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The dive started like any other: hauling tanks out of the truck, helping guests into their gear, and overseeing safety checks. It was a particularly hot day on the Caribbean island of Bonaire, and divemaster Kaitlyn was eager to get into the water to cool off.

The dive would be easy. Salt Pier is one of the most popular dive sites on Bonaire for a reason. Its giant, looming pillars made navigation easy and created an exciting landscape for guests, and the sandbar on the south side is known for spotted eagle rays and green sea turtles. One more easy dive, and then she could take lunch.

But shortly after the dive began, she noticed something in the distance, something lying on the reef. It couldn’t be trash; she was pretty sure she’d just seen bubbles. Could it be a diver who needed help?

She signaled to her group to follow and quickly swam over. There on the reef was a woman. She was lying across the coral, arm outstretched, reaching for an octopus.

“Not again,” Kaitlyn thought, springing into action.

She swam right up to the diver, banging on her tank to draw her attention. But the diver didn’t look up, seemingly intent on getting this octopus into her hand.

Kaitlyn grabbed the diver’s shoulder, signaling that they needed to get off the reef. Adamant to have their “octopus moment,” the diver persisted.

As she told me the story, my friend’s face was flushed with anger. It took several more minutes of persistent interference on Kaitlyn’s behalf before the diver decided to leave the octopus alone. Kaitlyn was furious; not only had the diver invaded this octopus’s space but now the reef beneath her body was left broken beyond repair.

The most frustrating part of all is that we, and other divemasters on the island, were dealing with situations like that every day.

As Kaitlyn told me this story, under a palapa during lunch at the dive shop where we worked, I came to a conclusion: I wish “My Octopus Teacher” had never been filmed.

I recognize that this is a strange thing for a professional SCUBA diver and conservation biologist to say. But ever since the documentary won its Oscar, people across the planet have flocked to the ocean, hoping to form an intimate friendship with an octopus.

Instead of forming that friendship, people end up having unethical wildlife encounters. Sensitive species are disturbed, surrounding habitat is destroyed, and precariously balanced ecosystems are disrupted for the sake of an Instagram post.

A study conducted in the Philippines and Indonesia found that damaging contact with a reef by divers more than doubled when a wildlife encounter occurred during a dive. Whether the contact was intentional or not, these encounters reveal a deeper issue: Even the most well-meaning tourists can be detrimental to the places they visit.

Right now coral tourism is estimated to be worth over U.S. $36 billion annually, despite coral reefs being among the most threatened ecosystems on our planet. Scientists have determined that our oceans have passed a tipping point, meaning they’re quickly becoming unsuitable for sustaining coral life. Warming ocean temperatures, pollution, and ocean acidification are all contributing to the loss of coral reefs, but an overlooked threat is also at play. Increasing research shows that coral-related tourism reduces reef resilience and adds stress to these already vulnerable ecosystems.

A coral reef can take 100,000 years to form, but it only takes a moment for a person to cause irreparable damage to a colony. This is because the coral you see when snorkeling is actually a group of tiny animals called polyps that build their exoskeleton bit by bit using calcium carbonate in the ocean.

Physical contact with the reef is all too common. I’ve witnessed hundreds of instances where divers lost control of their buoyancy or became unaware of their fins snapping chunks of coral. Research has shown that the number of times a diver makes direct contact with a reef is directly correlated with the diver’s SCUBA certification level. The less experienced a diver is, the more likely they are to make physical contact with a reef. Beginner SCUBA divers lack the technical skills needed for precise buoyancy control.

I remember feeling completely out of control underwater when I first started diving. On one of my first dives, I began to float toward the surface, completely unable to figure out how to stop my ascent. When I later began assisting with Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) classes, I had to literally hold down numerous beginner divers struggling with the exact same thing. Good buoyancy is something a diver only acquires through practice. The more you dive, the less likely you are to drag along a reef.

There are, however, instances like the one my coworker experienced with the octopus seeker where contact with the reef is entirely optional. I’ve seen people collect shells and chunks of living coral as souvenirs — all too often, during my time in Bonaire.

In addition to the physical harm, there’s growing scientific evidence that human activity on reefs correlates with the presence of coral diseases. For example, coral disease prevalence on the Great Barrier Reef increased with the presence of an offshore tourist platform that brings hundreds of visitors to the reefs each day. In the Red Sea, physical damage to brain corals by divers increased a coral colony’s susceptibility to predation and disease. Coral growth was found to be five times slower on unprotected reefs with high tourist activity than on protected reefs.

Coral reefs across the Caribbean are currently battling a particularly nasty coral ailment called Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, which targets hard corals such as brain and maze and causes irreparable damage to the skeletal tissue of a colony, spreading over an area the size of a sticky note each day. Total mortality of a colony can occur within days or weeks. The disease is highly contagious, and the exact mechanism of transmission is still unknown.

Some evidence  supports the claim that humans can spread SCTLD. Research suggests that contaminated gear can bring the disease to other dive sites and even to different countries or regions if it’s not properly disinfected. Dive shops on Bonaire keep clean rinse tanks available and require anyone diving to rinse their gear before and after each dive. When dealing with such a lethal disease, every small act of prevention can make a difference.

Even the most well-intentioned ocean enthusiast can cause harm to these delicate ecosystems. But what can we do about this problem?

Surely stopping all reef tourism is not the answer. As an ocean enthusiast myself, I wouldn’t recommend removing that snorkel tour from your vacation itinerary. Alienating ourselves from the natural world will never bring us closer to saving it.

Change can start with you on your next vacation. There are simple actions each of us can take to help improve the coral tourism industry.

• • Be picky about your guides. Guides often feel pressured to give their guests exciting, memorable experiences. Look for a local expert who can offer an authentic and respectful experience. Be wary of tour companies that promise close, personal experiences with wildlife. Do not be afraid to tell your guide “no” if they begin doing something you feel is harmful to the environment.
  • Build your water skills. Whether it’s a SCUBA course, swim lessons, or just spending time in a local pool, get yourself and fellow travelers in the water before visiting a coral reef. Not only will you have a more enjoyable experience if you feel more comfortable in the water, but you’re also less likely to cause damage to the reef you are visiting.
  • Rinse your gear. This is one of the simplest ways you can help protect the coral reefs you visit. If you own SCUBA gear, masks, snorkels, and floaties, be sure to thoroughly clean them before entering the water, especially if they’ve been used elsewhere.
  • Hold your travel buddies responsible. Talk to your friends and family (or even your whole tour group, if you’re feeling brave) about the shared responsibility of keeping coral reefs healthy. Encourage those around you to be considerate of all living creatures, including coral reefs.
  • Do your research. Get online and explore what regulations your destination may have for coral reef experiences. Most countries have a government agency, such as a national park service, that provides information on best practices and laws. By better understanding expectations, you can make better decisions in the water.
  • Most important of all, be respectful. Each time you enter the water, frame yourself not only as a visitor but as a steward. Each small action can have a larger impact. You’d be amazed at just how far that positivity can reach.

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The post I Will Love You to Death: A Divemaster’s View on Coral Tourism appeared first on The Revelator.

What if we treated the earth we walk on with the respect it deserves? There is an opportunity to value soil, grow food and support human communities in a way that gives more than it takes. How we respond is up to us. But so long as we remain hooked on fossil fuels, nothing will change.

The post Nebraska soil, Mid-east oil appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

For decades, toxic lead cables lay like giant sea monsters snaking across the bottom of Lake Tahoe. Installed as early telecommunications lines and owned by AT&T, the abandoned cables contained over 100,000 pounds of lead and were slowly deteriorating, leaching contaminants into one of the most iconic lakes in the country.

In 2021, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, or CSPA, filed a lawsuit to force AT&T to remove the abandoned lead cables. The multimillion-dollar litigation dragged on for over two years. Without sampling and scientific testing, it was difficult to make the case in court. Then Roland Peralta, the founder of a new non-profit called WHEN Justice, offered to provide $100,000 for the science needed to support the litigation. The case quickly changed course. 

With the new funding, scuba divers went down to the lake floor to collect samples that helped show that the lead in the cables was leaching into the surrounding waters. The crucial piece of missing evidence was found with lead isotopic testing, providing “fingerprints” that showed the lead in the cables was the same as the surrounding contamination in the lake.

Once the lead contamination was linked to the cables, AT&T settled the case in nine weeks and removed the cables within months. “That was the ‘aha’ moment, where we realized we could scale this model,” said Peralta.

An innovative pay-it-forward model

WHEN Justice is built around a simple but deeply powerful idea: Strategic funding at the right moment in litigation can help public-interest cases win. The non-profit raises funds to help pay for the costly pieces of litigation at the intersection of environmental and human health — like scientific testing, expert analysis, and sampling — that smaller entities taking on massive corporations in court frequently cannot afford. Because environmental lawsuits often include cost recovery, WHEN’s donations can sometimes be used repeatedly, helping fund multiple cases from the same original donation. 

Building off the AT&T case success, WHEN was officially launched on Earth Day in April of 2026. “WHEN made a huge difference in the Lake Tahoe case,” said Erica Maharg, the environmental attorney who represented the sportfishing group against AT&T. “Those funds provided us with the evidence we needed at a critical time in the litigation.”

Colin West, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Clean Up the Lake, sees that role as especially important for groups without deep legal budgets. “Being a smaller organization that is trying to step up and take on big litigation against larger entities is challenging,” he said. “A group like WHEN Justice that has closing that funding gap as their core focus fills a need, and a role that others can’t.”

The litigation bottleneck

Adequate funding is critical in today’s environmental justice landscape. Currently, much of the environmental law enforcement that forces powerful entities to clean up pollution is being done by individuals and nonprofit organizations. “We think of government and regulators as being the primary enforcement mechanisms. But in reality, many environmental cleanups happen because of the efforts of small organizations,” said Maharg.

For those groups, the main obstacle is usually not the legal standard, but the cost of assembling the scientific evidence needed to support the case. “If you’re going up against big companies, litigation is so expensive,” said WHEN’s chief executive and legal officer, Jacqueline Biner. “The way the legal system is set up right now, it sadly is not always about the merits of the case. It’s often just about who has more money.”

WHEN’s model is designed to help remove that barrier. In another current campaign, the organization is fundraising to support scientific analysis and sampling in a lawsuit involving a long-closed hazardous waste disposal site located on the edge of the San Pablo Bay in California. The lawsuit alleges that toxic substances are now leaching from the landfill into the bay. Together, WHEN and the public are funding experts to conduct sampling and analyze the results, showing how the pollution is moving from the landfill toward the bay, grounding the case in science and data.

“There are so many cases out there, like landfills that are leaching contaminants, or factory farms leaking manure and nitrates into water bodies,” said Biner. She sees strategic, targeted litigation funding as a tool that could help fuel a sea change, showing large corporations that it’s more cost-efficient to clean up their own messes and address sources of harm, rather than fighting in court to try to evade responsibility.

A new way to demand accountability

A serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of wellness company Nutrafol, WHEN’s founder Roland Peralta initially envisioned giving back through traditional philanthropy. But he soon began to see an additional, larger opportunity: By directing strategic funding to organizations fighting expensive David-and-Goliath battles against large corporations, he could help create a healthier planet for future generations. “I kept asking myself, what kind of world will I leave for my son?” he said.

By helping cover litigation costs, WHEN can help smaller organizations pursue cases against much larger and better-resourced opponents. “The ability to access funding for litigation is really exciting, because it means that we can take on bigger cases,” said Maharg. “Having a partner like WHEN that can help with fundraising key costs in the litigation makes all the difference in our ability to take on these well-funded polluters.”

Over the next several years, WHEN Justice aims to build an infrastructure for a new kind of corporate accountability — helping identify harmful corporate conduct before it becomes irreversible. They plan to give people a direct way to participate in the fight for transparency and justice through crowd-funding. Peralta and Biner envision an interactive platform, where donors can direct their dollars toward the fights that matter most to them. These funds would support both large, precedent-setting cases, and smaller, community-driven campaigns that help local residents confront injustices in their own backyards. 

Winning is not the only goal, said Biner. “We also believe it is ok to pursue a case that may lose if it will create momentum and pressure. If we educate the courts, place new accountability on corporations, and educate consumers, that moves the needle in a different way.”

WHEN’s goal is also to get the public involved. “We think there is so much more power in a million people giving a dollar than in a single person giving a million dollars,” Biner noted. “We want people to become invested in these cases, to follow them, and to become more informed about the legal process.”

