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EWG evaluation of food chemicals: Seven artificial dyes
Petroleum-based, synthetic dyes, including Blue Dye No. 1, Blue Dye No. 2, Green Dye No. 3, Red Dye No. 3, Red Dye No. 40, Yellow Dye No. 5 and Yellow Dye No. 6, are ingredients of concern.
EWG suggests limiting consumption of food that contains them.
Human and animal studies suggest artificial food dyes may affect behavior and learning, particularly in children. A 2021 assessment by the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard, or OEHHA, linked these dyes to adverse behavioral outcomes in children both with and without preexisting behavioral difficulties.
Animal studies have concluded that prenatal exposure to synthetic food dye mixtures can produce lasting changes in offspring behavior, including altered activity levels and measures of anxiety-like behavior and exploration.
Red 3 has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals exposed to high doses, prompting the Food and Drug Administration in 2025 to finally revoke its authorization of the dye for use in food.
Science analysisWhat are artificial dyes and why are they added to foods?
Artificial dyes are added to processed foods to give them color, restore color lost during processing, and make them visually appealing.
Six synthetic food dyes are authorized for general use in U.S. food: Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6. Red 3, another petroleum-derived synthetic dye, is currently being phased out.
Ingredient nameSynonymEuropean numberRed 40Allura Red ACE129*Red 3ErythrosineE127Yellow 5TartrazineE102*Yellow 6Sunset Yellow FCFE110*Blue 1Brilliant Blue FCFE133Blue 2Indigotine / Indigo CarmineE132Green 3Fast Green FCFE143 (Not authorized in the EU)* Must carry a warning label in the EU.
Where are artificial dyes found in foods?
Artificial dyes are most commonly added to candy, baked goods, desserts, beverages, breakfast cereal and other snacks.
They are found in 23,312 of the 172,081 foods and beverages added to EWG’s Food Scores between 2023 and 2025.
The 15 food categories with the most products containing food dyes (by supermarket shelf):
ImageSource: EWG’s Food Scores. Label created between January 2023 and October 2025.
What is the regulatory status of artificial dyes?
In 2025, the FDA revoked the use of Red 3 in food products and oral medication on the basis of the Delaney Clause, which bans authorization of a food or color additive found to induce cancer in humans or animals. Red 3 must be phased out of all food products by January 15, 2027.
In 2025, the FDA announced plans to work with manufacturers to phase out the remaining six artificial dyes in foods by the end of 2027.
Bills have been enacted in California, Utah, Arizona, Virginia and other states to ban Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 in food sold in public schools. And in 2025, West Virginia enacted a bill to ban these artificial dyes statewide.
Food containing Red 40, Yellow 5 or Yellow 6 sold in the European Union must carry a warning label stating the dye “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.” The EU doesn’t allow the use of Green 3 as a food additive.
In 2025, EWG supported the Ban Harmful Food Dyes Act, a bill in Congress which aimed to revoke approval for use of Blue 1, Blue 2, Citrus Red No. 2, Green 3, Orange B, Red 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, titanium dioxide and any additive similar in chemical makeup. The FDA revoked authorization for Orange B in 2026, and proposed revoking authorization for Citrus Red 2.
Are foods containing artificial dyes ultra-processed?
Industrially synthesized ingredients such as artificial food dyes are common in ingredients defined as ultra-processed food, or UPF, ingredients in the Nova framework (Monteiro et al., 2019).
Under a recent California law defining UPF, food containing artificial dyes is considered UPF (Real Food, Healthy Kids Act, 2025).
Are artificial dyes allowed in organic foods?
Under Agriculture Department organic standards, synthetic substances are banned in certified organic foods.
What are the potential health harms associated with artificial dyes?
Thorough review by the OEHHA found artificial food dyes are linked to adverse behavioral outcomes in children both with and without preexisting behavioral disorders (OEHHA, 2021), which is of particular importance since foods containing artificial food dyes are typically marketed to children (Dunford et al. 2025).
Although mixtures of all seven food dyes produced observed effects across studies, the most evidence of toxicity comes from studies of Red 3, Red 40 and Yellow 5. Reviewed studies support the evidence of their behavior and learning effects.
The research found changes in the behavior and learning of children exposed to artificial food dyes, both when the colors were added and eliminated from their diets.
This assessment of human and animal studies showed that because of outdated toxicity data, current allowable daily intake values do not sufficiently protect children from harm.
In one study, Yellow 5 was found to increase behavioral changes such as irritability, sleeplessness and decreased attention span in a dose-dependent manner in children (Rowe & Rowe, 1994).
In animal studies, developmental effects were observed in rodents exposed to artificial food coloring in utero. A series of studies that exposed pregnant mice to a mixture of artificial dyes and followed their offspring to adulthood observed long-term neurobehavioral changes.
Exposed offspring exhibited significant changes in movement and exploratory behaviors and altered anxiety profiles (Doguc et al., 2013, 2015, 2019). In one of these studies, these effects occurred with doses relevant to human exposure.
The neurobehavioral effects of artificial food dyes are believed to be caused by the ability of the dyes to bind to certain proteins and affect neurotransmitter pathways. When studying learning and behavior changes in rodents, researchers found that exposure during pregnancy can lead to altered expression of receptors that control memory (Ceyhan et al., 2013).
Red 3 was linked to cancer when it was observed to induce thyroid tumors in rats (Hiasa et al., 1988). Separate laboratory research found Red 3 can interfere with thyroid hormone signaling and estrogen-related pathways in human breast cancer cells, raising questions about its potential to disrupt hormones (Dees et al., 1997).
A 2015 study of human lymphocytes observed damage to genetic material exposed to Yellow 5 (Soares et al., 2015).
Another found that long-term consumption of this dye, even at levels established as safe, significantly changed how epigenetic genes are regulated in multiple mouse organs, suggesting the potential for developing cancer and behavioral effects (Zand et al., 2023).
Other research has linked certain food dyes, such as Yellow 5 and 6, to disruption of the human gut microbiome (Elder et al., 2023), and Red 40 to colitis in animal studies (He et al., 2021; Kwon et al., 2022).
Although research is limited on how artificial food dyes affect human health, some epidemiological evidence suggests that consumption of foods with both natural and artificial dyes is associated with an increased incidence of Type 2 diabetes (Shah et al., 2026).
Uncertainties/where more research is needed
From its 2021 report, the OEHHA identified important gaps in research on synthetic food dyes, including limited understanding of individual susceptibility, long-term developmental effects, absorption and metabolism, and differences in exposure and effects across population groups.
It also noted that current FDA acceptable daily intakes are based largely on decades-old studies that were not designed to assess behavior and learning effects.
The OEHHA nevertheless concluded the available human and animal evidence supports behavioral effects in some children and called for modern, dye-specific research to set exposure levels that adequately protect children’s health.
More details about artificial dyes
Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 account for most of the dyes used in the U.S. market.
Synthetic food dyes can contain manufacturing-related impurities, including carcinogenic compounds, that raise potential health concerns. A review by the Center for Science in the Public Interest called attention to p-cresidine as one potential carcinogenic impurity in Red 40 and benzidine and 4-aminobiphenyl in Yellow 5 and Yellow 6. Benzidine is classified as carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Orange B, an artificial color used only to color sausage casings, was “abandoned by industry” and is no longer approved for use as of September 2026. Since it is no longer being used, it doesn’t need to be evaluated.
Citrus Red 2 is allowed to be used only to restore the orange color to the skin of oranges that lose their color, but is also abandoned by industry.
Cited resourcesGlobal health and regulatory agencies
- Regulation (EC) No 1333/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 December 2008 on food additives. (2008). Official Journal of the European Union, L 354, 16–33. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2008/1333/oj
Comprehensive reviews and frameworks
- Monteiro, C.A., Cannon, G., Levy, R.B., Moubarac, J., Louzada, M.L., Rauber, F., Khandpur, N., Cediel, G., Neri, D., Martinez-Steele, E., Baraldi, L.G., & Jaime, P.C. (2019). Ultra-processed foods: What they are and how to identify them. Public Health Nutrition, 22(5), 936–941. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1368980018003762.
- Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. (April 2021). Health effects assessment: Potential neurobehavioral effects of synthetic food dyes in children. California Environmental Protection Agency, Children’s Environmental Health Center. https://oehha.ca.gov/media/downloads/risk-assessment/report/healthefftsassess041621.pdf
Legislation
- Arizona House Bill No. 2164, 57th Leg., 1st Reg. Sess., Ariz. (2025). https://legiscan.com/AZ/text/HB2164/2025
- Ban Harmful Food Dyes Act, H.R. 5027, 119th Cong. (2025). https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5027/all-info
- California Assembly Bill No. 2316, Chapter 914, Cal. Stat. (2024). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2316
- Real Food, Healthy Kids Act, Assemb. Bill 1264, Chapter 467 (Cal. 2025). https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1264.
- Food and Drug Administration. (2025, January 15). FD&C Red No. 3. https://www.fda.gov/industry/color-additives/fdc-red-no-3
- FDA. (April 22, 2025). HHS, FDA to phase out petroleum-based synthetic dyes in nation’s food supply. https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/hhs-fda-phase-out-petroleum-based-synthetic-dyes-nations-food-supply
- Utah House Bill No. 402, General Session, Utah State Legislature (2025). https://legiscan.com/UT/text/HB0402/2025
- Virginia Senate Bill No. 1289, Chapter 222, Va. Acts (2025). https://legiscan.com/VA/text/SB1289/id/3191585/Virginia-2025-SB1289-Chaptered.html
- West Virginia House Bill No. 2354, Chapter 206, W.Va. Acts (2025). https://legiscan.com/WV/text/HB2354/id/3177443/West_Virginia-2025-HB2354-Enrolled.html
Specific health impact studies
- Ceyhan, B. M., Gultekin, F., Doguc, D. K., & Kulac, E. (2013). Effects of maternally exposed coloring food additives on receptor expressions related to learning and memory in rats. Food and chemical toxicology : an international journal published for the British Industrial Biological Research Association, 56, 145–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fct.2013.02.016
- Dees, C., Askari, M., Garrett, S., Gehrs, K., Henley, D., & Ardies, C. M. (1997). Estrogenic and DNA-damaging activity of Red No. 3 in human breast cancer cells. Environmental health perspectives, 105 Suppl 3(Suppl 3), 625–632. https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.97105s3625
- Doguc D.K., Ceyhan B.M., Ozturk M., Gultekin F. 2013. Effects of maternally exposed colouring food additives on cognitive performance in rats. Toxicol Ind Health 29:616623.
- Doguc D.K., Aylak F., Ilhan I., Kulac E., Gultekin F. 2015. Are there any remarkable effects of prenatal exposure to food colourings on neurobehaviour and learning process in rat offspring? Nutr Neurosci 18:12-21.
- Doguc D.K., Deniz F., Ilhan I., Ergonul E., Gultekin F. 2021. Prenatal exposure to artificial food colorings alters NMDA receptor subunit concentrations in rat hippocampus. Nutr Neurosci:1-11.
