate Europe Observatory said. “When it comes to China or Russia, there are measures in place to defend the public from undue influence. We really need to figure out quickly how the American threat can be handled effectively. 

Dieter Plehwe, an academic at the Berlin Social Science Center likewise called for stronger transparency laws, stating: “It would be wise to increase the opportunities for investigative journalists, academic researchers and the public at large to understand who is behind think tank and media campaigns.”

The post Trump Accused of Trying to ‘Divide and Destabilise’ Europe Through New MAGA Fund appeared first on DeSmog.

“The older we grow, the more we miss our childhood and the playgrounds of our youth. And the more I walk through the streets of modern Damascus, the more I long for the old neighborhoods. I long for the past, for my purity, for the little girl who was two girls at once: one who […]

Concrete slabs, beams, columns and other elements from dismantled buildings can be safely reused in new construction, according to a new study. The analysis could facilitate incorporating concrete—currently responsible for as much as 9% of global greenhouse gas emissions—into the circular construction industry and make the building sector as a whole more sustainable.

“Due to its durability, concrete can have a long life, and if we reuse it, we maximize its longevity, and avoid the carbon-intensive process of producing new cement and the energy-heavy machinery required for crushing and recycling waste,” says study team member Arlind Dervishaj, an architect and graduate student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

Building codes generally require concrete to be sound for at least 50 years. When buildings are torn down (even before the 50-year mark, as is increasingly the case) it’s usually assumed that concrete’s useful life is over. Old concrete either gets landfilled or downcycled into rubble for road construction or aggregate for new concrete production.

That’s a major missed opportunity, the new study suggests.

But until now, there has been no organized method to evaluate the potential of reusing salvaged concrete. The researchers ran thousands of computer simulations to predict the future lifespan of reused concrete, based on measurements of the condition of existing buildings.

 

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“Our study demonstrates that we can scientifically guarantee a ‘second life’ for these elements, shifting the perspective of old buildings from end-of-life waste to a valuable resource of durable components,” says Dervishaj.

The future lifespan of a given piece of concrete depends on its past use, storage history, climate conditions like humidity and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and how it is deployed in its second life.

For example, a concrete slab that has been exposed to harsh elements for many decades may be best reused as an interior component. Repair and refurbishment techniques—such as waterproof coatings—can also extend the lifespan of concrete.

The researchers constructed a flowchart to help builders be confident that reused concrete components will be structurally sound for the anticipated lifetime of a new structure. “We can prove that much of this concrete is safe for another full service life,” says Dervishaj. “It’s a positive ‘re-discovery’ of a material we already have.”

To facilitate re-use, the history of concrete components will need to be tracked in an organized way. Ground-truthing of the researchers’ rubric is also necessary: “We now need to monitor real-world projects with reused concrete to see how it performs under changing exposures,” says Dervishaj.

“We are currently working on the first comprehensive standard for precast concrete reuse in Sweden—and arguably the first of its kind in Europe,” Dervishaj says. The researchers hope their approach will eventually lead to Europe-wide and perhaps even international standards for concrete reuse.

Source: Dervishaj A. et al. “From durability to circularity: ensuring service life and enabling reuse of concrete in circular construction.” Materials and Structures 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

In a recent Heated newsletter, the esteemed climate reporter, Emily Atkin, wrote something that stayed with me:

“​​How am I supposed to keep writing about, and caring about, climate change and pollution and government capture by Big Oil, when the government is executing people in broad daylight? How am I supposed to watch the country descend into full-throated fascism, and then log on to my computer and say: anyway, about those methane regulations?”

As we have watched the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, that’s how I have felt at times. How can we stay focused on our campaigns to end the financial backing for Big Oil, as Trump builds out his own personal paramilitary force and calls on Republicans to seize control of election processes? Should we even try?

Contemplating these questions, I’ve reached a similar conclusion as Atkin did in her newsletter: maintaining a focus on ending the power of the fossil fuel industry is not insensitive or irresponsible, but essential. Not only for the role Big Oil plays in enabling authoritarianism―never forget the $445 million oil and gas companies donated to Trump and his cronies in 2024―but because, in an oil-addicted world of climate chaos, war and violence increase dramatically.  

But it cannot be our only focus. Not now.

That’s why, this month, you’re going to keep hearing from us about pushing Democrats to not provide another dollar to ICE, demanding corporations like Target stop accommodating ICE, and why our staff will continue to support powerful actions like this one at the Hilton in Manhattan.

But, even as we join this beautiful mass movement of people standing up to ICE and standing up for immigrants, we’re also going to remain focused on our core campaigns to end the power of the fossil fuel industry. 

One of our main strategies on that front right now is in our campaigns to force a wedge between the insurance industry and the fossil fuel industry. Here’s why that matters. 

All across the country, the insurance industry is leaving markets and increasing rates for millions of people, worsening the cost-of-living crisis. In California, insurance companies have refused to renew home insurance for at least 2.8 million people since 2020. In New York City, nearly 1 in 5 affordable housing developers say they’ve had to pause projects due to insurance challenges.

And we know why: Over the last twenty years, one-third of all weather-related payouts made by insurance companies can be directly attributed to climate change.

Yet, even as insurance companies abandon vulnerable communities, hike rates and avoid making payouts, they continue to provide insurance coverage to new coal, oil, and gas projects – and directly invest billions on fossil fuel companies. The hypocrisy is stunning. 

But this hypocrisy is also a campaign opportunity. So, too, is the fact that, unlike banks, insurance companies are regulated at the state level, giving us an opportunity to achieve meaningful progress during an extremely challenging political time. 

That’s why one of our top priorities this year is advancing the Insure our Communities Act in New York State. If passed, this game changing bill would…

• Prohibit New York-licensed insurers from insuring new oil, gas and coal projects. Because New York-licensed insurers operate globally, this provision could rule out private insurance for super-polluting projects everywhere.
• Prohibit New York-based insurers from investing in oil, gas and coal companies. Little known fact: insurance companies are also some of the world’s largest investors, managing trillions in investment capital. Forcing them to divest from fossil fuels would lock off a major source of finance to oil and gas companies.
• Require insurers to make community investments in disadvantaged communities, akin to the Community Reinvestment Act provisions that apply to banks.
• Provide discrimination protections for consumers, preventing insurers from discriminating based on climate risk, aka “bluelining”, and stopping insurers from dropping coverage for a community for at least one year after a climate disaster. 

Over the coming months, our team in New York will be doing all they can to build support for the Insure our Communities Act, hosting community meetings, town halls, lobbying days, partnering with tenants’ unions and housing justice groups, making the climate-driven insurability crisis an issue in the gubernatorial race, and more.

If you’re based in New York State, you can get involved in the Insure our Communities New York campaign here. (And if you’re not in New York, the folks at the Equitable and Just Insurance Initiative have a model Fossil Free Insurance bill that can be introduced in any state.)

In 2026, this is how we believe the climate movement needs to show up: we need to fight the rise of authoritarianism and we need to continue to attack the pillars of support that enable the world-destroying fossil fuel industry. 

In Solidarity,
– Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline coalition director

News & Updates from the Coalition

– Not Another $$ for ICE

As the Senate debates funding for the Department of Homeland Security, Democrats must grow a backbone and refuse to commit another dollar in funding ICE.

Call your Senator here. Call, call, call. It’s increasingly clear Trump is building his own unaccountable paramilitary force, one that feels empowered to openly murder people in broad daylight. Democrats can stop him by holding firm in budget negotiations. Call now.

– Stand with Minnesota

The people of Minnesota continue to courageously resist the ICE siege in ways that are awe-inspiring, creative, and heartwarming. The rest of us need to back them up with everything we have. You can donate to Minnesota organizations here; gum up the works at Hilton hotels housing ICE in Minneapolis; or team up with your buddies and attend any of the marches and actions happening across the country, many of which are targeting corporate targets, such as the Hilton, Target, and Enterprise. On Feb 11th, there will be a day of action on Target. 

–  Flighting to Fossil Fuel Buildout in the Gulf South

On Tuesday, a methane gas pipeline in Cameron Parish, Louisiana, exploded, injuring at least one worker. The explosion happened just miles from where Venture Global – whose billionaire owners are accused of insider dealings in their cozy relationship with the Trump Administration– is attempting to build CP2, an LNG terminal that would have the climate impact of 54 coal-fired power plants.