A call to action

That sense of agency is central to WHEN’s purpose. At its core, the model is designed to give people a concrete, accessible way to respond to injustices that might otherwise feel too large or too entrenched to take on.

For Peralta, that means creating a clear path that allows ordinary people to turn outrage into action. “Everybody’s angry and appalled about these massive environmental issues, but as an individual, it’s hard to know how to help,” he said. “WHEN Justice is designed to be the call to action button that everyone has been longing for, to help individuals play a role in shutting this madness down by voting with their dollar.”

WHEN Justice is a charitable crowdfunding platform for legal and regulatory action at the intersection of environmental and human health. From pollution and toxic exposure to climate-related harms, we select and fund high-impact efforts that seek accountability from powerful actors whose actions put people, communities, and ecosystems at risk. Every campaign is open to the public, creating a direct way for concerned citizens to participate in outcomes that affect their families, communities, and future.

LEARN MORE

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Funding the fight against corporate polluters on Jul 6, 2026.

Shaun Martin is vice president for adaptation and resilience at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the United States.

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” A century later, H.G. Wells’s warning reads less like philosophy and more like a prediction for the near future.

Last week, the World Meteorological Organization forecast that a powerful El Niño – a naturally occurring climate pattern marked by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific – will develop in 2026, becoming potentially one of the strongest on record, capable of triggering floods, droughts and extreme heat across the globe.

This warning should make one thing crystal clear: we need to move faster to adapt to the rapidly changing climate.

Scientists warn El Niño could intensify climate extremes in 2026

What does it mean to take climate change adaptation seriously? It means recognising that building resilience to increasing hazards must inform planning and policy-making efforts that go beyond trying to reduce climate emissions.

Rising climate risks like extended heatwaves or massive bursts of rainfall should guide decisions about where homes are built, which crops are grown, and how natural resources are managed. We need to invest in systems that withstand and recover from climate-driven shocks rather than collapse under them.

Impacts arriving ahead of schedule

For decades, climate action has been anchored in mitigation – reducing emissions to prevent future harm. That work remains essential. But it is operating on a slower timeline than the impacts we are now experiencing in real time and ahead of schedule. The strengthening 2026 El Niño makes that mismatch impossible to ignore.

In the first few months of 2026 more than 600 thousand square miles of forest land burned globally – the equivalent of 81 million football fields – the highest on record for this point in the year. Ocean surface temperatures are at historic highs, Arctic sea ice has hit record lows, and multiple regions have experienced extreme, out-of-season heat.

The strengthening of El Niño later this year could push these conditions even further, potentially making 2026 one of the hottest years ever recorded.

El Niño expected to bring next record-hot year as soon as 2027

The climate today is fundamentally different than the one that shaped past El Niño events. Heatwaves run hotter. Droughts last longer. Rainfall increasingly comes in destructive bursts. Even historically cooler periods no longer offer relief.

El Niño’s counterpart, La Niña, now occurs in a warmer world with ocean temperatures during cooler La Niña phases exceeding those seen during past “super” El Niño events like 1998 and 2016. Yesterday’s extremes have become today’s baselines, and this new level of turbulence will test the limits of preparedness across the country.

Pragmatic preparations to build resilience

When it comes to policy-making, the focus should be on strengthening the health and resilience of communities facing growing climate risks. Across the United States, communities are already feeling the impacts of the quickly changing climate. Preparing for and withstanding what’s ahead is not ideological; it’s pragmatic.

WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in

Planning that prioritises resilience, modernises infrastructure and invests in adaptation helps safeguard food systems, protect homes and supply chains, and reinforce critical infrastructure. Keeping the strength and stability of local communities at the centre of decision-making is essential to building a more secure and resilient future.

Conservation organisations have long emphasised that adapting to climate change is not just about reacting to disasters, but about building resilience in ways that support people and nature. That means working with communities, governments and businesses to reduce vulnerability to natural hazards, strengthen local capacity, and deploy solutions that improve nature’s ability to protect us.

Adaptation rooted in nature

In coastal regions, for example, mangrove forests act as natural defences – absorbing storm surge, stabilising shorelines and protecting nearby communities.

In Mexico, World Wildlife Fund and its partners are using networks of sensors, drones and artificial intelligence to monitor mangrove health and weather in real time. The project analyses how these ecosystems respond to storms, heat and changing water conditions, helping communities and policymakers adapt their conservation strategies accordingly. It is a glimpse of what climate change adaptation looks like at its best: locally grounded, data-driven and rooted in nature.

Climate risk is not a single problem to solve but a system to manage. Addressing it requires rethinking and integrating conservation, economic development and disaster risk reduction into a single, yet multi-dimensional, agenda focused on resilience.

It will also expose vulnerabilities in infrastructure, stress-test disaster response systems and challenge assumptions about what constitutes a “normal” climate year. And it will remind us that even the best forecasts cannot reduce impacts – only preparation can.

The problem is not that we have ignored climate change. It is that we have misjudged its timeline. These hazards are no longer a future risk to be avoided; they are a present reality to be managed. H.G. Wells’ warning remains. We need to adapt or perish, now as ever.

The post A supercharged El Niño is coming – are we ready? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Accra, Ghana – The City of Accra has officially unveiled its LOW-Methane Portfolio, a landmark roadmap that sets out bold actions to reduce methane emissions from the waste sector while advancing climate resilience, public health, job creation, and the city’s  transition toward a zero waste future.

The portfolio outlines Accra’s commitment to reducing methane emissions from waste disposal by at least 30% by 2030, in line with Ghana’s commitment under the Global Methane Pledge and the country’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). The initiative supports Ghana’s national target of reducing carbon dioxide (CO₂e) emissions by 21,313 kilotonnes (ktCO₂e) by 2030 through sustainable urban solid waste management solutions.

Developed with technical support from the Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO), the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), and C40 Cities, Accra’s LOW-Methane Portfolio provides a practical framework for transforming how waste is managed across the city. It places focus on source separation of organic waste and diversion of organic waste, while centering the role of waste pickers and community groups in reducing waste methane.

“Accra’s LOW-Methane Portfolio is proof that when local governments, national, regional, and global organisations pull in the same direction, climate targets can become real action on the ground. The opportunity to cut waste methane at the local level is enormous, and Accra is showing that cities across Africa are ready to move when communities, governments, and partners co-create practical, locally rooted zero waste solutions,”  Desmond Alugnoa, GAIA Africa, Zero Waste & Climate Program Manager. 

Accra’s LOW-Methane Portfolio is built around three strategic goals that together map a clear pathway to a LOW-Methane, zero waste city. 

• First, Accra aims to achieve at least 50% source-separated organic waste collection by 2030 by establishing and enforcing citywide collection systems. 
• Second, the city will build a decentralised organic waste management system capable of diverting at least 30% of organic waste by 2040.
• Third, Accra will invest in people and data by launching comprehensive public education campaigns on the climate and health consequences of food waste and methane pollution, while tracking progress against the Global Methane Pledge and Ghana’s Nationally Determined Contributions.

“We envision an Accra where climate action is more than a policy commitment; it is a promise to our people, our children, and the generations who will inherit this city. We are demonstrating that when communities, institutions, and young people work together, Accra can become a beacon of climate leadership for Ghana, Africa, and the world,” Victor N. Kotey, Deputy Head of Waste Management, Accra Metropolitan Assembly. 

Together, the Accra Portfolio goals are projected to generate 13,500 tonnes of annual methane reduction by 2040, while creating local jobs, improving air quality, strengthening food systems through compost production, and building energy resilience through biogas utilisation.

For GAYO, the Accra LOW-Methane portfolio calls for partnership and investment for a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable Accra.

“The next phase must focus on scaling decentralized, community-based zero waste systems rooted in local realities, supported by strong city leadership, and sustained through meaningful partnerships and investment,’’ explains Jacob Johnson Attakpah, Zero Waste Director, GAYO.

He added, “At the core of this transition is recognizing waste pickers as essential actors in implementation. Their knowledge, labour, and leadership must be fully integrated into how Accra reduces organic waste from landfill, strengthens resource recovery, and delivers measurable methane reductions  that advance Ghana’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).’’ 

The city of Accra was recently  recognized among the United Nations 20 cities moving towards zero waste. The LOW-Methane Portfolio lays the foundation for future collaboration with development partners, investors, philanthropic organizations, civil society, and the private sector to scale up zero waste as a just climate solution for the city. The launch of this portfolio marks a significant milestone in Accra’s climate journey and further positions the city as a climate action leader in Africa.

ENDS. 

ABOUT GAIA 

GAIA is a global network of grassroots groups, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and individuals, in over 90 countries. The organisation envisions a just, zero-waste world built on respect for ecological limits and community rights, where people are free from the burden of toxic pollution, and resources are sustainably conserved, not burned or dumped. GAIA works to catalyse a global shift towards environmental justice by strengthening grassroots social movements that advance solutions to waste and pollution. www.no-burn.org 

For more information, please contact:

GAIA Africa: Ibrahim Khalilulahi Usman – khalil@no-burn.org 

The post [Media Release] Accra Launches Ambitious LOW-Methane Portfolio to Accelerate Climate Action, Advance Zero Waste, and Build Cleaner Communities first appeared on GAIA.

In the United States, PFAS chemicals are so ubiquitous — found in everything from frying pans to skincare — that nearly all of the country’s population likely has measurable levels of the so-called “forever chemicals” in their blood. It’s only in the last few decades that the public and scientists started untangling the health and ecological risks associated with some of the manufactured compounds, which earned their nickname because they don’t break down easily in the environment.

Now, new research from the University of Notre Dame has deepened our understanding of how PFAS can filter through ecosystems and move up the food chain to get to people.

The peer-reviewed study, published this spring in the Journal of Environmental Quality, focused on the Great Lakes. The researchers analyzed 42 years of studies and combined nearly 2,500 samples of algae, fish, birds, and other organisms, in what’s called a meta-analysis to identify trends in PFAS distribution.

PFAS have been linked to a range of health issues, and the chemicals have been identified in human tissue, including in the bloodstream, liver, kidneys, and lungs. Known health risks range from decreased fertility to a higher prevalence of certain cancers. People can be exposed to PFAS in several ways, including through the food they eat. 

“What we’re finding is that the food web itself is a vehicle for transferring these chemicals from one organism to another,” said Gary Lamberti, aquatic science professor at Notre Dame and a study co-author. “So it’s a more holistic view than we’ve known before.”

The Great Lakes study focused on six of the PFAS chemicals most commonly tested for, but there are more than 15,000 types out there, according to the National Institutes of Health. Researchers identified a dramatic decrease over the last two decades of one PFAS chemical known as PFOS, following a voluntary phaseout by industries in the early 2000s. 

“If we stop manufacturing these chemicals, they will eventually reduce in concentration in the food web,” Lamberti said. “That’s kind of good news for how we can manage these chemicals.”

Those declines were seen in the lower Great Lakes — Ontario and Erie — likely because these areas are home to the heavy industries that used the chemicals.

But there was little to no decline in PFOS in the upper lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, most likely because the water bodies are larger than the lower lakes. In contrast to the shallower Erie and Ontario lakes, which flush out their water about every 2 to 7 years, water can stay in the upper lakes anywhere from about 60 to 170 years.

The study also confirmed that these chemicals increase in concentration as they travel up the food chain. Algae and plants have the lowest concentration, according to the study, because they grow and die quickly. But predators like salmon and eagles had the highest concentration because they’re eating a large amount of prey that have a lot of accumulated PFAS.

Read Next Trump’s EPA vows to fight ‘forever chemicals’ — by loosening regulations Zoya Teirstein

Potentially dangerous levels of these chemicals in fish have prompted warnings by state officials across the country on how much is safe to eat, including in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Montana, and Pennsylvania. Michigan, which borders 4 of the 6 Great Lakes, has been testing fish for PFAS since 2012 and issues “safe fish” guidelines annually.

“If we can understand what the PFAS levels are in the food web, we can better communicate the risk of consuming those potentially toxic food sources,” said Katherine Manz, an environmental health professor at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study.

While it was easy to find PFAS data on salmon, trout, and some birds, Lamberti said, the information on the “less glamorous” smaller fish, invertebrates, and algae was harder to come by.

Tools to analyze the range of these chemicals are still evolving, said Vernon Lalone, CEO of Wave Lumina, a Michigan-based startup that’s developing a rapid testing kit for PFAS in water and soil.

“It’s like a chicken-and-an-egg situation,” said Lalone, who wasn’t involved in the study. “You’ve got to have an analytical method that’s robust and reliable enough to measure these things before you can regulate them at certain limits.”