- Elder, R., Vancuren, S. J., Botschner, A. J., Josephy, P. D., & Allen-Vercoe, E. (2023). Metabolism of azo food dyes by bacterial members of the human gut microbiome. Anaerobe, 83, Article 102783. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anaerobe.2023.102783
- He, Z., Chen, L., Catalan-Dibene, J., Lafaille, J. J., Furtado, G. C., & Lira, S. A. (2021). Food colorants metabolized by commensal bacteria promote colitis in mice with dysregulated expression of interleukin-23. Cell Metabolism, 33(7), 1358–1371.e5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2021.04.015
- Hiasa, Y., Ohshima, M., Kitahori, Y., Konishi, N., Shimoyama, T., Sakaguchi, Y., Hashimoto, H., Minami, S., & Kato, Y. (1988). The promoting effects of food dyes, erythrosine (Red 3) and rose bengal B (Red 105), on thyroid tumors in partially thyroidectomized N-bis(2-hydroxypropyl)nitrosamine-treated rats. Japanese Journal of Cancer Research, 79(3), 314–319. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1349-7006.1988.tb01593.x
- Kwon, Y.H., Banskota, S., Wang, H. et al. Chronic exposure to synthetic food colorant Allura Red AC promotes susceptibility to experimental colitis via intestinal serotonin in mice. Nat Commun 13, 7617 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35309-y
- Rowe, K. S., & Rowe, K. J. (1994). Synthetic food coloring and behavior: A dose response effect in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, repeated-measures study. The Journal of Pediatrics, 125(5), 691–698. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-3476(06)80164-2
- Sanam Shah, Anaïs Hasenböhler, Guillaume Javaux, Marie Payen de la Garanderie, Fabien Szabo de Edelenyi, Paola Yvroud, Cédric Agaësse, Alexandre De Sa, Inge Huybrechts, Fabrice Pierre, Marc Audebert, Xavier Coumoul, Chantal Julia, Emmanuelle Kesse-Guyot, Benjamin Allès, Valérie Deschamps, Serge Hercberg, Benoit Chassaing, Emmanuel Cosson, Sopio Tatulashvili, Mélanie Deschasaux-Tanguy, Bernard Srour, Mathilde Touvier; Food Coloring Additives and Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes in the NutriNet-Santé Prospective Cohort. Diabetes Care 20 May 2026; 49 (6): 1067–1077. https://doi.org/10.2337/dc25-2727
- Soares, B. M., Araújo, T. M. T., Ramos, J. A. B., Pinto, L. C., Khayat, B. M., Bahia, M. O., Montenegro, R. C., Burbano, R. M. R., & Khayat, A. S. (2015). Effects on DNA repair in human lymphocytes exposed to the food dye tartrazine yellow. Anticancer Research, 35(3), 1465–1474. https://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/35/3/1465
- Zand, A., Enkhbilguun, S., Macharia, J. M., Budán, F., Gyöngyi, Z., & Varjas, T. (2023). Tartrazine Modifies the Activity of DNMT and HDAC Genes-Is This a Link between Cancer and Neurological Disorders?. Nutrients, 15(13), 2946. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15132946
Other
- Dunford, E. K., Galligan, T. M., Taillie, L. S., & Musicus, A. A. (2025). All the Colors of the Rainbow: Synthetic Dyes in US Packaged Foods and Beverages in 2020. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 125(9), 1207-1217.e9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jand.2025.05.007
- Simon, J.E., Decker, E.A., Ferruzzi, M.G., Giusti, M.M., Mejia, C.D., Goldschmidt, M. and Talcott, S.T. (2017), Establishing Standards on Colors from Natural Sources. Journal of Food Science, 82: 2539-2553. https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-3841.13927
Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta
This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
On July 30, images streamed across TVs, social media feeds and newspapers of thousands of people approaching a fence along the beach, in boats and by foot. Migrants, including children and families, were attempting to cross into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave bordered by Morocco. Facing violent border guards and the threat of drowning, over 70,000 people made it to Ceuta, with hopes of eventually reaching the Spanish mainland. Officials in Ceuta said that 100 people died in the crossing — either by drowning or being crushed — and sources on the ground believe the number was higher.
“I lost my phone, my money, my ID card, everything I had,” one Moroccan teenager recalled. “At one point I got pulled to the bottom, so far down that my feet touched the sand. When I looked around me, I saw women and babies who had drowned.”
“There was no proper humanitarian response from the local authorities — whether it is basic hygiene, food or shelter,” said Ric Fernández, coordinator and spokesperson for humanitarian and migrant advocacy group No Name Kitchen, or NNK, about the first days after the mass crossing. “Instead, there was an institutional response of pressuring people to ‘voluntarily’ return to Morocco. … There was repression, violence against people on the move in every form — legal, administrative and physical, and the forced expulsion of people.”
Facing intense pressure and violence from both the Spanish police and military, within 96 hours most people returned to Morocco. Estimates about how many migrants remain are in flux, but the Spanish government said in late September that up to 10,000 people are still in Ceuta.
While the global mainstream media quickly moved on from this story, the situation in Ceuta has remained tense over the last three months, with increased violent harassment by the police, evictions and collective expulsions. In recent weeks, “voluntary returns” and evictions from makeshift camps on the beach have ramped up.
Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'d_JZCDM4Q5ZBUslnKH4l0Q',sig:'D865mB1H6f680CvXaneq8PnsrTSRxAOhEky-2uFJX_Q=',w:'594px',h:'399px',items:'2299035070',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});Irene Estébanez Gutiérrez, a family and community doctor in Madrid, spent two weeks in Ceuta as a volunteer. “An information campaign has been waged that portrays people on the move as invaders, violent and dangerous,” she said. The media coverage, she believes, has failed to adequately address “the resulting humanitarian crisis, the systematic violation of rights, the lack of protection for minors, and the systematic violence and discrimination to which people are being subjected to, particularly by the military.”
Those who remain include Moroccan men and women, alongside Sudanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Malians and Nigerians. According to NNK, a significant number are minors. They are still stranded; the majority of them have slept in the street or in makeshift tents since they crossed into Ceuta over two months ago.
Kora, who uses a pseudonym as an activist to protect her identity, arrived in Ceuta to volunteer in early August and found the violence and the lack of access to basic necessities particularly angering. The authorities were “not letting them access the supermarkets to get food or water,” she said. “They turned off the publicly and freely accessible water [to shower or drink] on the beaches and beat them or scare them in the middle of the night … to purposefully making their lives more miserable.”
Organizing solidarity, facing criminalizationThis violence, however, did not prevent activists and migrants from developing forms of organizing and resistance. Hundreds of migrants staged a protest on a popular beach in Ceuta in August to demand asylum. On Sept. 21, Migreurop, a Euro-African network of organizations, activists and researchers that monitors European migration policies, noted in a joint statement with over 100 organizations: “We have witnessed forms of resistance in everyday survival practices.” They mentioned the sharing of information, food and medicine, as well as safety and protection practices.
#newsletter-block_1b590d37a6301dd66e1fa8b563f08f3f { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_1b590d37a6301dd66e1fa8b563f08f3f #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterBesides migrants’ self-led efforts, civil society has stepped up to help, with the Spanish Red Cross distributing food at Trampolín Beach, the site of one makeshift camp. Other local charities like Luna Blanca, have been providing between 2,700 and 3,500 meals a day in five locations with initial funding from the Spanish government. NNK, a group started by Serbian activists in 2017 that supports migrants along the Balkan and Mediterranean routes to the EU, has been working in Ceuta since 2021. It has grown from a fixed team of four to more than 21 volunteers, after a call for help in early August through social media and Signal groups with other grassroots organizations providing aid to migrants in EU borders. Operations have shifted in the three months since the migrants arrived, and NNK is now cooking and serving over 1,200 meals a day in a new industrial-size kitchen.
Fernández shared how the group has adapted its work on the ground to keep up with a crisis situation. “For more than a month [after July 30], we were not able to do proper legal accompaniment, because the system was broken and we were just trying to register people,” he said. “We tried to divide our work into four different teams: legal, health, cooking, awareness.” To keep things coordinated, aid groups in Ceuta hold a weekly meeting to share information and needs. The most pressing needs are for immediate humanitarian assistance, including clothes distribution, housing for vulnerable groups and phone charging.
Volunteers arrive from Spain and mostly other European countries, contributing what they can based on their experience. “I provided direct basic health care because of the barriers to accessing medical care and the huge health needs due to violence and living conditions,” said Irene, the doctor who volunteered with NNK. She said she assessed dozens of cases involving wounds or injuries resulting from assaults, mostly perpetrated by the Spanish military.
The hostility of authorities toward migrants has also extended to volunteers, who carry out their daily work under intense police monitoring. Police constantly ask for identification documents and conduct searches, including of food containers meant for distribution. Reprisals against volunteers and grassroots groups have taken multiple forms, from administrative fines to criminal charges of “trafficking.” A volunteer who had previously spent time in Ukraine and Syria reported that the seven-square mile enclave of Ceuta felt considerably more militarized than either of those countries.
Lessons learned and the way aheadSpain’s response to the people who crossed into Ceuta has been shocking to many observers, especially for a country that has been considered among the more progressive in the European Union on migration. This comes at a time when states are slowly beginning to implement the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, a new and comprehensive reform to migration management which includes a focus on external borders. Legal advocates argue that this pact, coupled with the use of emergency laws, could suspend migration and human rights law in the EU during mass border crossings like the one in Ceuta.
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DonateSolidarity groups have also come under attack and are looking for ways to move forward in this new atmosphere. Greece is among the first countries to implement the pact and one that has led the way in criminalizing humanitarian efforts to support migrants. This increasing criminalization is happening “through the misuse of the criminal justice system to target and persecute activists and people in solidarity for their work, as well as through administrative law, such as harsher requirements for the registration of civil society organizations,” said Eleni Sirri from the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a network of NGOs, associations and collectives that monitors human rights violations at and within European borders.
Anna Gruber is the advocacy manager from Collective Aid, an NGO working with migrants in the borderlands of Serbia, Bosnia and Greece. She shared how Collective Aid also had to reorganize and strategize about the way ahead, given the increase in crackdowns on humanitarian work, as well as the anticipated changes because of the EU pact. “We are now focusing more on capturing conditions in detention, [and] mapping deaths and disappearances on the borders,” she said. “While these are hard to trace, bringing all the scattered evidence we can find together helps showcase the EU’s focus on detention camps and the containment of migration that is at heart of the new pact.”
Like other groups navigating the criminalization of migration and anticipated changes under the new pact, NNK feels it is important for grassroots groups across the EU and beyond to come together around migrant rights. Fernández believes putting energy into growing networks and collectives of grassroots groups is the way forward. “The far-right in Europe and instrumentalization of migration will continue to grow,” he said. “We need to prepare for that and learn from each other to be stronger.”
Kirsten Dimovitz, the advocacy coordinator for the Border Violence Monitoring Network and a volunteer in Ceuta, contributed additional reporting to the story.
This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Trump Protects Fewest Species Ever Under Endangered Species Act
In nearly two years the Trump administration has protected just three species as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act and missed dozens of deadlines to make decisions promised in a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service workplan. No other administration in the more than 50 years since the law was passed has protected so few animals and plants from extinction.
“The Trump administration is just a pure disaster for the natural world and America’s struggling wildlife will pay the price,” said Noah Greewnwald, endangered species codirector at the Center for Biological Diversity. “To benefit polluters and billionaires the administration is taking a wrecking ball to protections not just for wildlife but also our air, water and climate.”
In 2024 the Service published the fifth version of its workplan since 2016, providing a schedule of protection decisions for hundreds of species by fiscal year (Sept. 30 to Oct. 1) over the next five years. In fiscal year 2026 the Service failed to make scheduled findings for 39 species, leaving wildlife like little brown bats, golden-winged warblers, Arizona toads and more in the lurch.
“Even before Trump species waited far too long for protection,” said Greenwald. “Now massive spending and staffing cuts and contempt for environmental protections mean hundreds of plants and animals won’t get badly needed protections anytime soon, pushing them closer to extinction. It’s truly sad.”
Under the Clinton administration 521 species were protected and under the Obama administration 361 species were protected. Only 22 species were protected under the first Trump administration. To date, the second Trump administration has listed just three Florida reptiles: the Florida Keys mole skink, rim rock crowned snake and the Key ringneck snake. All three were listed following court orders.
In July the Trump administration published a new version of the workplan that dropped decisions for 64 species over the next five years, meaning animals including pygmy rabbits and Florida manatees have no prospects for gaining lifesaving protection.
Government Drops Appeal, Preserving Win for Plaintiffs in Challenge to Trump-Vance Administration’s Weaponization of Public Service Loan Forgiveness
The Trump-Vance administration has abandoned its appeal in National Council of Nonprofits et al. v. McMahon, a case brought by a broad coalition of nonprofit organizations, more than a dozen local governments, and labor unions against the U.S. Department of Education. The case stopped a new rule that would have allowed the Secretary of Education to disqualify government and nonprofit employers that disagree with the administration’s policies from a program intended to support borrowers working in public service jobs.
Earlier this year, a federal court ordered the Trump-Vance administration to stop its unlawful rewriting of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program as a way of silencing nonprofit organizations and local governments that do work that runs counter to the administration’s political agenda. The government had filed an appeal of the ruling, but on Wednesday submitted a joint stipulation of dismissal, which will formally end the matter and ensure the new rule will never take effect.
Plaintiffs in the case include the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), City of Albuquerque, City of Boston, City of Chicago, City and County of San Francisco, County of Santa Clara, Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, Legal Aid DC, National Association of Social Workers, National Council of Nonprofits, Oasis Legal Services, American Federation of Teachers, and National Education Association. The coalition is represented by Democracy Forward and Protect Borrowers in this matter; the County of Santa Clara and City and County of San Francisco represent themselves.
“The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program was created so public service workers can pursue careers serving their communities without being burdened with debilitating debt,” said AFSCME President Patrick Moran. “Countless essential workers rely on this program, and weaponizing it for political purposes would hurt not just these workers but the communities they serve. We’re glad the administration is now following the law and abandoning this illegal scheme.”
Quotes from additional plaintiffs included in the coalition about the court’s ruling are available here.
The legal team on this case includes Sarah Goetz, Victoria Nugent, Simon Brewer, Jennifer Fountain Connolly, and Robin Thurston from Democracy Forward, Persis Yu and Winston Berkman-Breen from Protect Borrowers, and attorneys from the County of Santa Clara Office of the County Counsel and San Francisco City Attorney’s Office.