Local community members are fighting back hard against CP2. Back them up by adding your voice to their letter to the banks and insurance companies behind the project.

– Costco… there are Better Options than Citibank!

Later this month, we’ll be releasing a groundbreaking new report: “Better Options: how large companies and nonprofits can select climate-aligned credit card partners”.

The report reviews the climate performance of the 20 largest credit card issuers in the United States and reveals that eight of those financial institutions do not funnel billions into the fossil fuel industry. Therefore, there are better options for co-branded credit card partners for large institutions like Costco, L.L.Bean and more.

Why does this matter? In total, Citibank, the world’s second-largest funder of fossil fuel expansion, issues 82 million credit cards; 13 million of them are through its partnership with Costco. If Citi loses Costco as a credit card partner over climate issues, it would be the largest example of a bank losing a client over climate concerns that we’re aware of.

Want to know more? Join our Costco: Clean Up Your Credit Card campaign update call on Thurs Feb 26th at 5pm PT / 8pm ET.

– Pushing Pensions to Act on Climate

Of all the financial institutions that should understand the threat of climate change, public pensions are pretty near the top. Pension trustees have a legal duty to steward pensions so that they’re still making healthy returns forty years from now, when a twenty-five-year-old paying into the system will retire. And that is very much threatened by the climate crisis.

Yet, a new report from the Sierra Club shows only 4 out of 29 of the largest pensions in the country have acceptable targets for climate investments, and emissions reductions. Read about it in Bloomberg – and then sign this sign this petition calling on public pensions to adopt climate solutions investment principles. 

– State Legislature in Full Swing

With the state legislative season well underway, the time is now to advance climate action at the state level.

You can take action with us in Illinois, click here to help pass the Fossil Fuel Divestment Act; in Ohio, stop a bill that would classify fracked gas as clean energy; in Virginia, support a bill to end tax breaks for large polluters and join our staff in attending a Lobby Day on Monday 9th; and in Washington State, you can help pass legislation to divest the state form coal and join 350 WA’s Civic Action Team for regular action updates.

– Venezuela, Imperialism, and Oil 

Surprise, surprise. Guess who is financing the fossil fuel companies set to profit from Trump’s imperial forays into Venezuela? Stand.earth breaks it down for us here and here. Top of the list are the terrible trio of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Citibank. 

– Local Leads, Global Impacts 

And to finish on a more upbeat note. We launched our new leadership development program this week, Local Leads, Global Impacts. Over the next 9-months, 14 campaigners from across the country will receive training and mentorship from a variety of organizing experts from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Communication Workers of America (CWA), Little Sis, and others.

The program is designed to be a real world program and all participants are leading their own campaigns, ranging from statewide Make Polluters Pay campaigns to efforts to push cities to take action on the banks to campaigns to stop the fossil fuel build out in the Gulf South. We look forward to celebrating their wins with you in the months ahead.

The post February Newsletter: Fighting ICE and Big Insurance – we can do both. appeared first on Stop the Money Pipeline.

Countries built on diamonds are moving to diversify their mining sectors as one of the deepest slumps in years exposes the risks of relying on the precious stones alone.

Botswana, the world’s top diamond producer by value, plans to expand exploration for minerals such as copper and other critical resources to reduce its exposure to a prolonged downturn in the diamond trade. 

Speaking on the sidelines of the Indaba mining conference in South Africa, mines minister Bogolo Joy Kenewendo said the country has explored only about 30% of its territory, reflecting decades of near-exclusive focus on diamonds. She said roughly 70% of Botswana remains unexplored.

“We were doing more exploration looking for diamonds than looking for other high-value minerals, and now we’re going to change that,” Kenewendo said, as reported by Reuters. 

Lab-grown gems put squeeze on diamond mining industry

Diamonds will remain the backbone of the country’s mining sector, but the government is pressing ahead with plans to widen the mineral base. A newly launched state-owned exploration company will focus on improving geological data and raising exploration levels to reduce risks for investors.

“There’s a little hesitation from investors to go into exploration. You can lose a lot of money by exploring and not hitting anything,” Kenewendo said. “We want to ensure that we have the right data and we know what’s where.”

Pressure spreads

The push reflects the severity of the current diamond slump. Prices have fallen as demand in key consumer markets stays soft, inventories remain high and lab-grown diamonds gain market share, particularly in the US, where lower prices appeal to younger buyers. 

In Botswana, diamonds typically generate about one-third of national revenue and roughly 75% of foreign exchange earnings, leaving public finances and growth exposed when the market weakens.

Taylor Swift’s vintage ring shines new light on diamond industry

Other diamond-dependent economies face similar pressures. Namibia is promoting exploration for base metals and energy transition minerals, while Lesotho has highlighted the need to build a broader mineral and manufacturing base as diamond revenues swing. South Africa, once the centre of the global diamond industry, is increasingly focused on critical minerals such as manganese, platinum group metals and rare earths to support electric vehicles and renewable energy.

In Botswana, diversification plans also reflect shifting geopolitics around minerals. Demand for copper and cobalt has intensified as the US and China compete to secure supply chains for clean energy and high-tech industries.

Kenewendo said that Washington has expressed interest in partnering with Botswana on exploration and mining projects, though talks remain at an early stage.

(With files from Reuters)

Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition

by brian bean
Haymarket, 2025

Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism and the Future of the Left

by David Camfield
Fernwood Publishing, 2025

 

Demetrius Noble: Good evening. Welcome to the Haymarket Books discussion of communism, abolition, and the Left featuring authors and comrades David Camfield and brian bean. I’m Demetrius Noble, and I will moderate tonight’s discussion on their respective books. I’m really excited to discuss David’s book Red Flags and brian’s book Their End is Our Beginning.

To open things up, a primary theme that is explored in both books is the leftist critique of the state. More specifically, it seems that you are both very much interested in having us, and by us I mean the Left broadly, assess our orientation to the state and how it informs how we struggle for change.

What should our orientation to the state be right now, as we currently assess where we are and what is needed to organize and struggle for the types of revolutionary projects and goals outlined in your respective books?

brian bean: I’ll start by talking about that big question about the state. And I think it’s funny to just talk about that because sometimes in doing the day-to-day work of building movements and engaging in social struggle, the question of the state can seem like an abstract one. At other times, it can be overwhelmingly crucial. Like right now, I’m thinking about what one does with elections, for example, Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral race. Or, for example, when you have ICE agents kidnapping people off the street, like they are in Chicago right now.

But to step back, what do we mean by conception of the state and what are the ramifications of that? I think the first thing to understand is that the state is not class-neutral. It’s not something that can just be transformed by working-class people or the oppressed. The state’s very existence is to create a good business climate in the interest of the system of capitalism. So, the state is the preferred model for capitalism as opposed to direct rule by individual capitalists.

This is unlike times in the past in pre-capitalist societies, where they were often ruled by one individual king, a dynasty, or the like. Under capitalism, the capitalist class, all the billionaires and so on, are in solid solidarity against our interests. But capitalists are also in competition with each other.

Individual capitalists are not good at administering what is best for the system as a whole because their individual profits always dictate their interest. So Jeff Bezos can’t really determine what is best for the system of capitalism because he’s really invested, and I use that word intentionally, in maximizing his own profit.

So capitalism needs a body that has a relative separateness from society. This is what Marx talks about as far as a committee of the general interests of the bourgeoisie. That’s what the state is. And that body that has this relative separateness has to be able to enact its will, administer taxes, and set and enforce laws.

And those things, of course, are almost always done against us–the working class, the oppressed, the dispossessed–but occasionally the state acts against individual capitalists. So it’s a capitalist state because it runs on tax revenues and then requires investment. The state administers political choices whose horizon is set by what is best for the general business climate of the system of capitalism. That is why it’s a capitalist state.

But what allows it to do these things is the police. So behind the force of every law, as innocuous as “pay your taxes” or “don’t sleep here” or “get off the street” or “don’t do this,” is the threat of violence.

It is the threat of the police officer’s baton and the gun that allows the system to continue to move as it does to churn out profit for the ultra-rich and the billionaires. This is why Lenin, the Russian revolutionary, described the state as a special body of armed men. That basic description still applies today, and I leave it gendered as men on purpose.