Lamberti said there are still plenty of questions about how these chemicals will shift in waterways as temperatures rise due to climate change, ice formation shifts, and as industries introduce new chemicals. But he’s optimistic — his study shows that when forever chemicals are removed from production, food webs eventually cycle them out. There is no national ban on PFAS, but a patchwork of federal regulations restricts certain chemicals, and some manufacturers have phased out other PFAS compounds voluntarily. 

“That’s what we need to be thinking about with these chemicals,” Lamberti said, “how we’re going to remove them from the production and find substitutes for them to do the right thing.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips5','In scholarly research, a “peer-reviewed” study or article is one that has been independently evaluated by other experts in the field to assess scientific accuracy. Not all studies go through a peer-review process, so peer-reviewed studies and journals typically indicate a higher level of confidence in methodologies and results.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips12','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.
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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New research traces how ‘forever chemicals’ move through the Great Lakes and into people on Jul 6, 2026.

Nate poses questions about our shared future, using headlines regarding a potential ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran to confront a subject that has re-entered public discourse with a quiet but startling force: nuclear warfare.

War has become a fever that world leaders cannot seem to break. As militarism spreads, its costs extend far beyond the battlefield, accelerating climate change while consuming the resources needed to confront it.

As concern over falling birth rates spreads across the political spectrum, pronatalist ideas are finding new audiences. But protecting reproductive freedom and respecting planetary limits require rejecting the politics of population growth.

The barrier to renewable energy was never the technology. It’s power: who holds it, who benefits, and what it takes to shift that. The ICONIC Renewable Energy Zones Toolkit is built to help close that gap. It’s a practical resource for NGOs, campaigners, and community partners who want renewable energy to do more than exist — to turn projects into campaigns, and consultation into co-ownership.

Solar and wind are already proven, affordable, and scalable. What usually stands in the way isn’t the technology — it’s the grid operator who won’t connect, the bank that won’t lend, the regulator whose rules haven’t caught up, or the developer who shows up to “consult” once the deal is already done. This toolkit is built for that fight.

It’s organized as a set of modules you can use standalone or as a full campaign workflow — starting with the case for organising around power, not just projects, and moving through strategy, community rights and consent, policy barriers, and finance. It draws on lessons from campaigners already doing this work, from La Guajira to East Africa to the Amazon.

Inside, you’ll find:

• Case studies from real campaigns
• A Theory of Change template and power-mapping worksheets
• A Strategy Menu and Tactics Library
• Tools for community engagement, FPIC, and benefit-sharing
• A plain-language finance module for engaging funders and investors
• Ready-to-use briefing templates for press, officials, and coalitions

Whether you’re building a campaign from scratch or sharpening one already underway, this toolkit meets you where you are.

Download the Toolkit

The post The ICONIC Renewable Energy Zones Toolkit appeared first on 350.

Campaigners battle 'monstrous megalith' AI centre Channel News brendan 6th July 2026 Teaser Media

A listing of 29 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, June 28, 2026 thru Sat, July 4, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (11 articles)

• The scientist and his family tracking melting glaciers for nearly half a century PBS NewsHour, Ben Tracy, June 22, 2026.
• Europe’s record heatwave: does the continent have a new climate? Nature asks researchers whether scorching summers are the new norm for London, Paris and Berlin. Nature, Edward Chen, June 26, 2026.
• How climate change gets under the skin Researchers unearth clues about how repeat, overlapping climate stressors, from flood-related mold to warming water temperatures to higher pollen counts, affect everyone Grist, Zoya Teirstein, Jun 28, 2026.
• Climate change to blame for intensity of Europe heat wave: Scientists Phys.org, Nick Perry, Jun 28, 2026.
• Could this be Australia`s warmest winter ever? The seasons underway in Australia exemplify a worldwide trend of unseasonably high temperatures, including the early summer heatwave in western Europe. The Conversation, Milton Speer, University of Technology Sydney, Lance M Leslie, University of Technology Sydney, Jun 29, 2026.
• Loading the Heat Dice Without human influence, the recent European heatwave would have been more than 3°C cooler. Climate Trunk, John Lang, Jun 30, 2026.
• How climate change influences extreme weather How science shows us how warming makes heat waves, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires more likely or more severe — and why this science is becoming a major public-policy battleground. The Climate Brink, Andrew Dessler, Jun 30, 2026.
• The world`s oceans are the hottest on record for June - and El Niño is set to turn up the heat even more Average sea surface temperature is just under 21°C across the world’s tropical and temperate oceans, while before widespread industrialisation in 1870 the temperature was about 19.6°C. The Conversation, Matthew England, Alex Sen Gupta, Alistair Hobday, Jul 02, 2026.
• Tour de France braced for historic stage cancellations amid 44C European heatwave The 2026 Tour de France, which starts in Barcelona on Saturday, is steeling itself for climate change disruption with another extreme heatwave predicted to return to Europe in the coming days which could lead to stages being cancelled. The Guardian, Jeremy Whittle in Barcelona, Jul 02, 2026.
• Without Climate Change, U.S. Heat Wave Called `Virtually Impossible` Scientists have said the conditions are the result of a climate that is “fundamentally different” from the time before fossil fuel use started rapidly warming the world. NYT, Raymond Zhong, Jul 03, 2026.
• Sydney records hottest June since 1859 as expert warns new high a `signature` of global warming Prof Andy Pitman, a Sydney-based climate scientist, expressed a “complete lack of surprise” at the new record. The Guardian, Ima Caldwell, Jul 04, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (4 articles)

• Why is America switching off its climate warning system? "Just have a Think" on Youtube, Dave Borlace, June 28, 2026.
• Can climate shocks change how people feel about paying taxes? Researchers further confirm that visibly effective climate adaptation and mitigation efforts improve public willingness to pay for better circumstances. The Conversation, Enrico Nichelatti, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Luxembourg, Abrams Tagem, Tax Research Specialist, Jun 29, 2026.
• New Florida law bans local net-zero emissions policies Gov. Ron DeSantis characterized the clean energy goals the law bans as “radical climate policies,” although experts say the law will not necessarily upend the plans. Inside Climate News, Amy Green, Jun 30, 2026.
• Q&A: How will the World Bank`s abandoned finance goal affect climate action? The World Bank has abandoned a target for 45% of the funding it gives developing countries to be “climate finance”, following months of pressure from the Trump administration in the US. Carbon Brief, Josh Gabbatiss, Jul 03, 2026.

Health Aspects of Climate Change (4 articles)

• `A sad inevitability`: after decades of climate warnings, why is Europe so unprepared for rising heat? Scorching summer of 2003 triggered first efforts to deal with the problem but heatwaves still have devastating impact The Guardian, Ajit Niranjan, Jun 27, 2026.
• Unbearable Heat for Hundreds of Millions The Global South, in particular, is suffering from the consequences of global heating. A new study quantifies heat stress in India by projecting it during the critical seasons. Eos, Thomas Stocker, Jun 29, 2026.
• How extreme heat is exposing extreme inequality The climate crisis and worsening disparity could be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths a year in Europe, which should set off alarm bells for policymakers The Guardian, Ashifa Kassam, Jul 01, 2026.
• Climate change will raise the risk of severe heatwaves. NZ homes aren`t ready The Conversation, Baxter Kamana-Williams, J. Geoffrey Chase, Rebecca Peer, Jul 02, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (3 articles)

• Another Trump Administration Payment to Stop Offshore Wind Farm With the fourth such deal struck by the administration to get companies to forfeit their offshore wind leases, the public is still left wondering why. NYT, Maxine Joselow, Jun 29, 2026.
• `But we`re just 1% of emissions`: do smaller countries` climate efforts matter? Past and present leaders of wealthy nations such as UK and Germany have argued their actions are insignificant The Guardian, Ajit Niranjan, Jun 30, 2026.
• World gets glimpse of its climate future Political risk analyst Kyle Volpi Hiebert compares how we're doing with energy modernization vs. the impact on human civilization of our continued employment of outmoded and dangerious fossil fuels. Brandon Sun, By Kyle Volpi Hiebert, Jul 04, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (3 articles)

• Is Climate Change Ramping Up El Niño Risks? ClimateAdam on Youtube, Adam Levy, June 27, 2026.
• Editorial: It’s time to step up and have your say for science Your comments on a dangerous rule putting politicals in charge of science can matter Ars Technica, John Timmer, Jul 2, 2026.
• Skeptical Science New Research for Week #27 2026 Skeptical Science's weekly survey of climate research, highlighting open access reports that we can all read. Skeptical Science, Doug Bostrom & Marc Kodack, Jul 02, 2026.

Miscellaneous (3 articles)

• A few reasons to feel hopeful about the climate in 2026 Environment, The Conversation UK, Will de Freitas, Jan 8, 2026.
• 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #26 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, June 21, 2026 thru Sat, June 27, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, Jun 28, 2026.
• Amid USFS Upheaval, Utah and Colorado Are Burning Eos, Emily Gardner, Jul 02, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Solutions (1 article)

• Fact brief - Are injuries from wind turbines common? No - Wind turbine collapses or blade failures are extremely uncommon, and wind power causes far fewer deaths per unit of electricity than fossil fuels. Skeptical Science, Sue Bin Park, June 30, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

A pungent smell clouds the stadium where the U.S. men’s football team is set to play its first World Cup match. With 30 days to go before kick-off, the venue’s operations team is busy transforming the playing field into a world-class soccer stadium, the freshly laid soil covered in fertilizer ahead of the arrival of refrigerated trucks with special grass the following day.

Tending to the playing surface is one small task in the job of delivering a seamless event in Los Angeles, one of 16 cities hosting the most popular sporting event in the world this summer. 

Compared to other host cities, the stakes are particularly high in L.A., which hopes to use this year’s World Cup — and next year’s Super Bowl — as a dry run for the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, coming to the city two years later.

A freshly fertilized pitch on an overcast day in Los Angeles.
Carolina Kyllmann / CLEW

This is the start of L.A.’s mega-sporting-event era, and while the eight World Cup matches unfolding at the SoFi Stadium pale in comparison to the size of the Olympics, they provide a good starting point to stress-test security strategies, mobility protocols, and heat wave response plans. The traffic-laden city, with its stressed budget, wants to know what an influx of fans does to its infrastructure,\ and hopes its mega-event preparations somehow pay long-term dividends.

“We’re here to deliver a lasting legacy,” Paul Krekorian, who heads L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’ Office of Major Events tells council members at a City Hall meeting in May. He reminds them that the city bid for the sporting events not just for the honor of hosting them, but to ensure that they delivered a lasting benefit for the people of Los Angeles.

Yet current preparations highlight existing tensions: for Los Angeles, this year’s World Cup is set against a backdrop of weak hotel bookings, high ticket prices, and a growing budget deficit. The city also faces an urgent need to rebuild what burned down in the devastating January 2025 wildfires — the unprecedented scale of which scientists have linked to global warming — with tens of thousands of residents still displaced. Meanwhile, fears that ICE immigration officers struck into the hearts of residents when they raided the multicultural city a year ago, where a quarter of the large immigrant community is undocumented, are still very much alive.

Fans, workers at highest risk from overheating

“The vast majority of people at risk are not the athletes themselves, but rather the spectators — who are generally much less acclimatized — and other groups such as service staff at sales points or in catering,” sports sociologist Sven Schneider said. “These risk groups require particular protection.”

Traveling around L.A., oceans of concrete and limited shade or greenery make clear that fans are exposed to heat long before matches start, racking up hours under the sun as they wait in line for shuttles to venues and stand in long queues to get into stadiums. Just days before the World Cup kick-off, FIFA placed a blanket ban on fans bringing sealed, transparent water bottles into matches — and quickly backtracked following backlash.

A month before, on an overcast day typical of springtime in L.A., Otto Benedict, who heads operations at SoFi Stadium (rebranded the Los Angeles stadium for the World Cup), explained how his team is well versed with local climate risks, sardonically looking upward to say that some fans might even show up underdressed for a cooler “May gray” or “June gloom” day.

The first subway train arrives at the freshly innagurated Wilshire/Fairfax station.
Carolina Kyllmann / CLEW

Regardless, he said they are ready. “We have cooling fans and cooling zones that we deploy if it’s a hot day,” he said, adding that he is constantly in touch with the National Weather Service, and that thermometers inside the stadium coupled with metrics from previous events inform their action plans. “We are sharing with FIFA what our response protocol is, and then learning from them what they need us to be able to do.” Heat response protocols differ across host cities, based on local risk assessments.