Read the opinion that decided the case here and learn more about the case here.
Field Notes: Brazil — Who Controls the Land?
Words Won’t Feed Us: Six Priorities of the People Who Already Do
Six demands to policy and decision-makers to strengthen policies in support of family farmers, by the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM).
There are nearly 900 million food producers at the heart of food systems. More than 90 percent of the world’s roughly 608 million farms are family-run, and generate around 80 percent of global food value; smallholdings under two hectares alone account for roughly a third of the food produced worldwide. Yet many of these smallholder farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples’, women and youth face massive challenges that threaten their livelihoods and agency.
Commitments to family farmers are not lacking. Since 2011, the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has adopted a series of policy recommendations that recognise their central role:
- How to Increase Food Security and Smallholder-Sensitive Investments in Agriculture (2011)
- Investing in Smallholder Agriculture for Food Security and Nutrition (2013)
- Connecting Smallholders to Markets (2016)
- Promoting Youth Engagement and Employment in Agriculture and Food Systems for Food Security and Nutrition(2022)
The CSIPM developed these key messages in consultation with smallholder farmers, peasants, pastoralists, fisherfolk and Indigenous Peoples across a balance of regions. They reflect the experiences, lessons and struggles of those living with the gap between policy and practice.
The CSIPM calls on policy-makers to act on the following six priorities:
- Rights-holders must take part in decision-making.
- Policy coherence is political, not technical
- Youth must shape prorgrammes meant for them
- Agrarian reform and an end to the criminialisation of peasants and Indigenous Peoples
- Redirect public finance to smallhoderls, territorial markets and fair prices
- A gender lens in every policy
The post Words Won’t Feed Us: Six Priorities of the People Who Already Do appeared first on CSIPM.
EWG comments to HHS and FCC on radiofrequency radiation exposure limits
Attached are EWG’s comments to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Communications Commission urging joint action to update radiofrequency radiation exposure limits to protect public health and children.
File Download Document ewg_comments_to_hhs_and_fcc_october_2026.docx.pdf Areas of Focus Cell Phones October 21, 2026Watsonville Community Hospital nurses plan town hall about threatened labor and delivery, postpartum, and NICU shutdowns
New Environmental Books to Inspire Your Autumn
We could all use a little extra environmental inspiration these days, so here are 15 new books for readers of all ages.
We’ve adapted the books’ official descriptions below, and the link in each title goes to the publisher’s page. You can also find any of these titles through your local bookseller and library.
Spooky Rivers: 25 Strange and Mysterious Rivers That Snake Across Our Planet
By Geo Rutherford
A thrilling nonfiction book that follows the winding histories of 25 mysterious rivers around the world. Explore natural phenomena, scientific oddities, historical events, and environmental disasters, as well as the myths and legends tied to these waterways, which are increasingly threatened by climate change.
Rivers are the Earth’s restless travelers — carving landscapes, shaping history, and holding secrets. Some are forces of destruction, sweeping away everything in their path, while others are lifelines, sustaining civilizations for millennia. And some are both, bringing prosperity and devastation in equal measure. From deadly whirlpools to lost cities submerged beneath their waves, these rivers challenge everything we think we know about the natural world. There are rivers that catch fire, rivers that boil, and rivers so deep they seem bottomless. Some slither beneath the ground you stand on, while others vanish without a trace.
Who knew rivers could be so … spooky?
By Steve Winter and Sharon Guynup
National Geographic photographer Steve Winter has spent his career photographing big cats around the world, from the graceful jaguars of Brazil’s Pantanal to elusive Himalayan snow leopards. His photographs astound; his stories, even more so. Winter and environmental journalist Sharon Guynup share experiences behind the lens.
In chapters on every key species — cougar, jaguar, leopard, snow leopard, tiger, and lion — readers will witness the power of Winter’s work, including uplifting stories of how his photographs have made a difference and powered important conservation efforts on behalf of these mighty creatures.
Winter and Guynup’s work has changed the world — and it continues to awe and inspire us. But you don’t have to be a serious-minded conservationist to be pulled into their new book. All animal lovers, especially those who love cats, big and small, are invited to look deeply into the eyes and lives of these iconic species.
Wild Work: Adventures of Women Field Biologists
By Sophie A. H. Osborn and Susan B. Adams
More than 40 real-life adventure stories by 37 women field biologists take readers behind the scenes with wolves, condors, bats, bears, and other wild animals, highlighting the important work of women in field science and wildlife conservation. This is an inspiring and entertaining anthology that brings to light the often-untold stories of women in wildlife science, featuring first-person accounts by dozens of adventurous field biologists, immersing readers in the thrilling and compelling reality of studying and conserving fish and wildlife across the globe.
From playing tag with wolves or cuddling wild foxes to wading through rivers filled with venomous snakes or evading poachers, these women share stories of courage, curiosity, and resilience. And they share the delicate balancing act of juggling demanding fieldwork with family life, the lifelong friendships they forge in the wild, and the transformative power of connecting deeply with the natural world. They also bear witness to the fact that while women have been integral to fish and wildlife research for decades, their stories have rarely been represented in literature.
The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy
By Gil Durán
When Silicon Valley says it’s ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,” the world is bullied into perceiving the chaos as a “necessary cost” of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule. The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.
Using insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern “messiahs” — Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk — and shows how the promise of technological liberation has become a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.
More than a hidden history, this book is an urgent warning: Democracy is being dismantled by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back — if we act now.
Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era
By Jacob Weisberg
History will be particularly harsh to Trump enablers who share and covet money and power. They represent intuitions that are central in determining whether America remains a free, functioning democracy or not — and they know very well they are committing crimes. In this bitterly humorous book, Weisberg has written a defining book of the Trump era — how this pitch-black political moment happened, why so few resisted, and what it reveals about the character of American leadership.
Big Tech, Wall Street, mega-corporations and the U.S. Congress are encapsulated in eight individuals who together form an entwined network of power in America, giving us a new way to understand how authoritarianism can take root in an open society — not by overthrowing institutions, but by bending and bullying them into submission.
We’ve Been Here the Whole Time! A Not So Sacred Guide to All Things Native America
By Joey Clift
Foreword by Shane Hawk / Illustrated by Julie Fiveash
Comedian Joey Clift (Cowlitz nation) takes you on a hilarious journey to discover the largest population you don’t know in this sharp debut for fans of Michael Harriot and Phoebe Robinson. Put away the construction paper: This contraband book contains everything your high school refused to teach you about Native American history, people, and culture — illustrated in an irreverent textbook-meets-notebook style by Diné artist Julie Fiveash.
Clift walks you through a wide range of misconceptions, weird questions, and even weirder assumptions, covering everything from Pocahontas and sports mascots to ancestry claims and the Land Back movement. This hilarious, NDN-approved guide to Native America is a great gift for history buffs, teachers, and comedy fans.
Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy
By Amy Westervelt
A gripping account of the corporate propaganda that has invaded our media, our democracy, and now the very nature of truth itself from investigative reporter and Drilled podcast host Amy Westervelt.
Whether it’s the tobacco industry lying about the health dangers of cigarettes, Big Pharma burying studies that make its products less marketable, or Big Oil misleading the public on the dangers of the climate crisis, we all know corporations use doubt and science denial to avoid responsibility. So why do we continue to let them get away with it?
Westervelt exposes the plot hidden within the familiar story of science denial. Over the last century, Big Industry has built a vast apparatus of think tanks, lobbyists, sponsored university labs, and obliging news networks to con the public and fool decision-makers, poisoning the informational ecosystem and warping the nature of truth along the way.
Forest of the Sea: The Remarkable Life and Imperiled Future of Kelp
By David Helvarg
A spectacular cold-water paradise 30 million years in the making is succumbing to warming oceans. Kelp forests are largely out of sight, hidden under the ocean’s surface, yet they are one of Earth’s most wonderous and underappreciated marine habitats. It’s an ethereal light-infused realm of sharks, otters, eels, sea stars, crabs, rockfish, and myriad other species vital to a functioning ocean and the countless coastal communities that make their living from the sea. Unlike coral reefs, whose similar plight plays out in tropical waters highly visible to vacationing tourists, kelp forests thrive along cold-water coastlines far from tourist centers. What will it take to stop the decline before these underwater playgrounds bursting with colorful life become vast fields of lifeless urchin barrens?
The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
A rallying cry and resistance manual from one of the leaders breathing new life into the environmental movement. As the climate emergency worsens and biodiversity shrinks, we somehow get used to it. We struggle to remember what summers were like before the unrelenting heat, in those years before wildfires became an annual routine. We adapt, we normalize. Scientists call this “shifting baseline syndrome,” and they warn that it’s why we are increasingly sleepwalking toward disaster.
Great Reads for Young People (and some adults too!)
Beatrix Potter’s Botanical: The Art of Flowers and Fungi
By Marta McDowell
A rare collection of Beatrix Potter’s own botanical art, and an exploration of the role these plants played in her personal and literary life. This beautiful book showcases 65 plants and fungi that Potter made special study of in her often-overlooked career as a botanical artist. For each species we see Potter’s original pencil and watercolor renderings, learn about the specimen’s role in her various beloved gardens, and hear the stories of how it inspired or appeared in her literary work. The result is a new look at the celebrated illustrator as a pioneering botanical artist and budding scientist.
Liars, Cheats, and Copycats: Trickery and Deception in Nature
By James O’Hanlon
Meet some of the world’s most dastardly creatures, who lie, cheat, and deceive for a living. There’s the deadly praying mantis that looks like an innocent pink flower. The assassin bug that strums spider webs to lure in a tasty snack. The cuttlefish that changes color to hide its romantic intentions.
To understand how these creatures swindle their way to survival, this book reveals the science behind camouflage, mimicry, and masquerade, taking readers on a journey from tropical rainforests to the darkness of deep ocean trenches to examine how animals and plants use deception to avoid predators, lure in prey, and even reproduce.
Let’s Explore Foxes: An Urban Wildlife Explorers Book
By Siski Kalla
Perfect for home or school, the new book for children in the acclaimed Urban Wildlife Explorer series takes a close look at foxes, one of the most common but least understood wild urban animals. Ideal for curious young minds, they’re bursting with laugh-out-loud moments, fascinating science, and beautiful watercolor illustrations. The series is also packed with tips on how kids can help protect and interact safely with local wildlife. Whether you’re a budding naturalist or just want to find out more, these are the perfect guides for young urban explorers.
By Rosanne Parry
A stand-alone addition to the New York Times and Indie bestselling Voice of the Wilderness novels by Rosanne Parry, which include A Wolf Called Wander, A Whale of the Wild, A Horse Named Sky, and A Wolf Called Fire.
On Westerly’s otherwise ink-black tail, one bright white feather stands out. Westerly stands out, too. She isn’t like her brother and sister — she’s different. Everyone knows it, including the roost’s story keeper, who proclaims that Westerly alone is destined to save her fellow ravens from a terrible fate. Questioning her destiny, isolated from her family, and full of doubt, Westerly takes to the sky, vowing never to return. But when a once-in-a-lifetime volcanic eruption finds her, she has no choice but to flee in the direction of home.
By Lea Korsgaard
Combining nature writing, philosophy, myth, science, and 64 beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, The Butterfly Season is a luminous account of one woman’s quest to see all 64 species of butterflies native to Denmark in a single year. Part field diary, part mythological tapestry, part existential reflection, Lea Korsgaard’s journey unfolds across seasons and geographies, through meadows, marshes, and ancient coastal lands as she discovers the mysteries and miracles of the natural world.
By Mark Brake and Benjamin Bryant
We may think of ancient cultures as rudimentary — but in reality, the humans living hundreds and even thousands of years ago were remarkably savvy, establishing the foundations of the science we rely on today. From early Mesopotamia to the Stone Age, through Ancient Greece and Rome, the pirates of medieval England, and the seafaring Vikings of Scandinavia, the time of the Samurai, Chinese dynasties, and cowboy cultures from the American West to South American ranches and the Mongolian tundra, This fascinating book showcases how different peoples at different times have observed nature, reached rational conclusions, developed scientific techniques, invented revolutionary tools, and devised shockingly creative ways not only to explain the world about them, but to thrive in it.
Within the Earth humans found medicine; within the Air, navigation; within Fire, warfare; and within Water, the ability to manipulate their environment. Discover the origins of surprisingly sophisticated ancient science in this fascinating look at human ingenuity, such as: Terraced Farming (Ancient Andes, China), Samurai Land Stewardship (c. C16th), Roman Concrete (c. 3rd century BC), Stonehenge (c. 3100 BC, England), Samurai Armor Crafting (c. C16th), Viking Battlefield Herbalism (793–1066 AD, Scandinavia), The Pirate Compass (C17th–18th, England) and so many more clever stories and fun facts, textboxes, lists, and features, readers can open any page of The Science of History and learn something new.