Before Trump’s administration, already 75 percent of all federal employees–be they Department of Defense, be they prisons, be they border patrol, be they the FBI or the CIA–75 percent of all federal employees constituted bodies of armed men. And these numbers have been shifted even more by Trump’s huge cuts to the administrative state, firing people in the Environmental Protection Agency,, the Department of Education, and so on. And he has overseen a hundred percent increase in the budget that is going to ICE and border patrol agents who are terrorizing our communities everyday.

So the state, at its core, is that of a special body of armed men that carries out the interests of the committee of the general capitalist class to keep the system going in all its violence and terror. And so what does this abstraction mean? In my book, I argue that it means that if we want to abolish the state, we need to get rid of the police.

We’re seeking to abolish the thing that is in many ways necessary for the state to keep functioning, to maintain its monopoly on legitimate violence. The consequences for strategy are that we will not abolish the state. We can’t abolish the police through the state as if we’re going to win electoral power and then dissolve them as an agency. But similarly, we can’t go around that state. We can’t just make up the alternatives on a community basis and assume the police will disappear or wither away.

The police will never be obsolete for the ruling class, even as much as we make them obsolete for us. So we may engage in struggle on the terrain of the state and government, trying to put the pressure on the government to do things like have mental health workers respond to mental health crises and engage even in running electoral struggles.

Similarly, we may engage in struggles on the terrain beyond the state in working to build communities that are organized to better handle conflict and work collectively to keep each other safe. But the state is not class-neutral, and the police are its main tool. This means that our task of abolishing the police has to come along with replacing the state with actual democracy, not having a body that floats above, acting against our interests, unaccountable, and with the constant and ever-present threat of police violence that secures state power.

I think this is what David gets at in his work. Any attempt to really win a society that’s democratic, in which we actually control our resources, our labor, and our destinies, will at some point come up against the police, the institution that is always used to thwart our dreams and strivings for a better world.

Practically, this means that our organizational tasks should not just be judged along the scale of whether they achieved the immediate win, the reform, or even elected office. We have to have the utmost clarity about the larger horizon of political change and see the state and the police as obstacles in building a movement powerful enough to overcome them in building a new world.

David Camfield: I really agree with everything that brian just said, and I would add that if we think about the state as part of the fabric of capitalism, it’s really part of how the dominant class rules, regardless of which political party forms a government at any particular time. It’s why it’s a capitalist state, and I think this is also important to understand.

The state has become ever more important to capitalism since the global crisis that began with the 2008-2009 recession. Capitalism has not extricated itself from the crisis that began at that time. The state is ever more involved in different kinds of ways in perpetuating the system, in trying to get it through the crisis that it still faces. And just also to pick up on something that brian said, even when you have a capitalist democracy at its best, which is not the United States today. Even if you find a historical example from another part of the world where you have capitalism with a broad welfare state and the best kind of capitalist democracy, it’s still a very undemocratic form of society because, at its best, you’re voting every four years or something like that for who is going to administer those state institutions. But you don’t vote for so many people, right?

You only elect people to the legislature and a few executive positions. You don’t elect the people who head the police. You don’t elect the people who head the central bank. You don’t elect people who are the top of all sorts of other state institutions. And we don’t vote for our employers. We don’t vote on anything connected to the places where so many of us spend so much of our time in the world of paid work.

Really, the state is about a small minority of people administering the vast majority. It’s not about the democratic self-government of the majority of people over the decisions that affect our lives. And so when it comes to strategy, I think we need to think above all about trying to build counter power: counter power to our employers and counter power to the state, whether that’s taking on Trump or taking on employers.

Of course, we need to defend what remains of the welfare state. We don’t want libraries privatized, we don’t want public transit to be privatized where it’s still public. But that doesn’t mean defending the capitalist state as it exists.

DN: As I think about what you state here, it seems like one thing that would flow from both of these types of conceptualizations is politics, socialism, abolition, and communism from below. Could you speak more about that as a kind of central and guiding framework in your respective works?

DC: Yes, it’s absolutely a politics from below. We could say socialism from below or communism from below. It’s not the words that matter, it’s the ideas. And that’s to distinguish it from a politics of change from above.

My book Red Flags looks at societies like the former USSR, China, Cuba, and others. And of course, these have been seen as the alternative to capitalism by most people around the world since they first came into existence. But we, in order to actually think about politics in the present, have to look at those societies and think about whether those are societies on the road to liberation toward the kind of society we want to create.

And what were these societies? We have to cut through the language and the rhetoric and see that these were societies where there was a central political bureaucracy of a one-party state that mobilized the labor power and the resources of society in order to carry out its project for economic and social development.

When we analyze this using the tools that Marxism gives us, we can see that in those societies, there was a ruling class that was exploiting the labor of the direct producers, in other words, workers and peasants. And these were not, therefore, societies where there was any transition going on from a society divided into classes towards communism in the proper sense of that idea of a classless and stateless society of freedom.

These were, are class societies. I think that’s the key thing. I would also argue that they were a distorted form of capitalism. But more important than that is just to recognize these were not societies that were in transition towards communism. And that means when we think about the politics that we need here and now, we need to look elsewhere than the tradition that’s associated with those societies. That’s the tradition of Marxism-Leninism. There are other traditions. I think we should look to those, because Marxism-Leninism is a form of change from above.

bb: In thinking about socialism from below, I go over a series of struggles that are not often seen as touchstones or examples in thinking about struggles against the police. And I think that it’s important to hold onto those for two reasons.

The first is because they’re international. There’s a lot of focus on the U.S., especially on the police, and the U.S. police are especially racist and especially violent. However, it is also a capitalist institution. You can get a cop to beat you up in every country in the world. And there’s a reason for that, and it has to do with the capitalist state.

In my book, I go over a series of instances in which people rose up from below and tried to carry out and enact a change on the level of society. I talk about Derry in Northern Ireland in the late sixties, early seventies, Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006, the various uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2011, and South Africa in the late eighties. I’ll start with the Derry example. The people of Derry were suffering under British colonialism. That meant a lack of equal rights, and it also meant the stifling brutality of the police. In 1969, movements around housing and voting rights exploded with an uprising that literally pushed the police outside of the barriers of a certain area of town and created Free Derry.

And so for first a series of months and then in a second iteration for a year, the police were run off the streets, and people were able to mobilize and carry on their daily life without them. And in many ways, in better ways, people organized communal kitchens. The milk still got delivered. Conflict was managed by all types of different institutions. And so it shows that in a certain kind of struggling from below, people actively find ways to take charge of their lives in their communities.

Another iteration of this process was the Syrian revolution in 2011, part of the regional conflagration of uprisings against the kind of inequality of global capitalism, post-colonialism, and the uniquely undemocratic forms that were existing in the regimes of the region.

Many countries had these huge, massive uprisings. Syria was one of them. And in many places across Syria, people rose up and literally ran the police off the streets and began to run their communities on their own democratic basis. Local coordinating committees that organized the protests would take on various institutions of managing conflict, making sure the bread got delivered, and all those sorts of things.

Each of these instances shows how people struggle from below, not asking someone on high to do it for them, but taking charge and building movements that have a particularly antagonistic revolutionary quality. People make space to create alternatives, not by asking the government to create them, but literally by running the police off the streets and taking control of their communities, their states, and their worlds to experiment with real alternatives, to provide glimpses of what a liberated world may look like.

The capitalist states mistaken for “actually existing socialism” that David talks about are also repressive police states, just like the United States. Having an internationalist abolition approach is a “Yes, all cops” approach, which is to seek solidarity with people in China who are rising up against the police there and people in Hong Kong who are rising against the police there. We recognize our joint struggles against our various undemocratic and capitalist states. And that means rejecting the argument that we must support these despots. A true internationalist abolitionist struggle is our banner.

DN: This makes me want to pivot back to David’s argument for exploring other traditions. David, are there any other traditions that you would like to call to the fore here that we might put in conversation with some of the examples that Brian mentioned? What do you have in mind when you think of these other revolutionary traditions that we might think about in terms of models for how we move past the state as we know it?