While heat waves are unusual at this time of year, record-breaking ocean temperatures are bucking the trend, said climate scientist Daniel Swain. “In the coastal parts of L.A. County, the prevalence of truly extreme heat is lower than in other parts of the country and other parts of the world,” he explains. “On the other hand, not all of the infrastructure is therefore designed for it, so when it does occur it can be very disruptive.”

Read Next US host cities made transit improvements a World Cup goooooooal Benton Graham

The $5.5 billion SoFi Stadium is the exception. Partly surrounded by greenery, it is designed to use the natural environment to create a comfortable experience. On hot days, Benedict’s team can open roof panels to create an updraft and cool the stadium’s interior, which is not air-conditioned. On rainy days, the roof funnels water to a catchment system. That rainwater, after being treated, is used to irrigate the native plants surrounding the venue, which in turn provide shade and cooling.

Yet one does not need to travel far to see a different story. The city of Inglewood, home to the stadium, has a tree canopy cover of 9 percent — when recommended canopy cover goals stand at around 30 percent. Temporary systems to spray mist, water dispensers, and sun awnings dispatched for the World Cup at key locations can only do so much when up against the demands of a climate-stressed county.

Sporting events entice users to try out public transport for the first time

L.A. Metro hopes that sporting events will give people a reason to experience public transit, maybe for the first time, and that a good ride can destigmatize the experience in a city where just over 3 percent of commutes are completed by public transit, according to 2024 American Community Survey data.

“We are planning with legacy in mind,” said CEO Stephanie Wiggins at the edge of the SoFi Stadium pitch as airplanes roared overhead. “We’ve been rolling up our sleeves to figure out how to make this as seamless as possible.” 

L.A. Metro has added multilingual signs to stations, introduced contactless payments on its buses, and consolidated eight apps into one platform for planning, paying, and receiving live information and service alerts. These are changes that both international visitors and commuters will notice.

Most notably, the agency inaugurated three new underground stops in May — just in time for the World Cup — having worked on the extension for over six decades. In June, fans used the D Line to reach watch parties and Fan Zones. Come August, unlike the match-day shuttles, the stations will continue to serve residents.

Most bus stops across L.A. County are not shelterd.
Carolina Kyllmann / CLEW

Officials estimate that around 78,000 people will use the D Line every day, serving one of the U.S.’s densest corridors. As May drew to a close, L.A. Metro saw its highest ridership numbers in six years. The plan is to open six more stations by 2028, connecting the UCLA dorms, which will serve as the Olympic Village, with downtown L.A.

L.A. Metro is drawing from its history: Ridership numbers reached new heights in 1984 when the city last hosted the Olympics. “We know that global events can mean an opportunity,” Wiggins added. 

For the World Cup, L.A. Metro is providing free water at hydration stations in key locations, and during four days at the end of June it transformed L.A.’s main railway hub into a Fan Zone. Union Station came to life in a way it has not in years. “Our Fan Zone gave people a reason to arrive early, stay longer, and see Union Station differently,” reflected Wiggins in a Substack post. “When we make the system easier and safer to use, when we create places people want to be, and when we give riders a reason to choose transit for more than their daily commute, they respond.” 

Read Next The World Cup is one wildfire away from an air quality disaster Tik Root

Time will tell whether ridership numbers continue to climb beyond the mega events. The backbone of L.A. Metro’s system is made up of buses. The agency serves around 12,000 bus stops a day, accounting for around three quarters of journeys — and the infrastructure leaves much to be desired.

Most bus stops are unsheltered, leaving riders under the sun, clueless as to how long without live departure boards or timetables in sight. The Sidewalk and Transit Amenities Program is currently upgrading stops, and has installed 403 shelters — yet departure screens are often out of service.

LA faces multiple tests as it counts down to Olympics

A few weeks in Los Angeles makes clear that authorities, agencies, and businesses struggle to work beyond the immediate tasks in their jurisdiction. L.A. Metro does not own bus stops; local authorities do. Transport experts say that local politicians are not motivated to invest in shelters, as they fear the homeless population would take them over. While the bus system will take you anywhere in L.A., riders accumulate hours under the sun transferring between lines, often accompanied by the city’s large homeless population — a reminder of the challenges the city faces as it readies to welcome the world. 

L.A.’s acute housing crisis and strained budgets mean not everyone is convinced that the time and money invested in delivering a party for the world will pay off for the local residents. A few days before kick-off, workers at SoFi Stadium threatened to strike and street vendors weighed match-day profits against their personal safety.

Halfway through the tournament, L.A.’s streets buzzed with life and there were plenty of signs of solidarity and camaraderie, with residents coming together to celebrate, wrote local journalist Alissa Walker in her dispatches. Yet celebrations were also obscured by toxic air stemming from a large warehouse fire. 

L.A. Metro’s CEO Stephanie Wiggins answers reporter’s questions with 30 days to go before the World Cup kick-off.
Carolina Kyllmann / CLEW

The city’s wounds run deeper than last month’s smoke: Many residents are still reeling from last year’s wildfires, which ravaged entire neighborhoods in Altadena and Pacific Palisades — the most destructive fires in Los Angeles history. Air pollution reached toxic levels; pollutants still linger long after the fires have been extinguished.

Against the backdrop of a national administration focused on advancing fossil fuels, comparatively green California faces much pressure. Los Angeles published its Climate Action plan in April, with an entire section dedicated to using major sports events to accelerate “climate investments that extend well beyond the closing ceremonies.” The plan commits the city to net zero by 2045, 100 percent clean energy by 2035, and to host a “transit-first” Olympic games, which should upgrade mobility options in underserved neighborhoods.

Yet those working to make L.A. County more climate-resilient are unconvinced by the level of ambition or the speed of progress. Following the wildfires, L.A. Mayor Bass dropped the requirement to build new homes without fossil fuel-powered systems. 

Read Next How FIFA’s climate solution has turned into ‘water-gate’ Tik Root

“The people and the trauma make this all very complicated quite honestly, but it was an opportunity to truly do things in a way that is more sustainable and the region chose not to,” said Cassie Rauser, who heads the advocacy group TreePeople, which educates, plants, and cares for trees across Southern California.

“It remains to be seen what the wildfire’s lasting impacts are,” said L.A. Metro’s Wiggins, grief palpable in her voice as she recalled her own employees’ devastation and shock at losing their homes. Regaining her usual confidence, she said that the wildfires showed how important it is to have good infrastructure and good transit: “We were relied on during those fires.”

Whether L.A.’s mega-event era will benefit the people of Los Angeles in the long run is a question that hangs thick in the air. It is exactly the kind of resilience that is deeply woven into the every day that L.A. will have to build more of for its mega-event investments to have a long-term legacy. The countdown until the Olympics opening ceremony marks two years and two weeks.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Los Angeles turns ‘most polluting’ World Cup into Olympic rehearsal in bid for climate legacy on Jul 5, 2026.

Drill baby drill or cry baby cry?  The energy sector and long-term job security

Photo by Julia Taubitz on Unsplash

Introduction

Climate change is already ruining millions of working-class lives across the globe, and increasingly threatening our homes, health, food supplies and safety here in the UK.  Radical changes are needed to stave off the worst impacts, and whilst these will affect every work sector and every community, the energy sector1 has a critical role to play.

1. Transition away from fossil fuels to renewables as quickly as possible.
2. Protect the jobs of workers in energy, supply chains and associated roles (and communities generally) as we move from fossil fuels to renewables.
3. Provide cheap renewable energy that can be afforded by all.

Despite the dire warnings about the consequences2, we are nowhere near doing any of these.  In the UK, the Labour government has made some nods towards each of these points3 without fully embracing transition as the engine of social and economic justice, equality and rejuvenation that it could be.  There are a number of explanations for this, including:

1. Labour’s ‘business as usual’ approach to governance prioritises technical solutions done TO people instead of governing in the campaign mode that’s needed, in which the population is fully informed and mobilised to become creative actors in the social green transition at all levels.
2. The immense weight of the US, pushing hard to sabotage the energy transition and retain ‘global energy dominance’ based on fossil fuels and militarisation, applying direct state to state pressure at government level while sponsoring subservient local political formations like Reform, Restore, Tommy Robinson and the Conservative Party as local agents of disinformation and mobilisation.

Keep the North Sea Working Campaign

One consequence of these currents is that they set a context within which some trade unions see the prevailing winds at the top and decide that they must travel in the same direction if they are to fulfil their purpose of protecting jobs4.  So Unite is currently pursuing a policy of ‘Keep the North Sea Working’5 through an expansion of oil and gas operations, as an extension of its ‘no ban without a plan’ campaign.

Unite wrote to leaders of all political parties ahead of the 2026 Scottish Parliamentary Elections asking if they back the campaign to Keep the North Sea Working and support the delivery of a No Compulsory Redundancy Pledge.  We firmly support the latter as a critical plank in a Just Transition but arguing that ‘keeping the North Sea working’ through expanded oil and gas production including pushing ahead with the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields’ raises expectations among workers that cannot be met. 

While these comments will resonate with members worried about what the future will bring, and that they might have a future in fossil fuel extraction if only the government would cease its attacks on the North Sea.

The approach is fundamentally flawed, even if we leave the disastrous impact on the planet of the continued extraction of fossil fuels aside and focus solely on jobs.

Why the North Sea is Closing Down Not Opening Up

Jobs in the North Sea have been declining at a rate of about 950 a month since 19996.  The projection that they will halve, from 115,000 to around 64,000, by the early 2030s does not accelerate that trend.  This is not so much falling off a cliff as sliding down a pretty steep slope with no chance of slowing it down, a slide that’s been going on for 27 years.  The only lifeline is to get off the slope onto the renewables that are, bizarrely, being blamed.  Oil and gas will keep smaller and smaller parts of the North Sea working regardless of how much investment might be put in.

• The job losses are coming because the North Sea basin is running dry7. Current oil production is 25% of what it was in 1999.
• 93% of what was in there has been ‘drained dry’ already.
• Government data shows that 4.1 billion tonnes of oil has been extracted in the UK since 1975, with the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) projecting a further 218 million tonnes out to 2050 from existing fields.
• These projections also suggest that new drilling could yield another 74 million tonnes, equivalent to 1.7% of the total that could be extracted from 1975 to 2050.

The bald comparison indicates that any idea that there is sufficient oil to meet current demand is absurd, as is any notion that additional investment will be sufficient to save the industry, jobs or communities.

For gas, the UK has produced 33,421 TWh since commercial operations began in 1967, with projected production out to 2050 of a further 2,060 TWh from existing fields and up to an extra 381 TWh (1.1% of the total) from new drilling.

If it was profitable to drill baby drill into what’s left, they would be doing it.  As it is they are not, because gas in the North Sea costs four times as much to ‘lift’ as it does in Qatar8.

So, the jobs crisis in the North Sea is not primarily a matter of industrial or climate policy but of the exhaustion of the field, which makes continued profitable extraction increasingly marginal.  The policy issues are a matter of how to manage the decline, with increased investment making only a small difference to this.  You could overturn the ban on new investment and open up Rosebank and Jackdaw and we will still lose thousands of jobs; pretending otherwise is misleading members.  Rosebank would need 1600 workers to set it up in the short term and employ just 450 while in operation9, which is no lifeline at all when 1,000 jobs a month are being lost.  This makes the need for a PLAN for transition even more important.

What Kind of Long Term Future

This is not to paint a picture of gloom for energy workers and the communities they live in, but to point out that

• a campaign for ‘business as usual’ will not serve those workers or communities,
• hope for the future does not lie in reverting to the status quo under the Tories, which allowed lots of new licences but generated just 36 days’ worth of additional supply as a result10.
• Rather, hope lies in the transition to renewables that is desperately needed and demanding that the government ensures that the huge number of jobs that such a transition requires is actually forthcoming11. This would include a large number in the manufacturing supply chain and decommissioning of redundant rigs, located where jobs are most needed. 

The only way to ‘Keep the North Sea Working’, at current levels of employment is to invest in renewable energy.  Jobs do not have to be exported if they are transferred, and that’s the plan we need, that all of us can fight for together.

The consequences if we don’t are:

1. We would become wholly dependent on imported energy, including hugely expensive US-made Liquefied Natural Gas12, a prospect that has LNG corporations licking their lips in anticipation, and we’d continue to be vulnerable to global shocks (like the one we are currently experiencing with the war on Iran).
2. UK energy workers jobs would fall off a cliff edge – with no lifeline to grab hold of.
3. Fuel bills, already prohibitively high (the ‘eating or heating’ dilemma) would rise further.