You can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations in the “Revelator Reads” archives.
And let us know what you’re reading: Drop us a line at comments@therevelator.org
Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy.The post New Environmental Books to Inspire Your Autumn appeared first on The Revelator.
The Senate permitting bill would lock in data centers and nuclear waste on public lands
A bipartisan permitting bill headed for a Senate vote right after the election would give President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum two years to approve data centers, nuclear facilities, and fossil fuel projects on public lands, then make those approvals nearly impossible to undo. While the bill would help speed the country’s grid buildout, it currently contains three provisions that would be disastrous for public lands, writes CWP Executive Director Aaron Weiss.
Section 1401 of the bill bars agencies from altering any permit in effect on or after September 16, 2026, unless they meet a “clear and convincing evidence” standard far higher than agencies normally face. Courts could no longer pause projects with botched environmental reviews. Construction would continue while the review is redone, and agencies can’t act on the review findings. Opponents of federal actions would get just 150 days to sue. Section 1402 would make taxpayers pay developers 50 to 100 percent of construction costs if a future administration slows a whole category of projects, like gas plants or nuclear fuel facilities, essentially locking in the priorities of the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management is currently considering at least 35 data center-related applications covering more than 24,000 acres across six Western states. The bill would essentially shield permits for everything from data centers to drilling issued by this administration from reversal by future administrations. Trump’s cancellations of wind and solar projects, meanwhile, stay in place. The bill, as written, also weakens the National Historic Preservation Act, over objections from nine Tribal organizations and the All Pueblo Council of Governors.
Senator Martin Heinrich, who’s co-sponsoring the bill, once said every person “deserves a chance to provide input” on public land management. His bill, as written, gives Burgum and Trump a green light to cut them out. Read more in the latest post on Westwise.
GAO to probe Trump mineral deals
Federal watchdogs plan to investigate what safeguards the Trump administration is abiding by when taking financial stakes in mining companies and separately examine the Interior Department’s decision to create a new division overseeing offshore energy development. Senator Heinrich and Representative Jared Huffman requested the review from the Government Accountability Office.
Quick hits Trump officials ask Supreme Court to let border security project resume in national park Judge halts U.S. Forest Service reorganization, ruling it is ‘overwhelmingly likely’ that plans violated federal law Trump administration plans to begin work on massive arch in two weeks Burgum discusses Colorado River plan, calls Arizona’s water cuts ‘completely manageable’ The future of wolf protections in the West hangs on the Ninth Circuit Trump’s East Potomac Golf Course renovations face a growing legal fight What’s behind the $105 million donation to Yellowstone National Park?Mountain Journal | Wes Siler’s Newsletter
Poll: 96% of Coloradans support conserving public lands Quote of the dayIt is overwhelmingly likely that the USDA’s planned closures and relocations violate Congress’s express restriction on those activities… There is no public interest in allowing the government to violate federal law.”
—U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, Summit Daily
Picture ThisHot moose summer is over. Welcome to cool moose fall.
At @grandtetonnps, autumn means the moose rut is underway. Bull moose roam in search of females, size up their competition and sometimes put those massive antlers to the test.
Romance, rivalry and really big antlers. Fall has arrived in the Tetons.
Photo by Kevin Yu Shi
Feature image: Spent nuclear fuel at the Hanford Nuclear Site, Wikimedia Commons
The post The Senate permitting bill would lock in data centers and nuclear waste on public lands appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.
Audubon Florida Recognizes Conservation Leaders for 2026
The case for low-carbon bamboo fuel starts at $2.75 a gallon.
With fuel prices sky-high, the need for fuels from non-petroleum sources has taken on a new urgency. And researchers at Worchester Polytechnic Institute say they might have just the alternative source we need for low-carbon and low-cost fuel: bamboo.
Bamboo could power trains, planes, and automobiles for as little as $2.75 per gasoline-gallon equivalent at mature commercial scale, the researchers calculate. The fuel would emit greenhouse gas emissions 26 times lower than conventional diesel fuel. What’s more, bamboo promises to be a more sustainable biofuel feedstock than conventional ones like corn and sugarcane.
Bamboo is a grass, and one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth. Some species growing several dozen inches in a day. Because of this fast growth rate, the US could make as much fuel from bamboo as it makes ethanol from corn while using about 13% as much land. The WPI researchers published their results in the journal Sustainable Energy & Fuels.
“I think this research is especially timely and important because fuel prices are high and the transportation sector produces more greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. than any other,” said chemical engineering professor Michael Timko in a press release. “Bamboo would use different land than we are using for food production, so there is no food versus fuel trade-off. Farmers win, consumers win.”
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Timko and colleagues evaluated bamboo for biofuel production using a process called hydrothermal liquefaction. In the process, wet biomass or organic wastes are subjected to high heat and pressure. Polymer chains in the mass breaks down to form a biocrude oil. The oil can then be converted to other liquid fuel products.
The researchers heated wet bamboo pulp to 300°C for 10 minutes. The process converted about 36% of its mass into biocrude.
Unlike corn or sugarcane, which are the main plants used to make biofuels today, bamboo wouldn’t compete with agricultural land and doesn’t need much water or energy to grow. And compared with other perennial grasses that are also being considered for biofuel, it has very low ash content—less than 1% by weight—so the fuel-making process generates minimal waste.
”Bamboo may eventually offer industry a way to generate low-carbon liquid fuels at scale,” Timko said.
Source: Timothy M. Woodard et al. Bamboo as a cost-effective feedstock for production of low carbon transportation fuels. Sustainable Energy & Fuels, 2026.
Image: Based on photo by Ranurte/UnSplash. ©Anthropocene Magazine
Trump is sunk
To put it mildly, Trump is not having a good day.
He is facing challenges from above: The Federal Reserve increased interest rates against his wishes. The Supreme Court ruled against his attempt to limit voting by mail. Judges have thwarted him on such issues as the Kennedy Center and his attempt to ban news outlets from the White House.
Previously loyal Republicans are fleeing now that a Trump endorsement has become a curse. Major far-right media figures such as Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Joe Rogan have broken with him. Impeachment and corruption charges are looming.
In addition, he is facing discontent from below: His approval ratings are at record lows. According to polls, 65 percent of voters disapprove of Trump, more than twice as many as the 32 percent who approve. His policies are even more unpopular than they have always been, with just 17 percent approving of his handling of the economy.
Increasingly, Trump is seen as self-serving and corrupt, no longer the “outsider” alternative to elite politics. As one Republican pollster puts it, in a guest essay called “The Trump Brand Has Tanked”: “Voters don’t think the economy is working for them, and they think it’s being rigged more and more in favor of a precious few who are cozied up to our nation’s leaders.”
Everyone is asking, “Why is this happening now?” While the answers vary, the universally acknowledged truth is that the war in Iran is the number one culprit, particularly because it is worsening the ongoing affordability crisis.
The economic fallout from the war is impacting everyone through soaring fuel prices and higher costs of living domestically. This impact is on top of the generalized instability and suffering the war has provoked globally.
The U.S. economy has continued to grow because of enormous investment in artificial intelligence, but this has raised fears of a massive crash if and when the AI bubble bursts.
Trump, of course, ran on the promise of ending deeply unpopular “forever wars,” so his exploits abroad are seen as a betrayal by some of his base.
And significantly, sections of that base are turning against him. In a New York Times opinion piece called “Trump’s Luck is Finally Running Out,” Thomas Edsall quotes Charlie Cook: “Over the last 90 days, President Trump’s political standing has transitioned from very unpopular to toxic and now to radioactive.”
Edsall shares this account from Amy Walter of The Cook Report:
Trump’s staying power in our politics — even, astonishingly, despite the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — gave the president the confidence and latitude to pursue unpopular policies and blow off scandals that would have sunk any of his predecessors. But now, the economic consequences of his sweeping tariffs and the war in Iran have done the one thing all the controversies of his first term were never able to do: splinter his coalition and sink his approval ratings to all-time lows.
It is certainly gratifying to see the unbearably arrogant and smug Trump brought down. But this isn’t a moment that we can celebrate. As The Guardian put it in September, “The weaker he gets, the more dangerous he gets: Trump lashes out as his power wanes.”
Trump’s relative weakness has not slowed the ruthless tide of xenophobic, racist, and transphobic scapegoating and attacks. Mass detentions and deportations continue. The recent ICE raid on the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar is a chilling example of how far the forces of reaction are willing to go.
Trump’s fear of losing the elections has led him to extreme attempts to undermine liberal democracy, something that is recognized even by conservative critics of the administration such as the neo-conservative Robert Kagan, who says, “We’re heading in the direction of dictatorship.” With varying levels of success, Trump has tried or threatened gerrymandering, restricting mail-in ballots, stationing federal troops or agents at polling stations, and abusing the voter database to throw people off voter lists.
Right-wing fear-mongering about hordes of noncitizens voting is, of course, unfounded. Trump recently cited Department of Homeland Security estimates of 16,000 noncitizen residents registered to vote in Nevada. A state investigation brought that number down to 185 and then, after further scrutiny, zero.
The Nevada Secretary of State called out such widespread disinformation:
DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence…Repeating unsupported claims does not make them true.
Given such extreme efforts to prevent people from voting and undermine the elections, we can anticipate more legal and illegal maneuvers in the face of a Trump loss.
There will likely be further court challenges. As one commentator writes:
The courts have provided mixed verdicts on Mr. Trump’s attempts at vote suppression in advance of the 2026 midterms. But the rulings have handed him an unambiguous gift: a road map for shaping the universe of eligible voters to his liking in the presidential election year of 2028.
Democrats are widely predicted to win the elections in November and may even win majorities in both the House and Senate, but they offer no real alternative to the far-right agenda.
Where we can make a real difference is in movements, campaigns, strikes and struggles on the streets and in the workplace. Collective organizing from below is the only force that has ever won substantial reforms, no matter who is in office.Many Democrats, including some so-called “progressives,” are bending over backward to distance themselves from issues such as Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and Palestinian rights. If they win the election, it will be a vote against Trump, not a vote for the Democratic Party. In fact, 45 percent of voters say their congressional choice is a vote against Trump, including four out of five Democrats and around half of independents.
Charlie Cooke has the perfect metaphor:
While many have long predicted that Democrats will enjoy a “blue wave” election, I think of it more as a “red undertow,” which will pull many Republicans under and significantly trim the margins for many others. A blue wave implies an endorsement or affirmation of Democrats and their policies. But the Democrats’ brand is still in tatters. … Fortunately for Democrats, this election will in most cases not be about them.
If they do get elected, unless Democrats fight for substantial reforms (which they show no inclination to do), they will only disappoint those with raised expectations and lay the ground for the return of an even more radical GOP in 2028 or 2030, continuing the vicious cycle of the two-party system.
Given these realities and the current weakness of movements, it’s understandable that some people are placing their hopes in democratic socialists working within the Democratic Party. A recent message from Alexandria Ocasio Cortez makes the case. Titled “Why I’m feeling hopeful,” it describes her campaigning in upstate NY:
Launching this program and speaking with organizers has filled me with hope that the energy to elect Democrats up and down the ballot is out there if we can channel it into turning people out who may have previously felt left behind or that their vote did not matter. The way we do that is by giving people something worth showing up for: Medicare for All, universal childcare, a living wage, and a government that actually works for them.
That all sounds wonderful. But it’s not what Democrats of any stripe are delivering anywhere. It is not the agenda of mainstream Democrats. And progressives or democratic socialists who get elected face relentless pressure from the system to toe the line.
In the absence of independent mass movements that can act as a counterweight, elected democratic socialists are unable to meet their campaign promises. Rather than pulling the mainstream to the Left, they themselves move to the center and lend weight to mainstream Democrats.
Katie Wilson, a democratic socialist who was elected as mayor of Seattle last year, campaigned on promises of taxing the rich and funding housing. Instead, she has delivered a city budget with massive spending cuts, no new taxes, and more money for the cops. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s failure to reign in the police has already disappointed and frustrated many of his supporters.
The failure is not personal, but systemic: Even the best progressives face the harsh reality of being trapped in a rigged and unbending system once they are elected.
This recognition does not mean inaction.
Revolutionary socialists don’t abstain from elections. They are an important part of politics that we often will want to participate in, whether around a particular ballot issue or a candidate attached to a movement. But we recognize that elections are the territory of the ruling class, and we will always be weakest there. So, they should never be prioritized. We don’t put them first. It’s a waste of our time and energy.