DC: Let’s go back and say that, as long as there have been socialist or communist traditions, there have actually been contending ideas inside those traditions about how change happens and what the goal is. And one way of talking about that is to look at the “from below” and “from above” parts of the tradition.

There’s a classic essay by Hal Draper called “The Two Souls of Socialism.” It was written in the 1960s, but it’s definitely worth checking out today. It’s not the last word, but it’s an important essay. There’s a dominant version of communism or socialism that has always been about the idea that some minority can hand change down to the majority. In the 1800s, before Karl Marx broke with it, you had this idea that the masses, the working class, were not ready for freedom, not ready for communism.

And so you had to have an enlightened minority that would take power and educate them to the point where they would be ready for it. And in one version or another, that has persisted even among people who thought of themselves as Marxists, whether it was the idea that a party would take power and hand liberation down, build socialism with the support of the majority, or whether it was a guerrilla army or some other minority force that would take power.

It’s a substitute, right? And it’s always a substitute for the majority of people emancipating themselves through their own self-organized liberatory struggles. And so I think we need to go back in order to address the challenges of the present and reclaim in a critical way all that’s best in those traditions and the struggles from below.

Not all the answers to the questions of the present are going to be found in the past. But tradition is a very valuable source of ideas. And we can see in all sorts of different struggles how people are organizing themselves to fight for their own liberation. We can see insights that are generated, we can see experiences that are worth learning from, including the ones that brian mentioned, which are a great feature of his book.

DN: brian, you had mentioned that as we struggle, we have to keep in front of us the question, what is our larger horizon of political change? What is the expansive scope of our political imagination? And David, you described how some societies described as socialist were not, upon historical examination, on the road to liberation. The question I would like to posit for you to reflect on as we think about the types of struggles that are in front of us right now is, how do we engage in these struggles in a way that ensures that we’re keeping our political aspirations expansive beyond what’s immediately efficient or practical? And thatwe don’t cut off our larger kind of political vision.

bb: I think that the art of politics is about how to engage in the current moment but not lose sight of the larger horizon, while not also doing the vice versa of losing sight of the current moment and only talking about an abstraction of the horizon.

There’s a quote from Italian communist Antonio Gramsci that says that our goal is to link every demand. So every demand, from the smallest ones to the revolutionary objective. Make use of every partial struggle to teach the masses the need for general action against the reactionary rule of capital, and seek to ensure that every struggle of a limited character is prepared and led in such a way as to be able to lead to the mobilization of the proletariat and not to their dispersal.

And so I think that is our task. And I think it means speaking frankly and ensuring that we also build our organizations, not just around the immediate reforms, but around some of the political questions, and to make this maximally concrete. I think we’re seeing this contradiction a little bit with the current election of Mamdani in New York City, in which there’s a huge movement behind him that is really inspiring, really exciting.

And so I think the question is one, how do we win those things that he put forward, which are the reason for his popularity. Universal healthcare, rent caps, and free, fast buses. How do we actually win those things? We need to be a part of and fight for those demands and struggle in such a way that it is not just asking for someone to do it for us.

We can take the energy that people have for wanting those things and say, how do we build to win that? And that might mean building a force that may be critical of and maybe even antagonistic to Mamdani. We need to make sure that we are where people are at and that we’re trying to fight the best fight and arguing to do so from below.

I think that the Mamdani election is very exciting, but there are some political warning signs, particularly around the question of the police. He has endorsed some positive community safety plans that would have a lot of good for a lot of New Yorkers. This idea would take some of the activity of the police off the streets, put in mental health responders, put in special supports around transit, and other things. So that’s a positive thing.

But he also continually says, “Hey, we’re doing this to allow the police to do their job.” This reinforces the dominant ideological narrative that the police are here to keep us safe. During his campaign run, at a certain point, he had a press conference where he went on air to apologize for calling the institution of policing racist during the George Floyd uprising. And so the political task, I think, is how we fight around those things in a real non-sectarian way that has appeal to most people, but also pushes back against this kind of capitulation. Through fighting for fast and free buses, and so on, we also need to continually push back against the hegemony of propaganda that says, the police are going to keep us safe, they hold us back from chaos, and we’ll just do better policing. I think those ideas changed radically in the context of the George Floyd uprising. We shouldn’t roll that back, but figure out how to push that forward in a way that also connects with people where they are and patiently explains these problems in a clear way, pointing towards that final goal of abolition.

DC: I certainly agree with brian, and I’m also going to give a quote from the sixties, from a group of socialists in Britain who wrote that, in their words,

Meaningful action for revolutionaries is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the egalitarian tendencies, and the self activity of the masses, and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them, and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others, even by those allegedly acting on their behalf.

And I think if we really take that to heart, we can apply that in really concrete ways, even when the level of social struggle is really low. The key is to avoid compartmentalizing. We don’t want to have, on the one hand, this part of our brain that says, and where maybe our heart is, which says we want a classless and stateless society of freedom, but I’m just gonna pull the lever for the Democrat over here.

There’s a disconnect. And so what we need to do is to try to apply these liberatory politics in practical ways. And I’m just going to give one example from my experience, which was 25 years ago. I was part of a strike. And at one point, we were told by the employer that if we didn’t move our picket lines off the employer’s property, they were going to call the police in against us.

A lot of union leaders would at that point have just capitulated. But the executive of our union did the right thing. They called a mass membership meeting. And in that meeting, we decided that we would call their bluff because we didn’t think that they actually wanted to have police wagons showing up and arresting strikers.

This was a university worker strike. We didn’t think they actually wanted to have all sorts of people just being peaceful picked up and carried and put in the back of vans and so on. We democratically made that decision in a mass meeting to defy what we had been told. And we kept the picket lines where they were, and we were right. They blinked.

That’s not revolutionary, but it’s applying that kind of from-below politics of democracy and self-organization that gives people the experience of actually being able to break boundaries. I think that’s the way we try to translate the long-term vision of liberation into the here and now, wherever we find ourselves, even if it’s sometimes very modest.

DN: Brian, you were talking about this kind of dance that we have to do on the Left, using the Mamdani moment as an example. He’s advancing a platform that we absolutely should rally around because these types of things will provide immediate relief to the working class. We need to champion those things, but also find ways to challenge him when he’s capitulating to the state. How do we challenge that in the most productive ways and not allow these reforms to impede our larger kind of political vision?

And for David, I want to ask about how anti-communism functions ideologically to stigmatize reform struggles like free public transportation and rent caps as dangerous communism for the masses.Could you speak more about anti-communism, how it functions ideologically in that way?

DC: Anti-communism, first of all, is not a new set of ideas. You can actually go back and see it in the 1800s when you find it used as a weapon against the Paris Commune, when the workers of Paris rose up in 1871 and took control of their city, for example. But the basic message of anti-communism is that any attempt to try to transform society, to replace capitalism with something else, is going to lead to some absolutely terrible, authoritarian, repressive nightmare.

All sorts of both real and fictitious examples from history are then brought forward to bolster this case. And I say both real and fictitious because there are all sorts of things in anti-communist literature and documentaries that are just outright lies, about conditions in Cuba or Venezuela or what have you.

But then there are sorts of actual experiences of oppression and exploitation and repression in those societies that I mentioned, and in many others. The USSR and other societies organized along those lines get wheeled out for anti-communism, but the whole discussion has become confused.

By the way, Trump and MAGA just accuse anyone they don’t agree with, any kind of Democrat, often of being communists. But then you have Kamala Harris saying that Trump was a communist dictator, right? Further confusing the whole discussion, and there’s just an incredible amount of confusion to cut through.

Communism just ends up being used as just a slur about bad things. “We think this is awful. We’re going to demonize it, call it communist.”  We have to try to cut through that to recognize that it’s an ideology of obfuscation. That it’s being wielded to defend capitalism, to defend the status quo, whether that’s defending the version of the status quo that Trump wants, or, the version of the status quo that his Democratic party opponents want.

Then there’s the question of how we oppose anti-communism. We absolutely have to challenge anti-communism. We need to actually learn some of the history so that we can do this most effectively and be able to see what’s being argued.

But I think the most common way when people figure out what’s going on with anti-communism is they just say, okay, this is an ideology that defends capitalism. And they reject it, but at the same time, they’re either sympathetic or sometimes actually more positive to societies like the former Soviet Union. And they just take where the anti-communist puts a minus sign, and they flip it and put a plus sign instead of thinking critically and actually analyzing those societies.