And of course, the catastrophic impact of climate change would continue to fall primarily on the most vulnerable communities.

What We Should Be Campaigning For

There are 145,000 jobs in the renewables sector currently and growth to over 180,000 by 2035, much more if full government support is forthcoming13.  What unions need to demand is that this not happen haphazardly but in a planned way, including:

• job guarantees,
• no compulsory redundancies,
• training and reskilling of workers from the shrinking fossil fuel sector as they transfer to the growing renewables sector,
• unionisation and full recognition rights for what has been allowed to become, via a piecemeal private sector-led approach, a non-union work force.

That’s why we say the transition has to be just.

In so far as that isn’t happening currently, that’s a failure of governance and it’s what the whole labour movement needs to demand must happen14. 

This argument is about:

1. the danger to jobs from delaying the transition and failing to develop a worker-led plan to accelerate it and on terms that ensure workers don’t lose out, and
2. the serious danger to the working class as a whole from such a failure, in terms of the collapse of the real value of incomes and direct danger to life and wellbeing – especially of the most vulnerable – from climate chaos.

The current Unite leadership’s argument that ‘with no credible plan for jobs, it’s time to take a new approach that protects jobs, communities and our energy security’ does not actually spell out any demands for ‘a credible plan for jobs’ but, on the contrary, reasserts the business as usual scenario that has lost so many over the last quarter of a century.  There is no ‘new approach’ here.  When the ban on new oil and gas exploration was first announced by Labour in opposition, Sharon Graham pledged that Unite would come up with such a plan to press on the aspirant government.  That’s what we need to put to the government at the negotiating table.  We are still waiting for it.

What is needed is a proactive, worked out transition plan that addresses

• skills retention and development,
• where work can and should be located both to meet labour needs and to prevent local/regional crashes,
• direct support for workers transitioning,
• the technological and climate credentials of technologies and production processes,
• a recognition that it’s not all about offshore workers, nor the technically skilled, but about supply chains, social geographies, offshore workers in catering, cleaning, healthcare and admin, onshore workers in induced jobs along the supply chain – and all these factors are integrated15.

This plan should be negotiated between the government and the unions/workers/communities.  We need a Just Transition Commission to work this through.  In so far as they don’t do that, it should be being demanded by the unions/workers/communities involved, which is the basis for the deepest unity and broadest support, and the cutting edge we need.  Proper union resources should be put into it, across unions in each sector, recognising that implicit within that demand is the seed of a transformation of the state and how it operates16.

Conclusion

No amount of fiery, rousing language is going to halt or reverse the exhaustion of the North Sea.  The steady, inexorable decline in oil and gas jobs can only be counteracted by the fastest possible expansion of the renewables sector to secure a long term future for workers, accompanied by  the guarantees needed to underpin the transition – no compulsory redundancies, guaranteed jobs, pay to compensate for any transition gaps, the training and reskilling needed etc.

We should never forget that the people and Parties currently posing as the saviours of offshore oil and gas workers are the same people who shattered the mining communities in the 1980s and finished them off with Heseltine’s ‘dash for gas’ in the early 90s.  Their promises to save jobs by ‘opening up’ the North Sea are simply a lie.  A lie repeated often and loudly, but a lie all the same.  Follow them down that path, trash the transition and profits will be made in the short term, and more jobs will be lost, bills will get even higher, and more climate damage done.

Paul Atkin, Tahir Latif, Ellen Robottom (personal capacities)

[For a far more detailed analysis of the situation, please do read this excellent article, Factcheck: Nine false or misleading myths about North Sea oil and gas, from Carbon Brief, 25 March 2026, which also contains a multitude of links to the sources of the information cited here.]

References

1. Note that the energy sector refers not only to electricity generation, and not only to fossil fuel production, but to a system which includes these things plus all the infrastructure which enables them, including transmission, distribution and storage, homes and other buildings, transport, foundation industry and manufacture. However, attention has been focused primarily on the contested future of the oil and gas extraction sectors, and it is this we will be mainly addressing here, without losing site of these other elements or the overall question of fairness and working-class interests
2. Manifestly all around us in the shape of the current heatwave, but see also National Emergency Briefing on climate & nature
3. See, for example, Decisive action to break influence of gas on electricity prices – GOV.UK, 21 April 2026.
4. Most significantly in terms of jobs promises, see Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage: a vision to establish a competitive market – GOV.UK
5. Keep the North Sea Working campaign launched by Unite for Scottish elections, 23 March 2026.
6. North Sea Future Plan for fair, managed and prosperous transition – GOV.UK, 26 November 2025.
7. Around 90% of UK North Sea oil and gas already drained dry, Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, 20 March 2026.
8. ‘North Sea gas becomes unaffordable in multiple ways, not only given the geological fact that it can be extracted up to four times cheaper in other parts of the world, but also the fact that renewable sources such as offshore wind can produce electricity at less than half the cost of running new gas plants’, Can North Sea oil and gas really power Britain’s future?, Renewable UK, 10 September 2025
9. What is the Rosebank oil field? – #StopRosebank, 26 February 2024.
10. Hundreds of North Sea licences granted by Tories ‘produce only 36 days of gas’, The Guardian, 28 March 2026.
11. See ‘Little time to spare’: UK must act now to double offshore wind workforce by 2030, Business Green, 15 June 2026, and Green economy supports more than a million UK workers, Friends of the Earth, 2 Jun 2026.
12. Trump has growing stranglehold over EU and UK energy supply, study shows, The Guardian, 21 January 2026.
13. REA’s REView 25 Report, Renewable Energy Association, 23 March 2026.
14. Framing the issue as a failure of Green policies only contributes to the Reform surge in regions affected by these job losses and job precarity. That poses a massive danger to jobs and union rights and risks putting paid to any sort of transition, just or otherwise, leaving huge numbers of workers genuinely on the scrap heap with little hope for the future.  And are we really at a point where the politicians some of our trade union leaders are most closely echoing are the ill-informed and anti-working-class comments of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump?  See Trump says Burnham is ‘extremely liberal’ and the UK is ‘dying’
15. There are broader considerations that need to be integrated into this. What are the barriers that need to be tackled, a recognition of how that’s affecting workers, and issues like the geographical location of jobs, the impacts on local induced economies, the technological barriers to getting power where it’s needed and balancing the grid, recognition that a lot of the jobs that are classed as “green” are neither new jobs (e.g. bin workers), nor really green (CCS etc), nor adequately paid.  But also touch on the areas that are not being highlighted, e.g. that transition and “green jobs” can’t be reliant on dubious technologies like carbon capture and fossil hydrogen; is gender justice and wage parity between skilled roles being considered; and the fact that climate change itself is a massive financial and material danger to working class people.
16. The truth about North Sea jobs and why workers need a plan – Blogpost from Uplift (News), 11 June 2024

 

Other relevant links

Parents slam Tory ‘Trumpian obsession’ with drilling as extreme heat ‘no longer distant threat’ | Morning Star 24 June 2026

The next PM urged to hold the course on climate action: Oil drilling won’t pay the bills | Morning Star 24 June 2026

Government launches multi-million grant scheme to re-train oil and gas workers | BusinessGreen News 24 June 2026

Why unions don’t want Ed Miliband as Andy Burnham’s chancellor | The Independent25 June 2026

Unison, NEU and TSSA back Ed Miliband for chancellor | Morning Star 26 June 2026

‘We must act fast’: Government urged to recognise UK gas reliance as a national security threat | BusinessGreen News 26 June 2026

Clean economy brings jobs and growth, says Miliband as £100bn invested in green energy | Green economy | The Guardian 23 June 2026

Heatwave: Scientists warn media coverage ignoring ‘fundamental’ links to climate change | BusinessGreen News 24 June 2026

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The post Drill baby drill or cry baby cry?  The energy sector and long-term job security first appeared on Greener Jobs Alliance.

PFAS Results Raise More Questions Than Answers

Part 1 of a 3-part series. Part 2 will examine U.S.-caused contamination at each of the 36 individual facilities in Greenland. Part 3 will survey the appeals U.S. veterans have filed with the U.S. Veterans Administration, claiming cancers and disease as a result of their exposure to toxins in Greenland.

By Pat Elder
July 4, 2026

‍Pituffik Space Base is likely to be heavily contaminated with PFAS, but the U.S. Department of War refuses to divulge pertinent data.

‍When the Danish newspaper Politiken reported on July 1, 2026, that groundwater at the U.S. Pituffik Space Base in Greenland contained 1,100 parts per trillion (ng/L) of PFOS, the finding immediately attracted international attention. The concentration greatly exceeds current European drinking water standards and adds to growing alarm over PFAS contamination at former and active U.S. military installations worldwide.

1,100 parts per trillion of PFOS? What exactly does the reported number represent? Searching for the answer provides insight into the U.S. military’s sloppy culture of non-disclosure in Greenland and around the world.  

Based on the results, the public cannot determine:

• the exact sampling location,

• whether the sample came from a drinking water well or a monitoring well,

• the depth of the well,

• the screened interval,

• whether the water was collected before or after treatment,

‍ Without this information, we don’t have a clue.

‍This is not only an issue for Greenland. Communities living near active and  former U.S. military installations in England, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere are asking the same questions as they seek to understand how decades of military firefighting activities have poisoned their environment and what can be done to protect their health. They’re not getting much help from the Americans.

The U.S. military uses carcinogenic aqueouos film-forming foam ( AFFF ) in about 1,500 facilities and over 6,800 mobile assets worldwide. Release of AFFF into the environment, either through accidental releases, or for fire training and emergency use, has resulted in PFAS detections in drinking water and groundwater in and around DOD installations, according to the  U.S. General Accounting Office in 2024.  

Public resentment around the world is building because the American public knows a great deal more about the specifics of the contamination in the U.S. than “foreigners” do at any of these places. Individual states are taking actions, based on The PFAS data released by the Department of War, to protect the health of their citizens.  

‍The lack of accountability for U.S. military pollution in Greenland stems from Article XI of the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement. This clause freed the U.S. from any legal obligation to clean up or restore its military bases. The treaty states:

‍ It is understood that any areas or facilities made available to the  Government of the United States of America under this Agreement need not be left in the condition in which they were at the time they were thus made available.”

‍This sentence is extraordinarily broad. It contains no environmental standard, no restoration requirement, no cleanup obligation, and no obligation to compensate for environmental damage, so the U.S. can tell Denmark to go to hell when it complains of environmental tyranny. The same is largely true under the SOFA agreements (Status of Forces Agreements) that set the tone between the great Goliath of 1945 and its many subjects today.

‍Section 345 of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, (NDAA)

‍When Congress mandated that the Department of Defense test off-base drinking water for PFAS contamination, it effectively left the Pentagon to police itself. By assigning the execution, reporting, and oversight of the PFAS program to the military's own internal PFAS Task Force, Congress created an inherent conflict of interest that complicates independent accountability.

‍The DOD is fundamentally stonewalling its statutory reporting requirements. Despite identifying 723 domestic bases  that utilized PFAS-containing firefighting foams, the Pentagon has only submitted data for 86 installations in response to Section 345 of the FY2022 NDAA. Even this minimal disclosure is functionally hollow, leaving major gaps where critical concentration metrics are omitted entirely.

‍A close examination of the records associated with Pituffik Space Base in Greenland raises serious questions about how the data have been organized and presented to the public.

What the Pentagon’s Website Says‍ ‍

Marketed as a sophisticated public transparency initiative, the Department of War’s PFAS database ostensibly delivers the final results of off-base drinking water testing mandated by Section 345 of the FY2022 NDAA. According to the Pentagon, these assessments are designed to determine whether military-related PFAS contamination has migrated beyond base boundaries into local drinking water supplies. However, a closer look at the data reveals that this transparency is largely performative.

The Unexpected Discovery of Pituffik’s PFAS data

The structural flaws of the DOD’s PFAS database are not limited to missing values; the platform’s underlying data architecture displays bizarre anomalies that further obscure transparency. For example, querying the database for Colorado’s Peterson Space Force Base (SFB) mistakenly returns data records for Pituffik Space Base in Greenland.

A broader examination of the eight primary U.S. Space Force installations reveals a stark institutional disparity: while six bases yield "no records found" and one returns just 11 rows, Pituffik SB accounts for a staggering 27,595 rows of data. This erratic indexing and massive data imbalance strongly suggest that the database is functionally compromised, undermining its statutory utility under Section 345 of the 2022 NDAA.