We must not drop our criticisms of mainstream or progressive democrats in office—to do so just leaves the field open to the right wing.
We must defend our limited democracy (including civil liberties), but most importantly, we must fight not only for meaningful reforms but also for the transformation of society that will allow genuine and much more expansive democracy.
The Democratic Party is not committed to such a transformation, and even if they were, would not have much room to maneuver in the current political system.
At an otherwise bleak moment, our reason to be hopeful is that a growing number of people on the Left are dissatisfied with the dominant socialist options, whether reformist or campist. They recognize that we need to build a better alternative.
Where we can make a real difference is in movements, campaigns, strikes and struggles on the streets and in the workplace. Collective organizing from below is the only force that has ever won substantial reforms, no matter who is in office. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young people in France, Spain, Belgium and India are currently demonstrating this in mass protests around education, housing and other issues. These are the same forces that have the power to stop the right and revitalize the Left in the U.S.
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: Hassan Albadawi, The White House; modified by Tempest.
The post Trump is sunk appeared first on Tempest.
Experts: How are climate scientists using artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing at a rapid pace and is increasingly being used by scientists to better understand climate change.
AI is perhaps best-known for its use in “large language models”, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
However, the field is vast.
From weather forecasting to analysing satellite images, climate scientists are using various types of AI to develop faster and more efficient ways to study the warming planet.
However, the technology comes with no shortage of risks and challenges, including overreliance on unverified results, intensive energy use and exacerbating existing inequalities in climate science.
Carbon Brief spoke to 10 experts working across a range of climate-related fields – from developing climate forecasts to analysing changes in the energy grid – about how AI is being used.
Their answers are set out below, grouped by theme.
- What are the benefits and challenges of using AI in weather and climate forecasting?
- What are some other current uses of AI in climate science research?
- How is AI being used to advance climate policy and action?
- How could AI be used in climate research over the coming years?
- Are there any misconceptions about the use of AI in climate science?
- Could AI improve or exacerbate inequalities in climate research?
- What are some other risks and challenges of AI in climate change research?
- What are the benefits and challenges of using AI in weather and climate forecasting?
- What are some other current uses of AI in climate science research?
- How is AI being used to advance climate policy and action?
- How could AI be used in climate research over the coming years?
- Are there any misconceptions about the use of AI in climate science?
- Could AI improve or exacerbate inequalities in climate research?
- What are some other risks and challenges of AI in climate change research?
Dr Doug McNeall, science lead in data-driven climate modelling at the UK Met Office:
One of the most significant recent developments has been the success of AI weather-prediction models, which learn from large volumes of weather data to predict the next few hours ahead and then repeatedly feed those predictions back into themselves to generate forecasts up to two weeks into the future.
These models have demonstrated that AI can provide accurate predictions while requiring far less computing power than existing numerical models [which rely on mathematical equations to simulate the climate].
One of the main challenges is that AI weather-prediction models have been developed for relatively short timescales, where large amounts of observational data [for example, temperature, rainfall or sea ice extent data] is available and model performance can be evaluated quickly and rigorously.
Climate prediction is fundamentally different. To provide useful climate information, we need to make projections for future climates that lie outside the observational record.
One promising route forward is, therefore, to use AI to emulate or accelerate these existing models, rather than relying solely on purely data-driven approaches. This blended approach could make climate risk information far more accessible and affordable to produce, while retaining the physical understanding [based on mathematical and scientific principles] that underpins confidence in climate projections.
Prof William Collins, professor of AI for climate science at the University of East Anglia:
We’re seeing a really exciting renaissance in both weather and climate science…Machine learning [a subset of AI that uses algorithms to let computers learn from data and make predictions without being explicitly programmed] has had an enormous impact on numerical weather prediction.
So, for example, the European Center for Mid-Range Weather Forecasts is now deploying an AI forecast system as part of their official communication of weather predictions to the European community, alongside the traditional forecast system. AI systems have become good enough that they’re absolutely competitive with the world’s leading numerical weather prediction…So that’s been quite remarkable.
Much of machine learning and AI involves learning from data and climate represents a future for which we do not have data. We’re literally trying to predict the future. We don’t have observations of it. So, where does the data come from to inform the models? That is, at the moment, the central challenge that the climate community is attempting to overcome.
Dr Amirpasha Mozaffari, researcher in Earth artificial intelligence at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre:
AI forecast models do well on typical weather, but underperform physics-based models on record-breaking and unprecedented extremes – precisely the events that matter most for adaptation [to climate change].
Solving that – whether through hybrid models [which combine AI with traditional models], physical constraints [in which rules are implemented based on the laws of physics to help the models make realistic forecasts] or new ways of evaluating models on what they have not seen – is the central open problem for the field.
What are some other current uses of AI in climate science research?Dr Stefano Materia, researcher in climate variability and change at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre:
Besides the climate modelling and prediction framework, the proliferation of Earth-observation satellites has created a massive influx of geospatial data (for example, images showing deforestation or sea ice melt). AI is used to translate raw pixel data into actionable climate intelligence.
Methane tracking and ecosystem monitoring are two examples of this kind of application. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, but leaks are largely invisible and hard to track. AI algorithms now automatically scan hyperspectral imagery [which uses data from across the electromagnetic spectrum] from satellites to pinpoint specific industrial methane leaks globally, alerting operators in near real-time.
At the same time, machine-learning models process thousands of satellite images daily to detect illegal logging, track land-use changes and monitor glacier retreat long before humans could manually review the footage.
Satellite image showing deforestation in Para, Brazil. Credit: Universal Images Group North America LLC / Alamy Stock PhotoDr Clare Eayrs, polar research scientist at the Environmental Fluid Dynamics Lab at New York University:
In sea ice research, machine learning is now used across the sea ice modelling workflow…The most mature application is extracting more information from observations, for example, mapping fine-scale sea ice deformation from ship radar and classifying snow layers in micropenetrometer profiles [which measure the hardness or softness of different layers of snow].
Forecasting is the most visible application in this field. Ice Net [a sea ice forecasting system] was an early demonstration that a deep-learning system [which uses models inspired by the layers of a human brain to process information] could outperform a leading physical model in seasonal Arctic forecasts. Machine-learning systems are now used to predict [climate] variables such as sea ice concentration, thickness and drift.
Prof Cristiana Stan, vice-chair of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP):
AI now appears across all major parts of the WCRP. [For example,]…the ”weather prediction model intercomparison project” [an initiative to create a centralised database of physics- based, machine-learning and hybrid model forecasts] includes physics-based numerical weather prediction models, hybrid [models] and AI weather prediction models. Because it is focused on operational models, the project offers a direct comparison between state-of-the art systems. [It] is intended to accelerate the deployment of the next generation of operational models and contributes to development of metrics needed to assess relative strengths and weaknesses of models.
Downscaling is another area that is harnessing AI power to refine the coarse-resolution model output into high-resolution.
Dr William Collins:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is performing its seventh assessment report (AR7)…This time, for the very first time, there’s a model intercomparison project just for models using AI [for weather and climate forecasting]. So that is a real milestone…It’s a very exciting proof of principle or proof of concept and, I think, the harbinger of many more developments of this kind to come.
[For more on how model intercomparison will inform IPCC AR7, see Carbon Brief’s recent guest post.]
Dr Amirpasha Mozaffari:
A few years ago, it took two or three years for a new architecture to make its way from the machine-learning community into weather and climate work. Today it is a matter of months: diffusion models, foundation models and generative ensembles have all arrived in our field almost as soon as they appeared elsewhere. That speed opens up things that were previously out of reach.
And the cost of running a global forecast has dropped by orders of magnitude…which, in principle, changes who can produce weather and climate information at all.
How is AI being used to advance climate policy and action?Prof Priya Donti, assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of Climate Change AI:
As we introduce more solar, wind and other renewable energy into the power grid, we need to rethink how we actually manage the various sources on the power grid…
AI is used in a few different ways here. One of them is just trying to get better predictions of solar and wind power production in order to reduce that uncertainty and allow us to plan with a little more foresight.
Wind turbines and solar panels in California. Credit: Tom Grundy / Alamy Stock PhotoAnother big one is helping to actually optimise and control the various components we have on power grids – the power generators, the batteries, flexible loads like industrial loads or the batteries in your electric vehicles or heating and cooling systems.
Dr Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, postdoctoral researcher at Politecnico di Milano, affiliated scientist at the European Institute on Economics and the Environment and at the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change:
AI is already useful at every stage of the climate policy cycle.
The first stage is measurement: understanding what is happening, what has been tried and who is exposed. Machine learning helps us process satellite imagery to estimate emissions, improve air quality monitoring, harmonise fragmented policy databases and map a scientific literature that has grown far beyond what any human team could read.
The second stage is modelling futures. The models we use to explore climate and economic scenarios are computationally very expensive, so AI-based emulators [simple models that can be used to represent more complex mathematical models] that reproduce their behaviour at a small fraction of the cost are transforming what we can do. Instead of a handful of scenarios, we can explore thousands and quantify uncertainties that were previously out of reach.
Reinforcement learning [a type of AI in which a computer programme learns to make decisions through a process of trial and error] is also allowing us to study how multiple actors, such as countries or electricity producers, compete and cooperate under different policy designs. This can reveal strategies that classical analysis misses.
The third stage is evaluation, where causal machine learning is extending the toolkit we use to answer whether a policy actually worked. That is a different – and much harder – question than predicting what will happen next.
How could AI be used in climate research over the coming years?Prof Cristiana Stan:
The WCRP has established a task team to address this very question. The focus areas considered by the task team include modelling and projections, data and observations [and AI] impacts and services, engagement with the private sector supporting development and integration of AI and machine learning into climate research and applications and the scientific rigour and trustworthiness of AI and machine learning methods.
Dr William Collins:
I think the IPCC’s eighth assessment [likely due in the late 2020s] may itself largely be written using large language models. Basically, the job of the people writing the IPCC report is to synthesise…One could certainly argue whether or not that needs to be done by people. AI should be telling us the known unknowns, not the known knowns… The thing that’s value-added [by AI] as part of that assessment process is to tell us what isn’t certain, what isn’t known well. Because then that tells you where the science should be heading.
[In September 2026, the IPCC established an “informal group” on AI to “provide timely guidance on the responsible use of AI and emerging digital technologies in IPCC processes”.]
AI will also be an integral part of the eighth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, with machine-learning codes running alongside traditional climate models.
Dr Stefano Materia:
The inclusion of AI in climate and land-vegetation modelling represents a paradigm shift. Rather than replacing physical models entirely, hybrid modelling merges the mathematical rigour and physical consistency of traditional process-based Earth system models [advanced computer models that combine physical, chemical and biological processes to simulate the climate] with the pattern-recognition power and speed of machine learning.
This new approach will be able to overcome computational bottlenecks, replace unresolved subgrid processes [which are too small to be captured by the grid cells of a computer model], improve the terrestrial biosphere – finally narrowing down the uncertainties on the terrestrial carbon sink and accurately pinpointing emergent constraints and non-linear tipping points.
Dr Clare Eayrs:
Much of what we know about Antarctic sea ice comes from the satellite era, which begins in 1979. That is a short record for a system with strong decadal variability. A great deal of information about earlier conditions is contained in ship logs, whaling records, expedition photographs and early aerial and pre-1979 satellite imagery. Machine learning is well suited to extracting it. Lengthening the observational record would improve almost everything else we do, including training and testing AI systems.
“The Bear” whaling ship getting free from the ice pack. Credit: New Bedford Whaling Museum Are there any misconceptions about the use of AI in climate science?Dr David Rolnick:
AI is frequently thought of as large generative models, like [those] developed by large tech companies. But that is not mostly what is useful in AI for tackling climate change.
People talk a lot about energy usage of AI and negative impacts on society, including on the climate, as a result of that energy usage and associated negative impacts like water usage. These are very real worries. However, it is worth noting that the massive energy and other requirements of AI systems are referring to those large-scale generative and agentic systems. They’re not mostly about the kinds of AI systems that are actually used to fight climate change.
Prof Priya Donti:
I think the general public thinks of AI as this one specific thing…often large language models, chatbots, etc…People who are making allocation decisions for who funds scientists might have a mismatched understanding of what needs to happen, which means the right science doesn’t necessarily get funded.
Could AI improve or exacerbate inequalities in climate research?Dr Amirpasha Mozzafari:
Frontier models [which are at the cutting edge of AI research] are built almost exclusively in the global north, trained on data that is densest where observations are richest and validated against benchmarks that reflect the same regions.
Cheap inference [in which a trained AI model applies its learned patterns to new, unseen data] does not fix that on its own: being able to run someone else’s model is not the same as having a say in what it is trained on, how it is evaluated, or whether it serves your decisions.