There’s a different approach, a different way of rejecting anti-communism. There’s a great slogan from the sixties in Britain that encapsulates this: “The ‘Communist’ world is not communist and the ’Free’ world’ is not free.”

And I think that’s the way that we should reject anti-communism. We’re rejecting the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds, that we live in some wonderful land of freedom and democracy, but we also reject the idea that those societies, including, for example, Cuba and China today, that those societies would actually be communist or on the road to communism.

DN: When you think about anti-communism as an ideology of obfuscation. I really like that language. Brian, you remind us just how murderously and dangerously violent capitalism is, like right here, right now. I think you have a quote in your book about random murders. I think you said one in three is actually done by the police. Can you speak more about just this in terms of the monopoly on legitimate violence, how dangerous and deadly the police are, and how anti-communism works as an ideology of obfuscation?

bb: The quote you’re referring to is a statistic that I have in my book about the violence of the police that complicates the common thought of how murders are committed. A large majority of murders are committed by people who know the victim, but if you are killed by a stranger, there is a one in three chance it is a cop. I think there’s such a symmetry between some of the mythologies around anti-communism and around talking about the police.

And that symmetry is that, “Hey, if people try to take control of their world it is always going to turn into an authoritarian despotic state.” The assumption is that ordinary people actually can’t protect their communities themselves and be in control of their destinies.

And those same mythologies are the same ones that are trotted out around the police. If we don’t have the police, there’ll be chaos. If we don’t have the police, it’s going to be like that movie, The Purge, random violence happening around every corner. I think that’s a really pernicious obfuscatory myth. You can find many examples of uprisings in which people push back the police and try to reopen society. There was a police strike [in 1976] for weeks in Finland, and the society did not devolve into chaos.

In the U.S., police often go on slowdowns during which they only carry out “necessary arrests,” which is really funny if you break that down. I think they are very conscious that there are arrests that are unnecessary as part of their daily practice, but that’s another story.

So, during these slowdowns, they found that when the police were doing less, actual reports of crime dropped. So, fewer crimes were occurring. A couple of years ago, in the Bronzeville neighborhood in New York City, there was a five-day period during which they intentionally removed the police and put social service agencies on call as an experiment. This is a neighborhood that’s had a high incidence of police calls. And during that period of time, when the police were gone, and social supports were present. There was only one 9-1-1 call that was done accidentally by a truck driver or something like that.

In Chicago, we had a surveillance program called Shot Spotter that had sensors that would perceive gunfire and direct police to it. It was a horrible surveillance device, and it didn’t work.

“The politics of communism from below, of abolition, communist abolition, is actually that we actually can control our destinies. We can take power democratically and reorganize our society in a way that would be democratic, fair, and safe.”

And so they removed them. Gun violence went down. Contrary to the mythology that you remove the police and there’s chaos and violence, the converse is actually true when the police aren’t present, particularly when paired with alternatives. People can actually organize our communities. People can actually care for each other. People can actually control their own destinies. So there’s an important symmetry between all the arguments around anti-communism and all the arguments that are pro-police. At their base, these arguments are so condescending in denying people’s ability to control and change our world.

The politics of communism from below, of abolition, communist abolition, is actually that we actually can control our destinies. We can take power democratically and reorganize our society in a way that would be democratic, fair, and safe.

DN: One thing that both of your books do very well is speak to the different types of mythologies of the capitalist state. These mythologies don’t remain static and flat over time. The capitalist system needs to update them to current technologies for what they need them to do. I know you all already stepped into those waters, but I was curious if you had more to say about those types of mythologies. And a follow-up to that: What does this mean for the Left in terms of ideological struggle? It’s not enough to think that our theory and our practice are correct. We have to win people over to our side to build out the type of mass movements and people power that we need. And these mythologies hold a lot of sway. They have captured folks’ imaginations in really critical ways that we have to find a way to supplant and then move people over to our ideas and visions for what the world could be, should be. How do we win people over to our side, knowing that these types of mythologies are what we have to confront?

DC: Ideological struggle is really important, but I’m going to start in a different place and get there. And that is that I think the barrier we face is not primarily ideological. The most important challenge we face, whether we’re talking about abolition or communism or both, is that most people don’t have any experience in their own lives of collective action, which would give them the lived sense that this is actually possible.

I think this is the fundamental thing. And then the question is, how do we actually work with other people to try to build movements through which people gain these collective experiences of collective action, which actually give people a taste of the possibility that things could be so much?

People have to come to that on a mass scale, through their own experience, not because they read a great book or see a wonderful video or watch or listen to a great song or something. All of those things matter. But when we’re thinking about change on a large scale, it’s those kinds of experiences, especially of strikes and other forms of mass direct action.

It’s those experiences that change the conditions. And then that makes a huge difference when it comes to how people make sense of things and ideology. Think about how the terrain of discussion around policing is different now in the U.S. than it was in the summer of 2020. It has so much to do with what people experienced at that time in the Black Lives Matter movement.

I think yes, absolutely, we need to engage in ideological struggle, but crucially, we need to be where working people are to build the kinds of movements and struggles that will allow more people to get that experience of the possibility of changing the world through their own actions.

bb: I was inspired by what you’re saying about the fact that ideas change in struggle. I’ll share the experience of Chicago as instructive on that point. There are, in our city on any given day, dozens of masked, flak-jacketed armed thugs from ICE who are kidnapping our neighbors, disappearing them, hurling tear gas outside of elementary schools, and more. People could have fallen into hopelessness and drawn negative lessons from that.

But instead, at the same time, while the situation is quite horrific and terrible, the community and neighborhoods all across Chicago have stepped up in a really inspiring way. Every day, people are out with their orange whistles linked up through various social media and text messages, finding ways to be present and, at a minimum, to just bear witness to the actions of these kidnappers. At certain points, people have confronted the police to make it more difficult for them to do their jobs of kidnapping our neighbors. That sort of thing transforms how people think.

When the first wave of ICE raids started occurring in the neighborhood where I live, there was one instance when they grabbed a particular individual, and people called a demonstration in that neighborhood the next day. There was an impromptu rally, people chanting, “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here,” all along the streets for blocks.

And that transformed how people thought about the moment. Instead of it being one only of fear, it told us that we can actually protect each other, we can keep each other safe. So ideology does change in struggle. And our main task is how to get people activated to take those partial struggles and connect them up.

There is an ideological task. The goal of my book is to hammer on the concept that the police as a body, as an institution, cannot be reformed. There are reforms that can limit the violence of the police. But as an institution, they’re unreformable. To end their monopoly on force that they can use basically at their own discretion up to the point of killing you is to remove them as an institution.

DN: I have one more question that I would like to ask, and I think we have a couple of things from the chat. For both of you, how do we reclaim communism, and what is its connection to abolition?

brian bean: One of the things that’s important about David’s work is I think people get lost in terminology so much and have been put on the back foot because of historical contexts.

And so if you say “socialism” to many people, they’re going to think, “Oh, Sweden.” They think of social democracy in which there’s a strong state that perhaps gives certain kinds of welfare to meet some basic needs for individuals. You say “communism,” and people think of the more authoritarian countries that David talks about.

There is a visionary core exemplified by Marx and Engels, and others. There is a liberatory vision of what we’ve been describing, people taking charge of their worlds, of saying, “Hey, we can actually democratically control our resources, our labor, and our self-determination. We can do so in a way without a state lording over us.”

“We talk about abolition, we talk about communism, and they intertwine in a way around the question of how we take real actual control over our society. … If we control our society in that way, most likely we will not need anything resembling the police.”

I think David is trying to reclaim communism as a positive thing while methodically dismantling the various ways that terminology has been bastardized. This is something to claim today.

We talk about abolition, we talk about communism, and they intertwine in a way around the question of how we take real actual control over our society. … If we control our society in that way, most likely we will not need anything resembling the police.

DC:  brian’s book looks at abolition from the communist perspective. It’s a wonderful book, and I highly recommend people to check it out. It distills some of the best things that have come out of abolitionist organizing in recent years.