U.S. Dept. of Defense, Off-Base Drinking Water Information: PFAS Testing Database, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment, https://www.acq.osd.mil/eie/eer/ecc/pfas/map/pfasmap.html (last visited July 3, 2026) (demonstrating indexing anomaly where a query for "Peterson SFB (CO)" returns records for "Pituffik SB (Greenland)" via the "Advanced Search" interface).

Looking Inside the Exported Spreadsheet

A granular look inside the exported spreadsheet reveals profound structural anomalies that challenge basic data integrity protocols. While the Pituffik dataset resembles a conventional laboratory database on the surface, a deeper audit reveals irreconcilable duplication errors.

A raw snapshot of the DOD’s exported Pituffik spreadsheet sorted by analyte concentration. A single physical water sample (ID: C256053) displays impossible redundancy, containing multiple, varying numeric results for identical compounds (like PFHxS and PFOS) taken on the exact same date.

When sorted by Laboratory Sample ID, individual identifiers contain numerous repeated measurements of identical compounds. For example, a single sample identifier—C256053—contains 252 analytical rows detailing eighteen unique PFAS analytes. Crucially, each analyte appears exactly fourteen distinct times under the same sampling date, analytical method (QSM_B15), and laboratory contract number. Even more perplexing is that these repeated records are simultaneously split across three conflicting treatment categories: No Treatment, Pre-Treatment, and Post-Treatment.

Ask the Artist Blue what he meant by this.

In standard environmental engineering and legal chain-of-custody protocols, a single Laboratory Sample ID isolates one physical sample. It cannot simultaneously represent pre-filtered and post-filtered water. The Pentagon’s platform offers zero documentation or methodology to explain why these contradictory treatment phases are compressed into single identifiers, rendering the data functionally uninterpretable. What were they thinking?

Putting the Pituffik Results into Context

To accurately assess the Pituffik database concentrations, it is critical to distinguish between different regulatory sampling methodologies. The Pentagon states that this portal tracks off-base drinking water under Section 345 of the FY2022 NDAA. This represents point-of-consumption monitoring, which is fundamentally distinct from the source-zone groundwater investigations that initially brought military PFAS contamination to national attention.

For context, the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) landmark 2019 report analyzed raw groundwater directly beneath or adjacent to 100 military installations.

Figure 2: Top 15 U.S. military installations ranked by maximum historical PFAS concentrations detected in groundwater (measured in parts per trillion / ppt). Data adapted from historic source-zone investigations.

Concentrated near historic fire-training areas where aqueous film-forming foam (AFFF) was heavily discharged, those groundwater samples yielded extraordinary concentrations. Because these monitoring wells target undiluted source zones, their metrics are predictably orders of magnitude higher than finished drinking water supplies.

Groundwater monitoring wells located immediately adjacent to historic fire training areas are designed to locate contamination near its source. They examine highly contaminated groundwater before a great deal of dilution occurs. Establishing these historical baselines remains vital to understanding what is to be expected when examining military installations.

To illustrate the scale of these historical source-zone investigations, Figure 2 highlights the peak groundwater concentrations compiled from these landmark military assessments.

As documented above, raw groundwater adjacent to historic fire-training areas reached extraordinary levels. At the most impacted sites—such as England Air Force Base in Louisiana and Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California—total PFAS concentrations reached 20.7 million and 8 million parts per trillion (ppt), respectively.

These extreme values represent the raw, undiluted toxic footprint at the source of the discharge. They serve as an important baseline when evaluating the available data from the six U.S. Space Force bases, allowing us to determine if Pituffik's anomalies extend to its actual toxicological profile.

 Domestic Baselines: Space Force Groundwater Concentrations

To evaluate what might be expected within the hidden records of Pituffik Space Base, we can isolate historical source-zone groundwater data from six primary U.S. Space Force installations. Because these metrics target undiluted groundwater near historical fire-training zones, they illustrate the raw scale of baseline contamination prior to environmental migration or dilution.

Figure 3 compiles the peak total PFAS concentrations and specific compound counts reported across these domestic facilities.

Figure 3: Peak historical total PFAS concentrations (measured in parts per trillion / ppt) and corresponding compound distributions across six domestic U.S. Space Force installations.

The mathematical average across these six domestic installations sits at approximately 1,143,000 ppt of total PFAS. To put this into perspective, this historical groundwater baseline is more than a thousand times higher than the 1,100 ppt concentration  recently reported by the Danish newspaper Politiken regarding Pituffik.

Critically, this comparison represents a distinct methodological asymmetry. We are comparing apples to oranges. While the domestic Space Force data captures raw, undiluted source groundwater, the Pentagon’s Section 345 testing theoretically targets off-base drinking water supplies used by neighboring communities. These two testing frameworks evaluate entirely different phases of the human exposure pathway—moving from the heavily contaminated source zone to the finished public tap.

However, tracking this migration remains a profound regulatory challenge. By routinely omitting critical metadata—such as exact GPS coordinates and sample well depths—the Department of Defense leaves independent scientists, lawyers, and the public to guess how these toxic source zones physically connect to public drinking water supplies. and how the contamination impacts multiple environmental media.

Welcome to the U.S. Military’s International PFAS Testing Dog and Pony Show!

‍ ‍Playing a shell game with the depth of testing

Sometimes we will see results in a PFAS Site Inspection from a surficial aquifer near the surface at a fire training area and the levels may be surprisingly low because the carcinogens may have seeped deeper into the ground. We may also see data at the same location taken from 200 feet below the surface, showing low, or even non-existent levels. To get the real picture we would need to examine results from every ten feet down or so. This way, we might find concentrations of total PFAS exceeding hundreds of thousands of parts per trillion somewhere in between.

By withholding both geographic coordinates and depth metadata, the Pentagon leaves the world’s public with a spatial blackout.

The Politiken Disclosure: Unmasking a Fabricated Baseline

The recent investigation by the Danish newspaper Politiken drew vital international attention to a reported PFOS concentration of 1,100 nanograms per liter (ng/L or ppt) associated with Pituffik Space Base. While this reporting represents a critical contribution to public awareness—offering a stark glimpse into a broader legacy of environmental degradation left by decades of U.S. military operations in Greenland—the metric itself originates from a deeply flawed source.

While the Pentagon's exported spreadsheet does contain raw PFOS entries that match this1,100 ppt figure, the underlying architecture of the dataset severely undermines its credibility. Because individual Laboratory Sample IDs are structurally compromised, confounding the data with unexplained duplicate rows and overlapping treatment categories, the entire database lacks the baseline integrity required for scientific or legal validation.

Ultimately, these pervasive structural errors create an information vacuum. Because the data lacks fundamental reliability and the Department of War provides no public transparency channels, independent investigators are left with a chaotic dataset that raises far more questions than it answers, completely obscuring the true scale of the toxic footprint at Pituffik.

Regulatory Miscalculations: Disentangling Water Concentrations from Dietary Limits

The Politikenreport quotes an expert claiming that the 1,100 ppt PFOS finding at Pituffik represents “about 250 times the EU limit.” This assertion conflates two distinct toxicological metrics.

The European Union’s statutory framework handles these limits through separate mechanisms:

• EU Drinking Water Directive: Establishes a maximum contaminant level of 100 ng/L for the sum of 20 individual PFAS compounds (including PFOS).

• European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) : Sets a Tolerable Weekly Intake (TWI) of 4.4 nanograms per kilogram (ng/kg) of body weight per week for the combined mass of PFOS, PFOA, PFNA, and PFHxS.

Dividing the reported 1,100 ng/L by the media's stated factor of 250 yields exactly 4.4 - confirming that the source material mistakenly swapped an ambient drinking water threshold with a physiological dietary intake ceiling.

Let’s make this real

Data from the Forever Pollution Project illustrates the staggering discrepancy between regulatory limits and dietary reality. Fish from the Damhussøen reservoir in Copenhagen have been recorded containing 311,000 ng/kg (311 ng/g) of PFOS. ‍ ‍

• A minuscule 0.08-gram fleck of this fish (portrayed here) contains 24.88 ng of PFOS. (.08 × 311 ng/g) This single crumb accounts for nearly 23% of the total weekly allowance (110 ng) for a 25-kilogram child under EFSA’s guidelines.

•  A typical 200-gram meal of this same catch delivers a massive 62,200 nanograms of PFOS. For that same child, this single meal represents 565 times the recommended weekly toxicological limit—and over 190 times the weekly ceiling for an average adult.

=========================

An expanding consensus among international toxicologists on both sides of the Atlantic maintains that no level of exposure to these bioaccumulative carcinogens is safe.

There’s so much more!

There are actually 40,000 types of PFAS. The Pentagon is providing compromised results for 40 compounds at Pituffik. That’s .1% of all the compounds potentially out there.  

40 PFAS compounds reported by the U.S. Military

Ask British, German, and Japanese scientists and environmentalists if they are frustrated by the lack of U.S. transparency. The dutiful corporate media is doing a lousy job reporting on the lack of data, the sobering science, and the world’s frustration.

Polar Bears and the Arctic Marine Food Web

PFAS contamination in the Arctic is not confined to military bases. Scientific reviews show that PFAS also reach the Arctic through long-range atmospheric and oceanic transport, also contaminating seawater, sediments, aquatic organisms, seabirds, marine mammals, and polar bears. In Arctic marine food webs, PFOS and related compounds can biomagnify, with the highest burdens often found in top predators such as polar bears and seabird eggs. Beyond accumulating in polar bears and other Arctic predators, PFAS have been linked to altered gene expression, immune suppression, reproductive impairment, and epigenetic changes that may affect future generations. 

Biologists, toxicologists, and geneticists are actively investigating whether the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) can survive the dual threat of climate change and genetic modification or if we are watching the final generations of the species as it has historically existed. The people who run this world just don’t give a damn. For them, if there’s no market-based solution or lucrative capitalist incentive for carrying it out, well then, there’s no solution.

And just one more parting shot, in U.S. military parlance.

In addition to PFAS, petroleum-related contaminants are commonly associated with military installations in Greenland. Releases from fuel storage areas, pipelines, refueling operations, vehicle maintenance facilities, and spills often result in contamination by benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX), along with a wide range of petroleum hydrocarbons. We know that certain American bases in Greenland have been severely and permanently contaminated with nuclear radiation.

Other compounds that may be present include vinyl chloride, which can form as chlorinated solvents degrade in the environment, as well as metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pesticides, and combustion byproducts associated with historical military activities. At Arctic bases such contaminants can become trapped in frozen soils and permafrost for decades, only to be mobilized as permafrost thaws, potentially creating long-term sources of contamination to groundwater, streams, wetlands, and the broader ecosystem.

Bummer.

How do we talk sense into these knuckleheads?

Welcome to CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective, an ongoing series this year.

The post CELDF’s What is America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

Read CCEJN's 2025 Annual Report — celebrating 25 years of environmental justice work across the San Joaquin Valley.

Following years of drought, the wells in Estancia, New Mexico, are running dry. 

After declaring a water emergency last week, the small town in Torrance County is hauling in water to fill its pipes. Estancia has also reduced water sales to the Torrance County Detention Facility, or TCDF, a federal immigration detention center run by the private contractor CoreCivic. The detention facility, Estancia’s largest commercial water customer, has resorted to trucking in water. 

In the midst of the crisis, Estancia Mayor Runnel Riley has taken a leave of absence. During a Board of Trustees meeting Tuesday evening, Estancia’s elected leaders passed a vote of “no confidence” in the mayor. The state has provided funding to drill a new well, and Estancia will be opening the 30-day bidding process this month.

Dozens of residents attended Tuesday’s meeting in person or virtually to voice their frustration about the water problems and delays in drilling a new well. When asked by a reporter for the Mountainair Dispatch, board trustees said they did not have data available on what proportion of the city’s water goes to the detention facility. Estancia is home to 1,400 people, and up to 800 people can be detained at the facility.

Read Next The Colorado River is vanishing — and the fixes are getting weird Jake Bittle

Ryan Gustin, senior public affairs director at CoreCivic, said the company implemented contingency plans once it learned of the water emergency. He said that the Torrance County Detention Facility has brought in additional water supplies, and the water emergency has not impacted its operations.

“Drinking water is always available within our housing units and bottled water has been provided in addition to the readily available drinking water containers,” Gustin said.

Roy Hubbard, Estancia’s deputy clerk, told Inside Climate News that the town is meeting with CoreCivic on Wednesday to discuss next steps. The detention facility has been the subject of complaints about sewer and water problems in the past.

A detention center, a drought, and years of delay

The current water shortage is not Estancia’s first. 