Without deliberate effort to share data infrastructure, evaluation metrics that centre on people’s wellbeing and genuine co-production of knowledge, AI risks automating and amplifying the existing divide in the global climate information system rather than closing it.
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If done well, [developing AI-based Earth system models] could dramatically lower barriers to entry. A small research group, or an agency in a data-poor region, could adapt a pre-trained model on modest hardware rather than building bespoke systems from scratch. That matters because [the] data is thinnest and the resolution gap is largest exactly where vulnerability to climate [change] is highest.
Dr David Rolnick, associate professor in the school of computer science at McGill University and cofounder of Climate Change AI:
Climate action should fundamentally be about democratisation of action and equitable response to climate change, both in terms of mitigation and in terms of adaptation. The consolidation of large-scale AI can often work counter to those goals by consolidating power in certain geographies and stakeholders, and by defining action based upon the goals of those stakeholders.
When you build technology in specific institutions, they do not necessarily understand the needs of the majority of the world’s population or local stakeholders from other geographies and other entities.
What are some other risks and challenges of AI in climate change research?Dr Clare Eayrs:
The biggest challenge is trust…Good performance is necessary, but it is not enough. We also need independent evaluation, physical credibility, process-based validation, robustness and some degree of interpretability.
The risk I worry about most is that the apparent success of these systems could be read as a reason to invest less on observations. AI is not a substitute for observation, physical understanding or careful evaluation. Especially for Antarctic sea ice, where observations of sea ice and snow thickness remain sparse and understanding of snow-ice processes remains limited, we need more, targeted observations, not fewer. It also makes the case for documenting them – and their uncertainties – far better than we do now.
Dr William Collins:
The challenge is always making sure that you’re getting the right answer for the right reason and the risk is getting a plausible answer that is “truthy”, but not the truth…Ask a computer for an answer and it will give you one. And it’s very good. It will always obey. It will always give you an answer. The question is whether or not that answer is valid or not.
Dr David Rolnick:
The first and foremost risk is AI diverging attention from other forms of climate action. AI is not a silver bullet. It is not an answer in itself. And where it is useful, it is only one part of the solution.
Prof Detlef van Vuuren, a senior researcher at the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency [in a 2026 Carbon Brief interview]:
There are now many more proposals being submitted than in the past, as people can use AI tools. So our science discipline has to start learning how to deal with this, both in terms of what we feel is allowed in creating [scientific] articles – what is allowed in reviewing [and] what is allowed in proposal writing. This is something that we have to learn.
Dr William Collins:
The partnership between academia, the data centres and private industry is going to be integral to our success going forward. And I think the challenge is going to be navigating that relationship in a way that respects open science, uses open source code, etc…
You do not want to be in a situation where we have something like a large language model where it’s not open source…[We need] fairness, accountability, transparency and explainability.
Dr Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo:
High-resolution outputs can look exact when they are not; uncertainties compound in invisible ways and predictions that feed into policy need honest, well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, communicated in decision-relevant terms.
Like any other technology, AI should augment human judgement in climate decisions, not replace it. As researchers, it is our responsibility to ensure the field serves as a force for social progress.
Related Explainer: The CMIP7 emissions scenarios – and how they explore future climate change 01.09.2026 Climate modelling Guest post: How CMIP7 will shape the next wave of climate science 22.05.2026 Climate modelling Traditional models still ‘outperform AI’ for extreme weather forecasts 29.04.2026 Climate modelling Limiting global warming to 2C would not ‘rule out’ extreme impacts 25.03.2026 Climate modellingThe post Experts: How are climate scientists using artificial intelligence? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Why the climate movement needs to show up for education workers
Across Ontario this summer, people have been standing up against the Ford government’s destruction of our communities. Supporting Grassy Narrows First Nation, in their 60...
The post Why the climate movement needs to show up for education workers first appeared on Spring.
The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream
What does going on a date have to do with fossil fuels? Everything, according to the petroleum industry.
One advertisement from the pipeline company Energy Transfer follows two people getting ready for a date, the man primping with hair gel, the woman applying lipstick, before meeting at a bar. “That connection was brought to you by petroleum products,” the narrator says. “But what if we lived in a world without oil and natural gas?”
The story rewinds to the beginning, except this time, the woman looks bewildered as her phone with the dating app evaporates in her hands. She gets lipstick all over her cheek when the car she’s riding in hits the pavement without its tires. As his hair gel disappears, the man looks into the mirror, baffled. When they sit down across from each other, makeup, hair dye, and glasses fade away. In the game playing on a TV in the bar, a football disintegrates a second before the kicker swings his leg at empty air.
The commercial, which has racked up 7.4 million views since it appeared four years ago, taps into the fact that fossil fuels have become embedded in American life (what’s more American than football?). Oil and gas not only influence how people get around town, but also where they live, how they dress, and how they cook food in their kitchens. This all feels so ordinary that most people don’t notice how pervasive petroleum is, powering our lives while hiding in plain sight. Though it might seem inevitable that we live this way, a Grist investigation found that this idea of what’s “normal” was shaped by decades of advertising, public relations propaganda, and broader efforts to sway American culture, from radio programs to Hollywood films.
“Our dependence on oil didn’t just happen,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.
More in this series Fossil fuels are hiding all over your house. We built a model home to show how. Kate YoderThis campaign started about a century ago, when companies began strategizing how to create long-term demand for fossil fuels and the products that ran on them. Billboards showcased happy families on the road in their cars, films showed stylish women cooking over the flame of a gas stove, and magazines featured men pushing their gas-powered mowers across soon-to-be perfectly manicured lawns. The message was often left unsaid: The American way of life runs on fossil fuels.
There’s a well-documented history showing that Exxon and other oil giants understood the dangers of global warming by the 1970s based on their own research and still spent decades publicly downplaying, or outright denying, the science. But the story of how oil and gas companies coaxed Americans into accepting — even desiring — a life built on fossil fuels has largely escaped attention, buried in the pages of obscure trade journals.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the oil industry spent millions of dollars a year on campaigns to “educate” the public about the wonders of petroleum and how it advanced the “American way.” The natural gas industry promoted all-gas “dream kitchens” and paraded them in front of the editors of Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. They sold a vision of the American Dream that required their products — a cultural legacy that has been devastating for efforts to rein in climate change and shift to a cleaner future.
This history offers an explanation for why Americans have had such a strong reaction to the idea of banning polluting gas ranges (“they can pry it from my cold dead hands”) or requiring more sales of electric vehicles over gas-powered cars. Is this debate really just about technology, or about what the burning of fossil fuels represents — freedom and a sense of identity? President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda is deeply nostalgic for what oil once promised: economic might, a higher standard of living, the chance to rise above your station and maybe make a fortune. In his inauguration speech last year, Trump promised a return to these ideals. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he said.
As the world enters an “age of electricity” powered increasingly by solar, wind, and other low-carbon energy sources, the United States often appears to be stuck in the past. The Trump administration has prolonged the life of coal plants and opened up new areas to oil drilling, while paying companies billions of dollars to stop offshore wind projects. The explanation, when it’s offered, often returns to the same theme. Earlier this year, when the Trump administration scrapped Biden-era rules to cut emissions from cars, along with the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate climate change, it touted the effort as “restoring the American Dream.” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers summed up the sentiment this summer: “President Trump was given a mandate to roll back the radical climate policies that are burning a hole through taxpayers’ wallets and jeopardizing the American Dream for future generations.”
The words echo what the oil industry has been telling Americans for a century: Without fossil fuels, there is no “good life,” only sacrifice.
How oil became the ‘American way’Before highways, parking lots, and suburban sprawl took over the United States, people moved about very differently. Americans traveled between cities by railroad; towns bustled with horses, buses, bicycles, and trolleys. Then the automobile rolled in, and forests, meadows, and swampland became pavement, changing the scenery forever.
It wasn’t a sure bet that automobiles would run on gasoline. At the turn of the 20th century, electric vehicles were quieter and easier to drive, and they quickly became a popular choice, making up a third of vehicles on the road. But Henry Ford’s cheaper, mass-produced Model T, unveiled in 1908, was the vehicle that took off, powered by gasoline.
Up to that point, gasoline was basically a useless byproduct of kerosene, but the new automobile industry gave it a market. Automakers promoted their vehicles as superior to public transit, offering a step up in social status. In an advertisement that appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1917, the Willys-Overland Company, an Ohio automaker, sold its automobiles as “chock full of healthy activity, wholesome fun, and lots of fresh air” — which would make for “a bigger life.” That was supposedly in contrast to the “wrong way,” where families were subjected to suffering through “long rides in hot trolley cars and listless conversation.”
An ad from the Willys-Overland Company portraying cars as superior to crowded trolleys appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1917. Internet ArchiveIt was a preview of a major shift in marketing leading up to the 1930s. Previously, advertisements for cars had touted their features: the “favorable” ratio of their light weight to their horsepower, their seats upholstered with “fine, long-grain French leather.” But companies began marketing the benefits of using their products instead, painting situations in which a car could improve your life and status. Selling the American Dream meant selling leisure, enjoyment, beauty, good taste, and popularity along with the “mundane product,” as Roland Marchand, a cultural historian, once wrote.
Most advertisers were aiming to reach Americans with means, and the everyday luxuries they depicted clashed with reality as the Great Depression set in. The photographer Margaret Bourke-White captured that sort of contrast after the Ohio River flood in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937. A billboard ad from the National Association of Manufacturers shows a white family smiling as they drive through the countryside, while Black people waited for Red Cross relief under a sign proclaiming “There’s no way like the American way.”
A 1937 photograph in Life magazine shows Black refugees from the Ohio River flood waiting for Red Cross relief. An advertisement behind them broadcasts the “world’s highest standard of living,” exemplified by car ownership. Margaret Bourke-White / LifeAs the Great Depression began to recede, automakers saw an opportunity to pitch Americans on a brighter future — one that relied, of course, on cars. At the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York City, where the theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” General Motors had the most popular exhibit, seen by millions of people: the seven-acre “Highways and Horizons.” Its centerpiece, “Futurama,” was a sprawling diorama of a futuristic city in far-off 1960, covering 35,000 square feet, complete with skyscrapers and 14-lane highways. People looked down on the display from moving chairs on a conveyor-belt ride, as if they were viewing it from an airplane. It was the visual representation of a new American mindset — a Futurama booklet promised that highways would “set the pace for advancing civilization” and improve “welfare and happiness.” Afterward, visitors were handed pins saying, “I Have Seen the Future.”
Visitors tour General Motors’ Futurama exhibit in 1939. Futurama was the largest scale model ever built at the time, including more than 500,000 buildings and 50,000 motor vehicles, many of them in motion. Bettmann / Getty Images The Futurama display at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York depicts a futuristic American city in 1960. The model was designed by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors. Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG via Getty ImagesFrom automobiles to oil, industry leaders grasped that appealing to a sense of national identity could legitimize their business. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, the oil industry boomed, producing fuel for planes and explosives. The wider public had been deeply suspicious of big corporations ever since the Depression, but the oil industry had a new way to defend itself, painting itself as patriotic and essential to the success of the broader American project.
“The petroleum industry deserves a better public opinion,” James H. Tanham, an executive at the Texas Company (now known as Texaco), wrote to a member of the Petroleum Industry War Council in 1943. “If properly handled, there probably never was a better time to undertake this work. There is nothing inimical about the prosecution of this war and this job. Both have to do with protection of a way of life, wholly American, against enemies without and within the country.”
That same year, the Union Oil Company of California (later part of Chevron) launched an initiative specifically to “sell [the] public on [the] American way of life,” according to the trade journal National Petroleum News. Within five years, it was spending 30 percent of its advertising budget on the effort, promoting how a “free enterprise” economic system contributed to a higher standard of living. A Union Oil advertisement in Central Oregon’s Bend Bulletin in 1944 celebrated how American factory workers could afford more cigarettes and bread with an hour’s wages than those in Germany, Great Britain, or Russia. This success, the ad claimed, came down to “two fundamental principles: PROFIT and COMPETITION.” Provided that Americans didn’t tamper with these principles, it promised, a man might someday be “working only half as long to earn a radio, a house, a hat, a vacation, or anything else he needs.”
After the war ended, the “American way” increasingly required a car. Suburbanization started taking off in earnest after 1946, when the Levitt family began acquiring 4,000 acres of potato farms outside Long Island, 25 miles east of New York City. They leveled the land, had trucks drop building materials every 60 feet, and eventually built more than 17,000 cookie-cutter homes. Other “Levittowns” soon followed suit, built across the country as developers converted apple orchards, garbage dumps, and barren desert into neat subdivisions. They proved to be model neighborhoods for the entire country. From the end of World War II to 1954, some 9 million people settled into suburbs. As Americans moved far away from where they worked and ran errands, they became locked into a car-dependent lifestyle that consumed vast amounts of petroleum.