It puts human freedom at the center. It exposes the kinds of unnecessary violence that we take for granted and shows that we shouldn’t have to live that way, and we won’t have to live that way in the society that we want to live in. Its vision of freedom is vital to a communist or socialist project in our times because that project has been distorted, besmirched, and damaged by the historical experiences of both social democracy and authoritarian “Communism.”

I live in a province, Manitoba, in Canada, where the government is the New Democratic Party, which is the sort of social democratic party that is just administering a capitalist society. It’s administering mass incarceration. It’s not on the same scale as south of the border, but it’s very significant to administering settler colonial capitalism here.

And then on a much bigger scale, the whole historical experience of the USSR and China and similar societies, leads many people, understandably, to say they don’t want any part of socialism. The kind of society we want to create is classless and stateless. And that includes a world beyond the police. Abolition is a vital part of reclaiming this vision of human liberation against the increasingly dire conditions that capitalism is inflicting on people all over the world.

DN: We have a couple questions from the chat. The first is aimed at you David, and it asks, how exactly are anti-communists stopping momentum? Is there something specific they’re doing or are they more like these MAGA folks that are spreading lies and misinformation to gain power?

DC: Anti-communism is diffused across the media, and the effect of it in whatever form it takes is to send the message that there’s no alternative. It leads people to draw the conclusion that, even if they don’t think what we are living in now is good, there’s no possibility of it being fundamentally better and different.

It also cuts people off from the incredibly valuable history of people struggling for change. By suggesting that revolutions inevitably lead to something like the Gulag in the USSR and mass death and starvation, it’s turning people away from studying the historical experiences of revolutionary movements and the theories that have come out of them, like the ones that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels began.

Anti-communism makes people think that this vision somehow ended up in the dictatorship of Stalin or the dictatorship of Mao, as opposed to actually using the tools that we can get from that tradition to analyze precisely the defeats that happened in the 20th century.

DN: brian, the other question is about the Mamdani moment. How do we address folks who are excited and energized by the platform that he ran on? What does it take now that people are energized to get them plugged into organizations that can attempt to build and amass some sort of power to hold him accountable?

bb:  I am not in New York City, so I would be hesitant to give advice as to what to do. But I think some of the basics are some of the basics of organizing. What would it look like if  some of the organizations who carried out the canvassing were to call mass meetings to organize these fights? We can see this as the beginning of organizing that will go beyond whatever Mamdani does or does not do. And so for an individual I would say, “Hey, talk to your organizations.”

It’s important to think about what to do beyond getting someone elected, to build a fighting movement on the ground from below that builds the pressure to carry out the reforms that made him popular.

DN: We have another question: At what point did past socialist countries become not socialist? Did they divert away from the Marxist socialist path, and would you uphold the October revolution as one of those real socialist moments?

DC: Yes, the October revolution in Russia in 1917 was an incredibly important historical experience because the working class, supported by the peasantry, actually took power into its own hands and opened up the door to the beginning of a transition in the direction of communism.

But unfortunately, it was unable to actually proceed down that path because of the conditions in Russian society. Russia had a very low level of development of productive forces. Most of the population were peasants who took control of their land, which was, of course, totally legitimate.

People wanted to get the landlords off their backs but there wasn’t the actual material basis to go beyond that. But the revolutionaries who led that revolution understood this. The whole premise of their revolutionary gamble at the end of 1917 was that they could take power.

They hoped that would then be a detonator, if you like, for revolutions in Western Europe, in more advanced capitalist countries and elsewhere, and that could come to the relief of the isolated revolution in Russia. And the extraordinary tragedy was that they didn’t happen, that revolutions elsewhere were defeated or didn’t go very far.

The Bolshevik Party that led that revolution found themselves trying to square the circle. They were able to defend the revolution in the incredibly bloody civil war. But society catastrophically broke down in this period, even just before the Civil War broke out.

The state that emerged from the Civil War was not one through which the working class was ruling. It did not have institutions of working class self-government. That situation led to the conditions where eventually a new ruling class consolidated itself. And this led to a break under Stalin, the central leader by the late twenties, which was the shift to try to have the state use all of its power to carry out a process of incredibly forced hyper industrialization.

There was also the dispossession of the peasantry, which was called collectivization but was not creating democratic collectives. It was the forcible expropriation or dispossession of the peasants. The state in the USSR did succeed in this extraordinary project of industrialization and modernization, but it was not socialism but rather something else altogether.

That society provided the model taken up by revolutionaries in other places. The revolution that happened in China in 1949, for example, was a very important social revolution against the capitalists and landlords that ruled China. But that revolution did not lead to the working class and the peasantry taking power. Instead, the military political forces of the Chinese Communist Party took power and from the beginning made themselves a new ruling class. They then proceeded to reorganize Chinese society along the lines that had been established in the USSR for the first time.

So the whole idea of what socialism was, what a transition towards it would look like, was really reshaped for most of the Left by what had happened in the USSR, with really damaging consequences.

bb: I think just one other thing to add in relation to Russia and the 1917 October revolution is the aspect of the Revolution about the police.

In the early days of the Revolution, the February before October, the notion of abolishing the police was one of the demands that was actually non-controversial among the diversity of different socialist opinions. And then after the October revolution, in the first month, revolutionaries issued a decree that abolished the courts and the police. They let people out of prison. Rather than the paradigm of punishment by the state, there were popular courts and tribunals. There was a flourishing of reconfiguring these things in the early days of the Revolution.

And then for all the reasons that David outlined, the revolution degraded and counter-revolution reared its head. The state repressive apparatus was not only repaired but developed further. And that’s how we get into the apparatus that carried out Stalin’s purges and the Gulag.

The thing to note here is that the defeat of what I would call Bolshevik abolitionism must ultimately be understood as one part of the defeat of the Russian Revolution itself.

DN: We have another question: If imagining beyond something like the No Kings protest, what is the role of socialists when engaging liberals who often share sentiments of democracy, equality, and sometimes even have anti-capitalist sentiment and ideas? How do we engage them in terms of getting them to participate in more meaningful collective action? You both spoke about the importance of collective action and that being a fertile terrain for ideas to change and shift.

bb: I think that many of the liberals who’ve come out for the No Kings stuff are concerned rightly about the degradation of American democracy. The size of these demonstrations is really inspiring. And people are concerned about a police state.

And I think our task as socialists is to take concerns with the police state and actually talk about the police. We need to connect the legitimate and real concern, fear, and outrage, particularly around ICE and explain that ICE is just a federal police department.

It’s important to outline the Democrats’ various complicities. Illinois Governor, J.B. Pritzker has spoken out a lot criticizing ICE. He has taken up Trump in court. But his state police officers are there outside Chicago at the detention facility with huge batons pushing back and arresting protestors who are there to protest the kidnapping of our neighbors and block them from doing so.

He’s trying to keep a certain kind of order. They don’t want protests that get a little too loud. They’re not concerned about the disorder of all these ICE agents prowling our city streets, kidnapping people who have done nothing wrong and disappearing them.

Let’s talk about the role that his police have played as well. ICE agents shot a man on the northwest side. There’s body cam footage of that killing. And Brandon Johnson’s appointed head of police, Larry Snelling has said he’s not gonna release the video.

We can connect to people’s anger about that and patiently connect that up with the role that police play in general and society.

DC: I also think we would want to bring up the question of, okay, you’re concerned about the things that brought you out to the No Kings action, but what are the methods of action that are actually going to win? The protest was really important, but we need to think about disruption. We need to think about mass disruptive action that actually can block aspects of the MAGA agenda if people are gonna fight back.

We need to stress that kind of organizing in between those big days of action to get people involved in different kinds of mobilization to show that there’s an alternative to the ballot box. We may not be able to persuade people to abandon the Democratic party, but the point is we need to actually say that if we want to fight and win in the here and now.

We need to actually use more effective tactics than the ones that are being put forward. So Mayday Strong, for example, that network of labor organizations, has been building for some more effective kinds of actions. And we need to also be trying to help people to see the links between the attacks on political rights and the things that are being done by employers to working people every day and the need to build the labor movement as part of the forces of resistance.

DN: David and brian, please offer any closing remarks.

DC: The theme of abolition cuts to the core of what we’re talking about, whether we call it communism or socialism–the possibility in the 21st century of a break with capitalism that begins a transition towards the classless and stateless society of freedom.