Last year, Estancia asked residents to conserve water because its wells were not producing adequately. In 2024, the town issued a similar call.

Overpumping has caused significant declines to the groundwater level in the Estancia Basin aquifer, which the town relies on, according to the New Mexico Groundwater Alliance. The Office of the State Engineer, which regulates water rights in New Mexico, closed the Estancia Basin to new water rights. However, the office predicted that if existing water rights remain in use, the groundwater level will continue to decline.

New Mexico, including Torrance County, is experiencing severe drought. State officials expect groundwater supplies to further diminish because of higher temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns due to climate change.

Read Next This simple metal tube helps scientists predict drought before it happens Jesse Nichols

Estancia elected Runnel Riley to replace the incumbent mayor in November 2025 by a mere five votes. However, Riley stopped attending trustee meetings as the town’s water problems became more severe.

State Representative Stefani Lord, a Republican who represents Torrance and Bernalillo counties, said at Tuesday’s meeting: “I called the mayor in January. He has never returned my phone calls.

“Just get the well finished. That is the short-term problem,” she said. “There are all kinds of things we can do in the future. But for this moment, we just have to focus on getting this done.”

During the meeting, the trustees also voted to prohibit fireworks over the Fourth of July weekend. The town still plans to hold a fireworks display, but private citizens will not be allowed to set off fireworks because of the ongoing drought and the risk of fires during the water emergency.

Hubbard, the deputy clerk, said that as of Saturday, trucks had delivered 116,700 gallons of water to the town. He said that water supply to CoreCivic will “gradually be turned back on” when there is more water available. According to reporting in the Mountainair Dispatch, more than 80 percent of the town’s water goes to commercial customers. However, town officials have not clarified how much of that share goes to CoreCivic.

Read Next How New Mexico is ‘building a forest’ by solving a seedling shortage Kylie Mohr

During Tuesday’s meeting, in response to questions from a Mountainair Dispatch reporter, Mayor Pro Tem Albert Lovato said that providing up-to-date information on the town’s water supply is difficult because of the fluctuating population at the detention center. “Our population goes up and it goes down because of CoreCivic,” he said.

The detention center has been a source of controversy for years. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General documented unsanitary conditions at TCDF in 2022, including “clogged toilets, broken sinks, inoperable toilets, water leaks, and mold.” The Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant and refugee rights organization, has also documented complaints from detainees at TCDF about sewage overflows and restricted access to water.

“There have been no sewage issues at TCDF because of this situation, nor were there any sewage issues in 2025 related to any water supply issues,” said Gustin, the CoreCivic spokesperson. “At no point have those in our care been without drinking water.”

The New Mexico Environment Department, or NMED, enforces health and safety regulations at TCDF. Agency spokesperson Drew Goretzka said that following a 2025 inspection, TCDF has addressed potential deficiencies with the sewer system.

“NMED is supporting the town of Estancia through emergency response coordination, including requesting assistance from other state agencies to provide alternate water sources,” Goretzka said. “The department is in communication with the town and its contractors to resolve the immediate water shortage issues.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement deferred questions about the facility to CoreCivic. 

The federal agency has expanded its detention capacity under the Trump administration. ICE purchased numerous warehouses around the country to open new detention facilities this year for immigrants who are in deportation proceedings. ICE has been detaining an increasing number of people with active immigration cases seeking to stay in the country. Many residents in these communities, from Texas to Pennsylvania, have raised concerns whether local infrastructure could support the increased water demand from detention centers.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A New Mexico town is running dry. An immigration detention center is its biggest water customer. on Jul 4, 2026.

Boots Riley’s new film, I Love Boosters, is a Robin Hood story about a crew of “boosters”—people who steal high-end clothing and resell it at affordable prices to working-class people who otherwise couldn’t afford it. The result is a beautiful, playful, funny, didactic, Afro-surrealist film with an earworm score by Tune-Yards. It’s a satirical comedy packed with practical special effects. It is also an unapologetically socialist film from an openly Marxist director.

The movie takes on the cost-of-living crisis, alienation, sweatshop labor, corporate control of the media, labor exploitation at home and abroad, and the predatory self-help industry. More importantly, it is crystal clear about its proposed solution: collective action by class-conscious workers.

Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, the film follows Corvette (Keke Taylor), an aspiring fashion designer struggling to survive while living in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant. Along with her friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), they make up the Velvet Gang. Their primary target for boosting is Metro Designers, a fast-fashion chain specializing in monochromatic clothing. The chain is owned by Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a workaholic designer who seems to live in an especially angry TED talk.

Once Christie becomes aware that Metro Designers is being targeted, the feud turns increasingly personal. To gather intelligence, members of the gang take jobs at Metro Designers, where they witness firsthand the unfair and often illegal tactics used to exploit workers. They also meet Violeta (Eiza González), who is attempting to organize a union at the company. Soon the Velvet Gang joins forces with Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a worker at one of Christie’s Chinese garment factories with her own reasons to bring down the fashion mogul. Armed with a convenient teleportation device, the group launches an escalating campaign to empty every Metro Designers store in the Bay Area.

This is a long-overdue movie. You may have heard of Nana Duffour’s excellent 2025 short film Rainbow Girls, which also follows a group of young femme shoplifters in the Bay Area. These two films were conceived and produced entirely independently. As Duffour wrote, “What I’ve come to understand is that when two filmmakers independently look at the hyper-gentrification of the Bay Area, the crushing weight of late-stage capitalism, and the rebellious art of boosting luxury goods, and decide to make a movie about it—that’s not a case of copycats. That is a cultural distress signal. It means a story is begging to be told.”

One of I Love Boosters‘s most striking qualities is its overwhelmingly woman-led cast. While several men play memorable supporting roles—LaKeith Stanfield is particularly entertaining as Pinky Ring Guy, a literal sex demon—they are all in supporting roles. In fact, I Love Boosters joins a very small club that passes the reverse Bechdel Test: in the handful of scenes in which two men speak to each other, they only talk about women—or the women’s revenge scheme. This represents a notable and welcome shift from Riley’s previous film, Sorry to Bother You, which only has two named female characters, who do not speak to each other at all.

Spoiler alert

I Love Boosters is a surreal film with a flamboyant visual style and an abundance of wild ideas, though it is not unique in that regard. Films such as Everything Everywhere All at Once similarly combine absurdity with a flamboyant fashion sense (they both share the same costume designer, Shirley Kurata).

What makes I Love Boosters distinctive is the clarity of its class politics.Throughout the film, Christie Smith is revealed to be the real thief. She steals design ideas from aspiring artists, as well as  wages and dignity from her retail employees through exploitative labor practices, and profits from starvation wages paid to workers in her overseas factories. When she is informed that the chemicals used to sandblast her designer jeans are causing lung cancer among factory workers—including Jianhu’s family—her response is indignant rage at being bothered.

The film’s final act offers a direct answer to these injustices: unionization, mass strikes, and the overthrow of capitalism. It turns out that the teleportation device that allows Jianhu to travel between China and Oakland has two additional settings. One, “Deconstruction,” can reduce concrete walls to piles of stone. The other, “Situation Acceleration,” intensifies contradictions in a distinctly dialectical manner. When amplified and combined with the teleportation function, the device triggers a worldwide surge in class consciousness. As the film ends we learn that revolutionary movements are spreading around the world.

This film is not perfect. There is a lot going on in this movie, which can make the plot feel overstuffed and rushed, especially the second act. Most of the practical effects feel fresh and vibrant in a way that CGI cannot replicate (see Mad Max: Fury Road for other examples of this). But the extended claymation sequence is a bit jarring and does not match the visual style of the rest of the movie, much as I enjoyed it.

Make sure to watch through the end credits for an explanation of dialectics from a stoner union organizer set in a hair salon. And if you haven’t seen Sorry to Bother You or Riley’s Hulu series I’m a Virgo, then add them to your list. They should be required watching for any political activist.

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: Señor Codo; modified by Tempest.

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The stakes of a state theoretical category

Over the past decade, the American Left has often used the term “fascism” to describe the emerging regime in the United States, and this has been quite understandable. All around us there has been visible disdain for legal procedures, cultivation of a leadership cult, the use of paramilitary symbols in security forces, the escalation of the machinery of deportation, and a culture-war mentality. Still, equating these developments with fascism can do more harm than good by muddying understanding. In the Marxist-historical tradition—from Trotsky to Poulantzas to Paxton—fascism refers to a specific type of movement: a mass-mobilizing force of the petty bourgeoisie, organized outside of parliamentary politics, fused with parts of capital to suppress a working class facing a revolutionary or near-revolutionary crisis (Trotsky 1934; Poulantzas 1970; Paxton 2004).

The current American situation doesn’t meet those conditions. The working class isn’t organized for revolution; the petty bourgeoisie doesn’t have the necessary extra-parliamentary units; and capital is not suffering the profitability crisis that led German and Italian industries toward fascism in the interwar period.

Calling the current regime as fascist might be a misstep, and labeling it as populist authoritarianism might miss some important nuances. What we’re really looking at is a more specific category—one that reflects how the executive power has become more independent from different class factions within an exhausted hegemonic bloc while also becoming more personal and patrimonial in its approach to state administration. I refer to this as “patrimonial Bonapartism,” which combines insights from two major theories: the Marxist view of Bonapartism as a unique form of capitalist state rule and Weber’s analysis of patrimonialism as a special mode of governance. I believe that bringing these two ideas together helps us better understand what’s happening in the United States, compare it with other cases, and start thinking strategically about what the future might hold.

The origins of Bonapartism as a Marxist category

The category of Bonapartism comes into Marxist analysis through Marx’s influential pamphlets covering France from 1848 to 1851: “The Class Struggles in France,” “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” and later, “The Civil War in France” (Marx 1850; Marx 1852; Marx 1871). These writings primarily explore the idea of state autonomy. By the time Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte orchestrated his coup in December 1851 and was proclaimed emperor just a year later, the French bourgeoisie had largely overcome the proletarian uprising of June 1848. Instead of governing directly, the bourgeoisie ceded political power to a regime that suspended parliament, weakened the party system, and concentrated administrative control in an executive supported by a “society of December 10”—a group of displaced adventurers, financial speculators, and noble remnants that Marx vividly describes (Marx 1852, Ch. 5).

Marx’s analysis turns on a paradox. The Bonapartist state is, in its political form, autonomous from the bourgeoisie: it disciplines them, taxes them, and deals with them through the prefectural apparatus. However, in its social content, it is a state that serves the general interest of capital. Bonaparte protects property; he crushes the workers’ movement; he opens the way for the second industrial revolution under Haussmann and the Crédit Mobilier. The autonomy is real but conditional. It rests on a peculiar conjuncture: a working class strong enough to threaten the bourgeoisie but not strong enough to take power, and a bourgeoisie too divided to rule directly. Into that vacuum steps the executive, claiming to stand above class to represent the nation—most especially the parcelized peasantry, which Marx famously likens to a “sack of potatoes,” incapable of self-representation and therefore requiring a representative who lords over them (Marx 1852, Ch. 7).

This is the original sense of Bonapartism: a particular form of capitalist state in which the executive, surrounded by a personal apparatus, achieves real autonomy from the dominant class while serving its general interest. Hal Draper’s reconstruction of Marx’s state theory establishes that Marx and Engels treated this phenomenon not as an anomaly but as a recurring form of the bourgeois state under conditions of class equilibrium (Draper 1977). Engels generalized the category in his analysis of Bismarck’s Germany, where he saw a similar structural logic at work in a different historical setting (Engels 1884). The category was thus, from its first elaboration, intended as a portable analytical tool rather than a description of a single regime.

Leon Trotsky decisively extended the category in the 1930s. Confronting the rise of fascism, Trotsky was concerned to distinguish Bonapartism, a form of normal bourgeois rule under crisis, from fascism proper, which involved the destruction of working-class organization by an extra-parliamentary mass movement (Trotsky 1934). For Trotsky, the regimes of Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher in late Weimar were Bonapartist preludes; Hitler’s regime, once consolidated, was something qualitatively different. The Bonapartist regime, Trotsky argued, was an emergency form of rule, inherently transitional, pointing either back toward parliamentary normality or forward into fascism. Trotsky also, controversially, stretched the category to characterize Stalin’s bureaucratic regime in The Revolution Betrayed, arguing that Stalinism represented a Bonapartism sui generis, the autonomization of a bureaucratic stratum from both classes in a workers’ state (Trotsky 1937). Whatever one makes of the Soviet application, the methodological move is important: Bonapartism became, for Trotsky and his successors, a tool for contemplating state autonomy in moments of class equilibrium and crisis.