“Oil is basically the fuel that allows this dispersal of the population,” said Matthew Huber, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University.
Yet oil companies worried that the public still didn’t properly appreciate how the fuel had transformed their lives. In response to a survey finding an “opinion vacuum” on the oil business, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s biggest lobbying group, formed the Oil Industry Information Committee in 1948, intending to fill the void. “There is a great vacuum represented by men’s minds,” George H. Freyermuth, who led the public relations department for Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon), said at the time. “We can’t let others fill the vacuum. We have got to create the knowledge to fill people’s minds.”
It was much more than an advertising campaign: The group built the infrastructure for promoting petroleum through schools, community parades, and exhibits, carried out by local industry ambassadors who could give the effort a friendly face. The committee produced pamphlets, sponsored films, radio programming, and educational materials for classrooms, but its signature initiative was Oil Progress Week: a national ad blitz that encouraged local events celebrating how oil fueled innovation and everything people loved about modern life.
In 1950, an advertisement in Life magazine as part of Oil Progress Week attributed the marvels of daily life to the advent of oil drilling. Internet ArchiveIt was part of a trend toward what’s called institutional advertising — promoting industries and brands themselves, rather than products. Fortune magazine surveyed this growing field in 1950 and found that the oil industry was pouring $10 million a year into these programs — roughly $142 million in today’s dollars. Executives insisted that such messaging was just telling the facts to the American public. But Fortune pushed back. Not since wartime ads, the magazine wrote, “have we been insulted with such noxious interpretations of the American Dream.”
As much as Americans were already driving, they could be driving more. Automakers and oil companies had been working together to promote highway construction for decades. In the 1950s, advertisements urged families to see the U.S. by car, framing the road trip as a matter of national pride. In the iconic jingle “See the USA in a Chevrolet,” the TV star Dinah Shore urges viewers to get on the road to take in everything America has to offer, from the “fields of golden wheat” to the “Rockies way out West.” Anyone who isn’t doing so is missing out, the lyrics imply: “Life is complete-r in a Chevy,” Shore sings.
The singer Dinah Shore closed her weekly TV variety show, sponsored by Chevrolet, with the jingle “See the USA in a Chevrolet.” Chevrolet PhilippinesAfter the success of freeways in Los Angeles and a “miracle turnpike” in New Jersey that became the busiest toll road in the country, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, calling for a 41,000-mile superhighway system across the country. Futurama was becoming reality, roughly on schedule.
The Oil Industry Information Committee, meanwhile, had been busy making sponsored films glorifying oil’s contributions to American prosperity. The films were shown all over the country, from small-town Michigan to the heart of Texas oil country, at Rotary Club luncheons, at meetings of religious organizations, in high school classrooms, and eventually on TV. The committee claimed that its films had been screened 92,500 times and seen by more than 12 million people in 1955 alone — about 7 percent of the U.S. population.
Its 1956 film, Destination Earth, follows a cartoon Martian who visits the United States and is amazed by how powerful and efficient cars are. After doing research in the local library, he concludes that “the big secret is, of course, oil!” and that this miracle substance has provided “a whole galaxy of things to make a better life on Earth.” The result, the film’s narrator declares: “a higher standard of living in the USA than in any other country on the whole planet.”
Destination Earth, a film sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, tells the story of an alien who visits Earth, learns how oil powers cars, and brings that knowledge back to Mars. shaggylocksDuring the postwar boom, profits from 14 big petroleum companies tracked by the Federal Reserve more than tripled during the postwar boom, rising from $269 million in 1946 to $917 million in 1956. All that money brought scrutiny. Critics in Congress and the media wondered if the Oil Industry Information Committee’s so-called “education” efforts, especially the pamphlets distributed to schoolchildren, should be considered propaganda, or even indoctrination. Henry Stewart McKenzie Burns, president of Shell Oil Company, admitted there was “a little ulterior motive” to the committee’s work when a congressman grilled him about it in 1956.
“I have had a good deal of experience in public relations,” Burns said during questioning, “and you never can stop telling people that you are good. They might forget.”
But oil companies had done more than simply tell people they were good. They had helped define what kind of life was good, steeping the American Dream in oil.
‘A Word to the Wives’: Fossil fuels invade the homeAn unusual performance took place on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier in 1923, during an American Gas Association convention in New Jersey. The wives and sisters of the assembled industry delegates settled in to watch “Progress,” a play that pitted an old-fashioned kitchen against a modern one, starring “Miss Polly Old Time” and “Miss Mary Modern Way.” As charming as the old ways were, there was no doubt whose vision would win.
Miss Mary was played by Ada Bessie Swann, home services director for the Public Service Electric & Gas Company of New Jersey. She led the industry’s push to introduce women to appliances powered by manufactured gas, the predecessor to natural gas. In the early 20th century, most women weren’t familiar with all the expensive stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines that had come onto the market. They were used to cooking on wood or coal stoves and doing laundry by hand. So gas and electric utilities performed a “service,” as they called it: extensive efforts, led by women, to show homemakers how these appliances worked and convince them of their benefits. For years, Swann had been running the New Jersey utility’s experiment to foster “‘better, happier homes’ with the help of gas,” according to an industry publication. (It openly called the effort propaganda.) She was soon heralded as “an apostle of home service,” spreading the mission of gas appliances far and wide.
By 1925, these kinds of industry-sponsored lectures, demonstrations, and classes were reaching thousands of women every day. In Connecticut, New Haven Gas Light Company’s domestic experts visited nearly 13,400 homes that year to instruct residents on the “proper use” of gas ranges. A daily radio show from the Laclede Gas Light Company in St. Louis aided the “home manager” with recipes and cooking advice; the company also held free cooking classes every day to show off its model gas-powered kitchen.
It was a clever strategy to speed up adoption and lock in future demand for gas — a parallel track to how selling cars as a cornerstone of American life led to increasing gasoline consumption. “Teaching [women] the art of home management as it has become today, is a duty of the gas company,” Swann wrote in a trade journal, pondering the industry’s future in 1925, “because by so doing it must reap for itself the profit of such service — Profits in goodwill. Profits in increased gas consumption. Profits in increased sales of gas heating equipment.” The industry also had to convince people to install the lines to deliver gas. In California, workers would track local building permits and talk homeowners and contractors into connecting gas lines to new construction.
It wasn’t inevitable that so many Americans would switch to gas appliances. Electric competitors were selling their “flameless fuel” as superior, and gas companies saw this competition as an existential threat. By 1930, gas executives were aggressively promoting their stoves, the core of their business. “The public mind has been inculcated with the gas cooking idea, but just as no business is secure, no idea is secure nowadays,” Rodger K. Tenney of Chicago’s North Shore Gas Company wrote in American Gas Journal that year. “Constant pressure brought to bear on the public mind will make that mind thoroughly gas cooking conscious,” he concluded.
To do so, gas companies embarked on a decades-long campaign to influence the influential. In 1934, Swann’s utility in New Jersey recruited newspaper staff and heads of home economics departments of colleges to advertise the modern gas kitchen. The industry also worked to get favorable coverage in The Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, The American Home, and other women’s magazines; Swann soon got a job working for Woman’s Home Companion.
Gas executives also sought to bring gas propaganda to the radio and Hollywood films. When the phrase “now you’re cooking with gas” started taking off on radio routines in 1939, the industry quickly capitalized on the free advertising, recruiting radio stars such as Jack Benny and Fred Allen to use the phrase. C. E. “Deke” Houlgate, a representative of the American Gas Association, also launched an effort to establish gas appliances as standard props in Hollywood films. By 1941, motion pictures had featured 202 all-gas kitchens, along with 360 gas ranges and 238 gas-powered refrigerators, according to Houlgate. “Today, Hollywood uses gas appliances 100 percent in its outstanding pictures,” he told the audience at a gas appliance and equipment convention in Los Angeles.
A 1939 advertisement from the American Gas Association in the Ladies’ Home Journal promises to make cooking easier: “‘Why, they do the cooking almost by themselves!’ women exclaim when they see the remarkable things an Automatic Gas Range can do.”Ladies’ Home Journal
As World War II came to a close, the gas industry latched onto the patriotic mood and promised to take the “‘irk’ out of work” with its “New Freedom Gas Kitchen” campaign. Freedom, that is, from the drudgery of cooking. The actual model kitchens varied, but they had streamlined, step-saving layouts built around gas-powered ranges, fridges, and automatic water heaters that could “speed up clean-up” by providing endless hot water.
It was the perfect time to market new gadgets, because mass consumption had rapidly taken hold of American culture. Economic growth after the Great Depression and World War II relied on an expanding middle class buying more, more, and more: A Bride’s Magazine handbook from the postwar era urged newlyweds to keep an eye out for brand names when buying “dozens of things you never bought or even thought of before,” for the purpose of “greater security” for the country’s industries. “[W]hat you buy and how you buy it is very vital for your new life — and to our whole American way of living,” it read.
A Word to the Wives, a short film sponsored by the American Gas Association in 1955, showcased a modern home equipped with gas appliances, such as refrigerators and dryers. When a busy homemaker, Jane, visits her friend Alice’s home filled with this technology, she has to decline Alice’s offer of a shopping trip because she’s too busy with chores at home. “Remember, I haven’t got your dream kitchen to make things easier. Mine’s strictly the nightmare type,” Jane says, sighing. Alice sells her on how gas appliances can provide “freedom from unnecessary drudgery,” and they plot to leave Jane’s husband to suffer through chores without her for the weekend, so that he’ll want to buy a “dream kitchen,” too.
The American Gas Association’s 1955 film A Word to the Wives follows a woman’s scheme to convince her husband they need modern gas appliances. Internet ArchiveThe battle over what would power American homes — gas or electricity — would continue to play out over decades. But petroleum had quietly found a way into households, too. In 1957, the Shell Oil Company celebrated women’s work as part of an ad campaign, “From A to Z: An Alphabet of Good Things about Petroleum.” M was for Mother: “Housewife, cook, chauffeur, hostess, teacher, glamor girl — she does dozens of jobs well … who’s responsible for so many of these new time-saving products? Mother’s little helper — Oil,” the advertisement says.
A 1957 advertisement from Shell promises that oil will make life easier for women. LifebloodSoon, it seemed like almost everything in the American dream house was made from petrochemicals, which some oil executives had predicted would be “the most dramatic future field of development.” As chemists experimented with petroleum derivatives, plastics began taking off, and Tupperware containers, polyester clothes, and synthetic carpets arrived in households. Shell’s alphabetical ad campaign pointed out that “oil research helps with quick-drying paints, no-polish floor tiles, durable plastic table tops, weather-defying asphalt-shingled roofs.”
“In many ways,” the ad says, “your home is a house that oil built.”
‘The American lifestyle is not up for negotiation’As the years passed, people forgot where this version of the fossil-fueled American Dream had come from. Like most successful propaganda, it simply became taken for granted. The country’s growing reliance on petroleum was seen as a sign of progress for much of the 20th century, an article of faith in the American project.
In the 1960s, however, the pollution from fossil fuels and all the products companies were pumping out was increasingly visible. Smog blanketed Los Angeles on more days than not; an oil spill off the California coast washed sludge onto beaches; the polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire, again. The decade saw the federal government’s first serious effort to crack down on pollution, starting with the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963, followed by the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Act in 1965. The environmental movement was born on Earth Day in April 1970, when an estimated 10 percent of the country’s population joined in demonstrations demanding that political leaders do more to clean up the environment.
Then, the cheap, plentiful fuel that had enabled the American “way of life” was suddenly no longer cheap and plentiful. In 1973, oil-producing Arab countries stopped exporting petroleum to the United States because of its support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and oil prices nearly quadrupled. President Richard Nixon instituted a rationing program, and gas stations started running out of fuel.
The oil crisis threatened the car-powered American way of life that people had come to rely on, and as if on cue, “freedom” became a hot talking point. “For many the ‘energy crisis’ was seen as a contrived threat to justify more government control of everyday life,” Matthew Huber writes in Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. One advertisement from the New Car and Truck Dealers of America in 1979 asked readers to “Help us protect your freedom to drive.” From whom? The people who cared about the environment. “There are people in government, and others, whose only answer to our environmental and energy problems is to restrict the use of the automobile.” Businesses that relied on fossil fuels were now on the defensive.