Social democratic and Stalinist traditions of politics from above have really gotten in the way of, and sometimes distorted, the genuinely socialist or communist project as being one about liberation and self emancipation of the majority of people in the world.

There’s a powerful way in which people’s horizons get lowered in our times by how bad things are and how they’re getting worse. People will be prepared to settle for a lesser evil or settle for a regulated capitalism.

We haven’t talked about the ecological crisis. The only way to address that, ultimately is by breaking with capitalism. We need to be able to try to reclaim an emancipatory liberatory project in our times. And I think abolition is an important part of that reinventing of communism for the 21st century.

bb: Linking up abolition and communism is urgent because the right knows what they need to protect the system. Both Democrats and Republicans increase police budgets as police training facilities like Cop City in Atlanta proliferate. We’re seeing this in the moves towards more interoperability, different departments working together. We see this with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. There’s open collusion between the police and ICE. For the ruling class, the police are the answer to the crisis.

Grasping the liberatory potential and future of communism and abolition has urgency for our organizing in the context of political crisis–the rise of the far right, the crisis of the economy, and the ecological crisis that has apocalyptic ramifications. The surge of people who are fleeing across borders all over the world reflects this crisis. We can’t achieve a revolution right now; we need revolutionary patience to undertake the work of building movements.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: nigel viu; modified by Tempest.

The post Communism, abolition, states, and the future of the Left appeared first on Tempest.

Zanaga Iron (LON: ZIOC) has signed a binding term sheet with Red Arc Minerals that could see up to $25 million invested to advance its namesake iron ore project in the Democratic Republic of Congo towards a final investment decision.

The agreement outlines a staged investment by Red Arc Minerals, a private group founded by mining veteran Mick Davis, starting with an initial tranche of up to $25 million in cash to fund engineering and other pre-production work. That funding, to be paid in five equal sub-tranches, would earn Red Arc an aggregate 20% interest in Jumelles, Zanaga’s subsidiary and the project owner.

A second tranche gives Red Arc the option, exercisable within 18 months of completing the first stage, to pay $125 million in cash to ZIOC for an additional 67.5% fully diluted stake in Jumelles, lifting its ownership to 87.5%. If that option is exercised, ZIOC would retain a 1% net sales revenue royalty on iron ore concentrate sales, with Red Arc able to buy back half of the royalty for $50 million.

ZIOC said the structure leaves the listed company itself non-dilutive, with chief executive Martin Knauth calling the transaction a major acceleration enabled by capital that allows the project to move through the pre-production phase and towards a final investment decision.

The transaction remains subject to due diligence, the execution of definitive agreements, and approval from shareholders and regulators, as set out in the term sheet.

Headline News:

• “UK Awards 6.2-GW Of CFDs In Onshore Bonanza” • The UK government has awarded Contracts for Difference agreements to 6.2 MW of onshore wind, solar and tidal stream projects in the Allocation Round 7a renewable energy auction. Solar PV secured the largest haul, with 4.9 GW of awarded deals at a clearing price of £65.23/MWh (in 2024 prices). [reNews]

Ed Miliband at a solar farm (DESNZ image via Flickr)

• “Cold Europe And Burning South: At Both Ends Of The Planet, January Shows Climate Extremes” • While much of Europe and the US braced against frigid cold, the Southern Hemisphere had extreme heat, with wildfires and floods. Global temperatures were at near record highs last month, on average, to make it the fifth-warmest January on record. [Euronews]
• “China To Invest 5 Trillion Yuan In Power Grid Over Next Five Years” • China is set to pour a record-high 5 trillion yuan ($722 billion) into its power grid over the next five years, a massive investment in infrastructure designed to eliminate renewable energy bottlenecks and propel the nation toward its 2030 carbon peak goal. [China Daily]
• “Record Snow Drought In The West Raises Concern For Water Shortages And Wildfires” • Record snow drought and record heat are hitting most of the American West, depleting future water supplies, making it more vulnerable to wildfires and hurting winter tourism and recreation. Both snow cover and depth are at the lowest level in decades. [ABC News]
• “Leading US Utility Goes Rogue, Offers New Round Of EV Funding” • Exelon’s ComEd branch announced another $70 million round of funds to support EV uptake in its territory in Illinois. The initial round totaled more than $160 million in EV funding. ComEd credits the program with more than 10,000 EV charger installations in Illinois. [CleanTechnica]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

At Davos, during the ongoing elite annual gala known as the World Economic Forum (WEF), Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech, receiving much...

The post Carney’s speech exposes the moral bankruptcy of the West first appeared on Spring.

Shell shock for Dutch climate policy Channel News brendan 10th February 2026 Teaser Media

Boom Supersonic wants to build the world’s first commercial supersonic airliner. Founded in 2014, the company set out to make air travel dramatically faster — up to twice the speed of today’s passenger jets — while also aiming for a smaller environmental footprint. For years, Boom has focused on developing the high-performance engine technology needed to sustain supersonic flight.

Though the company has not yet debuted its revolutionary jet, last year it identified a new and potentially lucrative application for its novel technology: generating electricity for the data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom.

Many of these data centers want the kind of flexible, around-the-clock energy associated with combined-cycle natural gas turbines. These heavy-duty machines burn gas to spin turbines and generate electricity, then capture the associated heat and use it to spin the turbines some more. As far as fossil fuel generation goes, they are among the most efficient options for dispatchable baseload power. But with demand for these turbines surging and supply increasingly tight, developers are turning to creative alternatives.

The upshot of all this creativity is clear: Much of the data center build-out is poised to be powered by natural gas — and the climate consequences that come with it.

Boom Supersonic inked a $1.25 billion agreement with a developer called Crusoe, which is building a suite of data centers for the artificial-intelligence startup OpenAI. The turbine company agreed to provide Crusoe with 29 jet-engine gas turbines that the developer could position at data centers across the U.S. 

The deal is just one example of developers and tech companies straining to find power sources for the data centers sprouting up nationwide. Meta’s data center in El Paso, Texas, will draw fuel from more than 800 different mobile mini-turbines. Meanwhile, the construction equipment company Caterpillar has supplied gas engines to a data center in West Virginia. And the developer Crusoe used “aeroderivative” turbines based on airplane models for its massive Stargate data-center campus in Abilene, Texas, where power demand is a whopping 1.2 gigawatts. 

It’s not just the U.S. New proposed natural gas capacity has surged worldwide over the past year. The energy analysis firm Global Energy Monitor reports that projects totaling more than 1,000 gigawatts of gas-fired power are now in development worldwide — a roughly 31 percent jump in just the last year. The United States leads the pack, accounting for about a quarter of that pipeline. More than a third of the new U.S. capacity will power data centers. The analysis also notes that two-thirds of gas project developers in the U.S. have yet to identify who will manufacture their natural gas turbines.

This rush to build out natural gas generation will have serious consequences for the climate. Early boosters of the data center boom suggested that new AI facilities would draw power from renewable sources such as solar and wind farms. While that has happened in some cases, developers are also rapidly locking in years of additional fossil fuel usage. An analysis from researchers at Cornell University found that the build-out could add as much as 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to the annual emissions of around 10 million passenger cars. 

“This is a huge proposed build-out,” said Cara Fogler, deputy director of research, strategy, and analysis at the nonprofit Sierra Club, which has been tracking gas plant expansions by utilities. “Existing coal that’s not coming offline and planned gas that’s trying to come online are potentially boxing out clean energy.”

As Silicon Valley’s AI boom drives demand for ever more computing power, data center developers have struggled to keep up, largely because securing the massive amounts of electricity needed to run these facilities has become so difficult. The rush has led to long wait times to secure power from traditional utilities. As a result, developers and tech companies are increasingly taking matters into their own hands by generating power on-site. According to an analysis by Cleanview, a data firm tracking the energy transition, at least 46 data centers with a combined capacity of 56 gigawatts — equivalent to that of roughly 27 Hoover Dams — are using this “behind-the-meter” approach, as it’s known in industry parlance.

The chief executive of Bloom Energy, a startup that builds behind-the-meter fuel cells for data centers, said in a recent call with investors that the startup’s order backlog has more than doubled over the past year.