Another challenge for the oil and gas industry arrived when the American public grew concerned over global warming. During an unusually hot summer in 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at the time, warned Congress that the greenhouse effect had already been detected. Global warming became front-page news around the country, climate bills proliferated in Congress, and the United Nations created the building blocks for global climate policy. President George H.W. Bush went into office declaring himself “the environmental president” and promising to counter the “greenhouse effect” with the “White House effect,” but as soon as it became clear that doing something about climate change meant curbing the use of fossil fuels, his administration reversed course. By 1992, when countries met to sign a global climate treaty at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Bush refused to commit to targets for emissions reductions. U.S. delegates insisted over and over that “the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation.”
The idea that addressing climate change required a sacrifice of American values — and the lifestyles and products that supported them — came up whenever the country was seriously considering limits on fossil fuels. In 1997, President Bill Clinton stood prepared to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which required countries to cut carbon emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. But the oil company Mobil responded with alarm: “Committing to binding targets and timetables now will alter today’s lifestyles and tomorrow’s living standards,” it warned in an ad in The New York Times. “Flexibility will be constrained. Carpooling in; sport utility vehicles out. High fuel and electric bills. Factory closures. Job displacement.”
A 1997 ad from the Global Climate Coalition, a group of 100-plus companies including Shell and General Motors that worked to block climate policies, shows smiling children beside the warning that signing the Kyoto Protocol “would force American families to restrict our use of the oil, gasoline, and electricity.” Climate Investigations CenterA pattern was established: Oil companies ramped up their PR campaigns whenever there was a push for climate action in Congress, helping to thwart efforts to limit emissions or negotiate binding treaties. They poured money into political campaigns and lobbying, played up doubts about the science of global warming, and commissioned studies showing that climate policies would hurt the economy. They also argued that cutting fossil fuels would threaten the American way of life — the one they had spent so many decades championing.
But as fossil fuel emissions continued to rise, and hurricanes and wildfires grew more severe, Americans became increasingly worried about climate change. In the late 2010s, progressives channeled their energy into proposals for a Green New Deal, calling for bold investment in a clean economy that would tackle climate change and inequality at the same time. By tapping into nostalgia for the New Deal, one of the most ambitious political projects in U.S. history, they were articulating a competing vision of the “good life,” divorced from fossil fuels.
The ascendant right wing of the Republican Party had a ready-made response: The Green New Deal was an attack on freedom. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office released a fact sheet that mentioned the difficulty of eliminating emissions from “farting cows and airplanes” in 2019, critics seized on it as evidence of climate activists trying to control their choices. At the Conservative Political Action Conference that year, Sebastian Gorka, a Trump administration official, said, “They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers.”
After years of failed climate proposals, politicians knew that mandates and regulations would be politically tricky. When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, promising to tackle climate change, the energy behind the Green New Deal was whittled down into a less ambitious, more politically palatable project. In 2022, Congress passed the only comprehensive climate law in American history, the Inflation Reduction Act, full of tax credits and incentives to switch to clean energy and green technologies. The Biden administration instituted many regulations that mandated more efficient technology, including for household appliances, and conservatives keyed in on the upfront costs. In 2023, The Alliance for Consumers, a conservative advocacy group, posted a visual of “Biden’s Dream House,” purporting to reveal how the Biden administration’s policies would force Americans to pay for costly remodeling jobs.
“Welcome to Biden’s Dream House, where the American dream just got significantly more expensive …” Alliance for Consumers posted on X in 2023. The campaign focused on the cost of upgraded appliances and the idea that the government was trying to control household decisions. “If you like your living room and kitchen, you can keep your living room and kitchen … just with a few additional ‘upgrades’ to comply with Progressive Lifestyle Choices™.”
Welcome to Biden's Dream House, where the American dream just got significantly more expensive…
Join us on a tour and see the green "upgrades" that the Biden Administration wants to bring (by mandate) to a home near you, very soon. pic.twitter.com/7cg7yMRCXZ
The clear message was that “elitist climate liberals” wanted to force people “to have a worse life and sacrifice to solve this,” said Huber, the author of Lifeblood.
As Republicans geared up for Trump’s presidential run in 2024, they leaned into this narrative. That September, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the far-right policy playbook Project 2025, told the audience at a New York Times climate event: “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American Dream.”
Another way of looking at it, though, is that climate change itself is threatening the American Dream. Global warming pushes up the cost of food and energy, causing spikes in home insurance rates that can price people out of owning a home, and destroys homes with floods and fires. Fossil fuels, long sold as the key to achieving comfort and prosperity, have now begun pushing those goals further out of reach.
Can a ‘petroculture’ dream up something new?The idea that sinister, left-wing climate killjoys want to get rid of hamburgers, pickup trucks, and other iconic American standbys is often dismissed as culture war nonsense. But it begins to make sense if you see it as the result of a century-long campaign tying fossil fuels to the “good life.”
From the cars we drive to the plastics that surround us, oil has become part of daily life. Brulle, the sociologist at Brown, says the MAGA movement that has captured the Republican Party taps into a “cultural belief in the rightness of petroleum” in the American imagination more broadly.
The rise of MAGA Republicans has coincided with a sharp shift among members of the party toward embracing fossil fuels. In 2020, 65 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. prioritizing wind and solar development over oil, coal, and gas, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Today, that picture has completely flipped, with 71 percent preferring fossil fuels. Across party lines, the idea of moving on from oil and gas has lost some of its appeal. Less than half of Democrats polled by Pew in 2024 said the U.S. should completely phase fossil fuels out of the energy supply. Scholars call the United States a “petroculture” — an “oil society through and through.”
It can be difficult to peer beyond the rumbling of an engine, even when stuck in stop-and-go traffic, to a different way of life. In the U.S., our lives are so saturated with oil, it’s hard to know where to begin untangling our connection with petroleum, said Stephanie LeMenager, an English professor at the University of Oregon who wrote a book about oil’s cultural resonance. “There’s a sense of despair, paralysis, and also just not really being able to clearly see a path forward, because of how embedded oil is in everything that we do,” LeMenager said.
So how does a country begin to rid itself of a century’s worth of oil and gas propaganda? It might start with understanding that none of this was predestined, as much as it might feel like it. The early 20th century began with electric cars and electric stoves; things might have stayed that way, with a push or pull one way or the other, and the same sort of PR campaign that put petroleum at the center of American life.
From the Green New Deal to the more recent focus on “abundance,” parts of the left have tried to move past the narrative that tackling global warming requires sacrifice. But it will take more than catchy slogans to convince people that a comfortable life is possible without fossil fuels. Oil helped deliver a higher standard of living — the stretch was that people needed to consume ever more of it to live their best lives. The fossil fuel industry spent decades reaching ordinary Americans with that message, broadcasting it over the airwaves and across movie screens, and carrying it into towns around the country through schools and public events. Now, there are cleaner, safer options to power the world.
Petroleum runs so deep in American culture that building another, cleaner version of the good life will take time — and probably a lot of money. “Crafting the American Dream is the thing that advertisers have been doing for decades,” said Duncan Meisel, the former executive director of Clean Creatives, an initiative pressuring PR companies and advertisers to stop working with fossil fuel clients.
The American Dream was invented, so maybe we can invent it again.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream on Oct 22, 2026.
In defense of abolition
The Tempest Collective POC caucus invites you to a national Zoom panel and discussion on defending abolition. The event will take place this Saturday, October 24th, 2026 at 2 pm ET/1 pm CT/12 pm MT/11 am PT.
You can register for the event here.
Share the event flyer here.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: Andrew Ratto, Fibonacci Blue; modified by Tempest.
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Agroecology and regenerative communities: a day of exchange between young people, farmers, schools, and institutions in Bracciano
PRESS RELEASE
Agroecology and regenerative communities: a day of exchange between young people, farmers, schools, and institutions in Bracciano
On Saturday, October 24th, from 9:30 AM to 7:00 PM, at the Chiostro degli Agostiniani in Bracciano (RM), Navdanya International is promoting a meeting dedicated to the resilience of territories, biodiversity, and community participation. The event, titled “Agroecology and Regenerative Communities – Networks of resilience between young people, schools, farmers, and institutions,” will bring together agroecology experts, institutional representatives, associations, youth organizations, and agricultural realities to discuss the challenges of ecological transition, combining local experiences with international perspectives.
How can communities be built that are capable of facing environmental, climate, and social crises? What role can agroecology, biodiversity protection, ecological education, and citizen participation play in the regeneration of territories? And how can experiences of ecological and social regeneration be transformed into collective processes capable of influencing public policies and the choices that affect the future of territories? Answers to these questions already exist and have long since become good practices that are now waiting to be translated into concrete policies.
In an international context marked by the worsening climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the growing vulnerability of food systems, agroecology represents not only a set of sustainable agricultural practices, but also a perspective of ecological, cultural, and social transformation. It is an approach that recognizes biological and cultural diversity, community autonomy, and the sharing of knowledge as the fundamental conditions for building more resilient food systems and territories.
From local experiences to national and international policies
The meeting stems from the experiences developed by Navdanya International through the Terrae Vivae programme, the ecological education pathways and School-Work Training initiatives, the project “RiGenerAzione Ecologica – Cittadinanza e Partecipazione,” co-financed by the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security, and Officine Municipali, carried out in collaboration with the Municipality of Bracciano and co-financed by the European Union under the PR Lazio ESF 2021–2027. These are experiences that connect schools, new generations, agricultural producers, and institutions, experimenting with forms of learning, cooperation, and active participation in the life of local territories.
The initiative, which enjoys the patronage of the Bracciano-Martignano Regional Natural Park, aims to go beyond the presentation of individual projects, opening a space for exchange on the conditions needed to strengthen territorial networks and connect local experiences with national strategies and international processes for sustainability and food security, as confirmed by the director of Navdanya International, Ruchi Shroff: “The good practices that come from the territories are in fact laboratories from which proposals emerge for the democratization and sustainability of food systems, even at the international level.”
Young people, biodiversity, and participation: the day’s programme
The morning, from 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM, will be dedicated to “Young People and Territories,” a space for exchange among youth organizations on the role of new generations in regeneration processes, within the framework of the National Strategy for Sustainable Development.
In the afternoon, from 2:30 PM to 6:00 PM, the programme will get underway with two public conversations dedicated to the resilience of territories and the collective construction of change.
Particular attention will be given to agricultural biodiversity and seed sovereignty, with a talk by Salvatore Ceccarelli, an internationally renowned agricultural geneticist, who will explore the relationship between genetic diversity, climate change adaptation, and farmer autonomy.
Among those taking part in the discussion will be Caterina Batello, president of the Italian Association of Agroecology, Mara Cossu and Tiziana Occhino of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security, Silvia Canali of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry, Silvia Francescon of the Italian Buddhist Union, the Mayor of Bracciano Marco Crocicchi, representatives of local farms (Fattoria biologica Le Bricchiette, Fattoria Faraoni, Azienda Agricola La Argentina), representatives from schools (Istituto Agrario Salvo D’Acquisto, the Art Lyceum of IIS Luca Paciolo), youth organizations (the Network of Youth Associations from the mapping of the project “RiGenerAzione Ecologica: Cittadinanza e Partecipazione“), and civil society (GASP – Gruppo di Assistenza e Solidarietà Popolare).
Also taking part will be Magdalena Ackermann, representing civil society at the UN Committee on World Food Security, and Ruchi Shroff of Navdanya International.
A dedicated session, “Territori in relazione: Bracciano–Tubas,” will be devoted to international cooperation in agroecology and the prospects for community resilience, connecting the territory of Bracciano with the Palestinian territory of Tubas.
A meeting open to the public
Throughout the day, the Chiostro degli Agostiniani will host exhibitions of educational projects created by schools, the art exhibition “Ars non dat Panem” by the Art Lyceum of IIS Luca Paciolo, the photo contest organized by Terrae Vivae Youth, local producers, seed exchange initiatives, agroecological games, and creative workshops for children and adults. In the convent’s cloister, stands will be set up by producers, associations, and the CRAS Wildlife Recovery Center of the Lago di Vico Reserve.
The initiative aims to promote knowledge and participation as concrete tools for transformation, fostering new alliances among those who cultivate the land, those who educate, those who study, those who govern, and those who work every day to protect the commons.
An opportunity to bring together practices, knowledge, and policies, in the conviction that the regeneration of territories cannot be entrusted solely to technical solutions, but requires democratic processes, cooperation, and communities capable of deciding their own future together.
Information and participation
Event: Agroecology and Regenerative Communities – Networks of resilience between young people, schools, farmers, and institutions
Date: Saturday, October 24, 2026
Time: 9:30 AM–7:00 PM
Location: Chiostro degli Agostiniani, Via Umberto I, 5 – Bracciano (RM)
Programme and registration form:
https://navdanyainternational.org/it/save-the-date-agroecologia-e-comunita-rigenerative/
Contact: info@navdanyainternational.org
Navdanya International
https://navdanyainternational.org/
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