“On-site power has moved from being a decision of last resort to a vital business necessity,” said company executive K.R. Sridhar. He noted that while most of the company’s previous business was in states like California with high electricity costs, now “states where we are growing fastest have robust natural gas infrastructure and favorable regulatory and policy frameworks for on-site power generation.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai lead a panel at a Google data center in Midlothian, Texas. Google plans to invest $40 billion in new Texas data centers through 2027.
Ron Jenkins / Getty Images

One of those states is Texas, which is the epicenter of the build-out so far. Unconventional gas power will anchor campuses like that of Titus Low Carbon Ventures, which is building half a dozen data center parks across the Lone Star State. In September, the company signed a deal with power developer Gruppo AB to source Jennbacher gas generating engines, each of which provides just a few megawatts of power. The company will plug in hundreds of these boxy generators to provide baseload power alongside solar and wind.

“We could’ve elected to go with gas turbines,” said Jeff Ferguson, the president of Titus, in an interview with Grist. Instead of sourcing traditional gas turbines, he opted to buy “reciprocating engines,” which are smaller gas-powered generators that are similar to passenger car engines.

“We think that reciprocating engines are a better solution for data centers,” he said, adding that ”the difference is in the ability to manage transient loads,” or rapid fluctuations in power demand that are very common at the facilities.

Not only is it unlikely that 200 generators will ever go offline all at once, but the engines are also much faster to start up and stop than turbines — they can come online in around a minute, as opposed to an hour for a traditional power plant. Ferguson likened it to the difference between accelerating in a Corvette and a jet plane.

But experts say these substitute gas sources are even worse for the climate than traditional power plants, which use more efficient combined-cycle turbines that employ both gas and steam. The worst offenders are not turbines at all but rather internal-combustion engines like the ones in most automobiles.

“Internal combustion [engines] have better ramp up/down time[s] but are less efficient when compared to a gas turbine,” said Jenny Martos, a researcher who runs the gas plant tracker for Global Energy Monitor. “All gas power technologies produce emissions, but generally engines produce more emissions than the others.”

Texas has almost 58 gigawatts of natural gas power in various stages of planning and construction, according to the latest estimates from Global Energy Monitor. That’s more than the next four states combined, and more than every country on Earth except for China. Nearly half of the power plants under construction in Texas will provide power exclusively to data centers, without connecting to regional energy grids. These projects span the state, from OpenAI’s Stargate campus in central Abilene to Meta’s data center in El Paso, where the company has contracted with a Houston-based microgrid developer to set up 813 modular generators.

The projects are also popping up in rural areas of the country with few other economic development prospects. A developer called BorderPlex is proposing a $165 billion data center campus called Project Jupiter in southern New Mexico, powered by two microgrids that operate on simple-cycle gas turbines, which just burn gas to generate energy without capturing and deploying their waste heat. The project’s 2,880 megawatts of generation are more than the entire generation capacity of central New Mexico’s main utility.

“I’ve never seen something quite this big before, dollar-wise, scale-wise,” said Colin Cox, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, which is opposing the project. “To call this a microgrid defies common sense.” Remaining behind the meter allows the project to avoid seeking approval from regulators who would enforce compliance with the state’s climate laws — even though Project Jupiter’s carbon emissions alone could outweigh the actions that New Mexico has taken to lower emissions over the past several years.

The project’s developer has promised jobs and tax revenue to rural Doña Ana County, but the future is murky. It remains unclear whether demand for artificial intelligence products will keep up with the historic capital expenditures being made by companies like OpenAI. If the bubble were to pop, the state would be left with a gas turbine that didn’t serve any users — an asset that the state would not need and that, under its climate laws, it would not be allowed to use.

“They’ll just be stranded assets,” said Cox. “You can’t do anything with a gas turbine besides run gas through it to make it spin.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Data centers are scrambling to power the AI boom with natural gas on Feb 10, 2026.

If you’ve ever been to a hot spring or geyser or volcano, you’ve seen the future of energy. Earth’s innards are hot — really hot — and that heat sometimes bubbles to the surface. If engineers dig holes in these geologically active places, then pipe water through rock, they can tap into this geothermal energy. Whereas solar and wind require sunlight and gusts to produce electricity, the Earth itself provides this constant source of fuel, which provides a powerful technique for bolstering the grid.

A new report from the energy think tank Ember underscores geothermal’s potential, finding that it could theoretically replace 42 percent of the European Union’s electricity generation from coal and natural gas — and at the same cost. New technologies could help Europe keep pace with the United States and Canada by opening new regions and exploiting this abundant, clean energy supply, the report adds. “We can’t really say that all of it will be utilized, but there is enough of it to get policymakers and investors more interested, even in Europe and even outside of traditional hot spots,” said Tatiana Mindeková, a policy advisor at Ember and lead author of the report. 

About those hot spots. Historically, geothermal has been limited to geologically active places. That is, if the Earth isn’t hot near the surface, you’d have to dig farther to get at the energy. And the deeper you dig, the higher the costs and the harder it is to recoup that investment. In addition, the rock at these sites must be permeable: A facility pumps down liquid, which flows through the gaps and heats up, then returns to the surface to power a turbine.

But next-generation techniques are opening swaths of new territories to exploit. Engineers are drilling deeper, allowing them to tap into the constant heat emanating from the planet’s molten core. And they’re creating their own permeability by fracturing rock at depth, so the water has space to heat up. “With these new technologies, we actually can extend the scope of where geothermal makes sense economically,” Mindeková said.

This is not to say that these techniques, known as enhanced or advanced geothermal, are cheap or easy. As crews drill deeper, the equipment on the surface must scale up to handle the load. We’re talking depths of several miles. “Anytime you get deeper, it gets more difficult,” said Wayne Bezner Kerr, who manages the Earth Source Heat program at Cornell University but wasn’t involved in the report. “It gets more expensive, it gets more challenging.”

Oddly enough, tools and techniques developed by the oil and gas industry have helped massively here, opening pathways in a geothermal system. That creates more surface area for the water to move across and heat up. “It is a bit ironic,” Mindeková said, “and I feel like it’s also maybe one of the reasons why we don’t talk about [geothermal] in Europe as much.”

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Which is not to say that geothermal can now be done economically everywhere. One major consideration is the geothermal gradient — how quickly temperature rises the deeper you go: Rock may be the desired temperature two miles below the surface in one place, but just one mile deep in another place. The cost and complexity of drilling fall if things are hotter near the surface. Geology also matters: Water can be lost as it’s pumped underground — which becomes a problem if you’re drilling in an area without access to a lot of surface water to replace. Certain types of rock also infuse that water with more minerals, which can interfere with the equipment aboveground. 

Still, like any technology, efficiency will increase and expense will decrease as more geothermal comes online. “To the extent that we see more deployment of advanced geothermal in Europe, we’re going to see that bring down the cost of applying the innovation in lots of other places in the world,” said David Victor, co-director of the Deep Decarbonization Initiative at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the report.

Really, though, we don’t need to drill deep to get major energetic gains from the Earth. In the EU, the average household uses more than three quarters of its energy on home and water heating. A new geothermal project could generate electricity to meet that demand or, alternatively, a shallower project could heat and cool those homes more directly. 

This is known as networked geothermal: A utility drills maybe 600 or 700 feet deep and pipes water through the ground, which maintains a fairly constant temperature at that depth throughout the year. That heated H2O flows to individual homes, where ultra-efficient heat pumps extract warmth from the liquid in the winter and inject the cooled water back underground to heat again. Then in the summer, the heat pumps pull warmth from indoor air and add it to the water, which is pumped underground once more. This heats up the subterranean rock, so it’s ready to provide warmth once winter rolls back around. 

Similarly, geothermal can complement wind and solar by turning the ground into a giant battery. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, a facility uses that energy to heat water and pump it underground. Then when those renewables aren’t available, the hot water is pumped back up, discharging the subterranean battery.

The future for geothermal, then, is looking hot. And ironically enough, it’ll be advances from the oil and gas industry that will help the technology grow — in the EU and beyond. “We are trying to highlight,” Mindeková said, “that it’s also an opportunity for people working in these sectors to just transfer the knowledge, the skills, and find future employment in this new sector.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Geothermal could replace almost half of the EU’s fossil fuel power on Feb 10, 2026.