The next major theoretical extension comes from Nicos Poulantzas. Across Political power and Social Classes, Fascism and Dictatorship, and State Power and Socialism, Poulantzas systematized Marxist state theory and gave Bonapartism a structural rather than purely conjunctural meaning (Poulantzas 1968; Poulantzas 1970; Poulantzas 1978). For Poulantzas, the bourgeois state always exhibits a relative autonomy from the dominant class, because it must organize the class as a whole against the centrifugal tendencies of its competing fractions. Bonapartism, then, refers to a period in which the relative autonomy of the state becomes intensified. During this time, the executive concentrates power, parliamentary mediation breaks down, and the state apparatus becomes the primary site of conflict among class fractions. In his late work, Poulantzas proposed that this had become the normal form of the developed capitalist state under late capitalism, a regime he called “authoritarian statism,” characterized by the decline of parliamentary institutions, the concentration of power in the executive, the fusion of party and state, and the decline of formal legal procedure (Poulantzas 1978). In this account, authoritarian statism is described as Bonapartism that has become permanent and pervasive, serving as the underlying tone of advanced capitalist rule rather than merely as an expression of a crisis episode.

Bob Jessop’s strategic-relational reconstruction of Poulantzas’s framework has advanced this analysis, insisting that the state must be understood not as a thing but as a social relation, more precisely, as the institutional materialization of a balance of class forces (Jessop 1990; Jessop 2016). On this account, Bonapartism, whether episodic or structural, is the institutional crystallization of a particular conjuncture of forces, and it has its contradictions, its conditions of reproduction, and its forms of crisis. This is the Marxist inheritance on which the present analysis builds.

The Weberian Inheritance and the Patrimonial Moment

To this Marxist tradition, I want to graft a category drawn from Max Weber, one that the Marxist literature has been slow to integrate: patrimonialism. In Economy and Society, Weber distinguishes three pure types of legitimate domination: legal-rational, traditional, and charismatic, and within traditional domination, he develops patrimonialism as the dominant form of pre-modern rule (Weber 1922). Patrimonial domination rests on the personal loyalty of officials to the ruler; the apparatus of administration is treated as the ruler’s personal household; offices are dispensed as favors and held at the ruler’s pleasure; there is no clear distinction between the private wealth of the ruler and the public revenue of the polity; and rule-bound, predictable, legal-rational procedure is subordinated to the personal will of the patron.

Weber developed the category to analyze pre-modern empires, sultanates, and feudal kingships. However, Weberian scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly that of Shmuel Eisenstadt, extended the concept to analyze post-colonial regimes in which a formally modern, legal-rational state apparatus operated alongside or beneath a system of personal rule, clientelism, and rent extraction (Eisenstadt 1973). Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle (1997) specifically developed the category of neopatrimonialism in the comparative politics literature on Africa. It was refined methodologically by Gero Erdmann and Ulf Engel (2007). This literature establishes that patrimonialism is not confined to pre-modern formations: It can be the dominant administrative principle within ostensibly modern states, hollowing out the formal apparatus from within while preserving its outer forms.

It is worth distinguishing patrimonialism in this sense from Weber’s other category of personal rule, charismatic domination, since contemporary analyses of Trumpism frequently conflate the two. Charismatic domination, in Weber’s account, rests on the personal devotion of followers to a leader whose authority derives from his perceived extraordinary qualities; it is inherently unstable, episodic, and prone to be “routinized” into one of the other forms over time (Weber 1922). The American regime exhibits charismatic elements in its legitimation: the cult of personality, the rally form, and the perceived extraordinary qualities of the leader. But its administrative substance is patrimonial. The two layers must be kept analytically distinct: Charisma is the legitimating idiom by which a patrimonial-Bonapartist regime addresses its mass base, while patrimonialism is the actual principle on which the administrative apparatus is being remade. The conflation matters strategically. If one mistakes the regime for a purely charismatic phenomenon, one expects its collapse to follow the personal political fortunes of the leader. If one understands the patrimonial substance, one recognizes that an architecture of personal-loyalty administration is being built that may survive, in altered form, even through significant changes in personnel at the top.

To say that the United States today is undergoing a patrimonial-Bonapartist transformation is to say two things simultaneously: that the executive has acquired real autonomy from the established class-fractional coalitions of the neoliberal order and that the administrative apparatus is being remade on patrimonial principles, with personal loyalty replacing rule-bound office-holding as the central administrative criterion.

Patrimonialism, in this synthesis, names a mode of administration: the principle on which the personnel, budgets, rule-following, and loyalty relations of the state apparatus are organized. Bonapartism, by contrast, names a political form: the relationship between the executive and the contending class fractions of the dominant bloc. The two operate at different levels of abstraction, and that is precisely why they can be fused. To say that the United States today is undergoing a patrimonial-Bonapartist transformation is to say two things simultaneously: that the executive has acquired real autonomy from the established class-fractional coalitions of the neoliberal order and that the administrative apparatus is being remade on patrimonial principles, with personal loyalty replacing rule-bound office-holding as the central administrative criterion.

Historical examples and the comparative register

Before turning to the American case, it is worth running through several historical and contemporary examples that fall within the synthetic category, since the comparative register is what makes the framework analytically productive.

The original case, Louis Bonaparte’s France from 1851 to 1870, already exhibits both moments. Marx’s society of December 10, Bonaparte’s personal retinue, is patrimonial in its essence: a household of personal clients, financiers, military adventurers, and political opportunists who depend on the ruler for their position and whose function is to staff the state apparatus on principles of personal loyalty rather than meritocratic competence (Marx 1852). The Second Empire’s economic policy, concessions to favored financiers, contracts dispensed through personal channels, and the rebuilding of Paris organized through Bonapartist patronage are patrimonial in their concrete operation, even as the political form is Bonapartist in Marx’s strict sense. The Second Empire, then, is not merely Bonapartism; it is already patrimonial Bonapartism, though the Marxist tradition has tended to read only the Bonapartist moment.

The Latin American caudillo tradition supplies a register but a distinct one. From Rosas in Argentina to Vargas in Brazil to Perón again in his second turn, Latin American politics has known many regimes in which executive concentration, personal rule, and patrimonial administration coexisted with formally republican institutions. These cases differ from European Bonapartism in their relation to the world economy. They were, for the most part, semi-peripheral or peripheral states, often dependent on commodity exports, and the autonomy of their executives was conditioned by that dependency in ways with no direct American analog.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia exemplifies the cleanest contemporary case of developed-capitalist patrimonial Bonapartism, but we must handle the comparison with care. Putin’s regime exhibits, with textbook clarity, the autonomization of the executive from the contending oligarchic fractions of the 1990s; the personalization of administration around a network of siloviki and personal clients; the fusion of family wealth with state office; the use of state resources as personal levers; and the relative subordination of capital to political access. The Russian case differs from any prospective American case in its semi-peripheral position in the world system and in its specific path of regime formation out of the Soviet collapse, but the structural logic is recognizably similar.

Silvio Berlusconi’s three turns as Italian prime minister between 1994 and 2011 constitute a more telling rehearsal of the form within a Western liberal democracy. Berlusconi entered politics from the private media-industrial complex he had built; his governments used state office to defend his personal business interests; he packed the administration with personal clients; and his legal-political combat against the magistracy prefigured many of the conflicts that have since recurred in the United States. The Italian case is instructive because it shows the form arising not from regime breakdown but from the exhaustion of an established party system: the collapse of the Christian Democrats and Socialists in the Mani Pulite crisis created the vacuum into which Berlusconi stepped, just as the exhaustion of the post-1980 American party-political order has created the vacuum into which Trumpism has expanded.

Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey supplies an intermediate case between the personalistic but episodically institutional Italian variant and the more deeply institutionalized Hungarian variant. Since his initial accession through the AKP in 2003, through the constitutional referendum of 2017, through the consolidation of presidential rule, and through the wholesale remaking of the judicial and educational apparatus, Erdoğan has built a patrimonial-Bonapartist regime in a NATO member state that retains formal elections and a residual opposition (Esen and Gumuscu 2016). The Turkish case is instructive because it exemplifies a state that, like the United States, is an important regional power with significant military assets, is entangled in international institutional architectures, and has a politically active capital fraction (the so-called Anatolian tigers) that has developed as a political-economically of the ruling party, serving as a clear analogue to certain American capital fractions whose growth has been politically mediated.

Narendra Modi’s India, similarly, has entailed the patrimonial reorganization of a major capitalist democracy whose institutional architecture is far more complex than that of the small post-communist states most often studied in the comparative literature. Modi’s regime has bound itself to specific capital fractions, the Adani and Ambani groups of family-dynastic conglomerates, in a way that recalls Bonaparte’s society of December 10 in its essentials: the use of state office to favor a personal-political coalition of capital, with the public revenue and regulatory apparatus serving as instruments of personal-political accumulation (Crabtree 2018). The Indian case, similar to the Turkish case, is enlightening for Americans because it demonstrates how the form arises not from regime breakdown but from the patrimonial transformation of a large, complex capitalist democracy during an organic crisis.

Viktor Orbán’s Hungary represented the most institutionalized variant. Orbán’s regime did not merely concentrate executive power; it rebuilt the administrative state, the judiciary, the universities, and the media on principles of personal and partisan loyalty (Scheppele 2018). Where Berlusconi remained primarily a personal-dynastic political entrepreneur whose regime did not survive his political eclipse, Orbán built an institutional architecture intended to outlast him. The Hungarian case is the model toward which American patrimonial Bonapartism may evolve if its early phase consolidates, and it is the case most closely studied by the American right intelligentsia associated with the current administration.

The American conjuncture

What conjunctural conditions have produced the American variant of this form?

The first is the exhaustion of the neoliberal order that has organized American politics since roughly 1980. The bipartisan coalition that produced NAFTA, financial deregulation, the welfare reforms of the 1990s, and the long wars of the post-2001 period began coming apart in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and has not been reconstituted. Neither party has been able to assemble a stable governing program responsive to the conditions of low growth, declining real wages for the working majority, capital’s drift toward rentierism and political access, and the secular decline of American hegemony abroad. This is what Gramsci called an “organic crisis,” a crisis of the relationship between rulers and ruled in which the inherited political forms can no longer organize consent. However, no new form has yet stabilized (Gramsci 1971, 275–6). Trumpism is best understood as the political form that has arisen within this organic crisis: not its resolution but its prolongation under new auspices.

The second is the long-run hollowing of American state capacity. Wolfgang Streeck’s work on the consolidation state describes the secular transformation of advanced-capitalist states under the discipline of bond markets. However, the underlying logic has also been at work in the American case, converting states from “tax states” that respond to citizen-democratic demands into “debt states” that respond to creditor demands (Streeck 2014; Streeck 2016). The American administrative state in 2026 is the product of forty years of cumulative privatization, contracting out, hiring freezes, the politicization of senior career positions, and the substitution of consultancy networks for permanent civil service capacity. This environment is the soil into which patrimonial principles have penetrated. The civil-service density that could resist personal-loyalty administration is significantly lower than it was even in the 1970s, not to mention the New Deal apparatus established by Roosevelt and the long Cold War security state that consolidated around it.

The third condition is the transformation of the Republican Party from an organized party of capital, with its own internal discipline and class-fractional coalitions, into something closer to a personal vehicle for the leader. The conservative legal movement, the corporate donor network, the evangelical organizational infrastructure, and the talk-radio and cable-news complex have not disappeared. However, the party’s relationship with these constituencies has been reversed. Where the party’s leadership once disciplined these constituencies into a coalition, the leader now disciplines the party against them, retaining their support by delivering on selected priorities while subordinating their organizational autonomy to his personal political vehicle. This is the patrimonialization of a major bourgeois party, a development with no real precedent in modern American political history.

The fourth condition is the specific accumulation regime within which all of this is occurring. I have argued elsewhere that this is best called “political capitalism”: an accumulation regime in which appropriation through political access, tariffs, sanctions, regulatory favor, subsidized contracts, and public-private deals becomes a primary route for the rentier fractions of capital, displacing competitive accumulation as the dominant mode. (Riley and Brenner 2022 develop a closely related argument under a slightly different label.) Patrimonial rule is functional for this regime in a way it could not be for a competitive-industrial accumulation regime. When access to the executive becomes a prime means of appropriation, the executive’s autonomy and personalization become valuable to the fractions of capital that benefit. This is the class content of the American form.

The fifth condition is strategic-imperial. The American imperial state is undergoing a transition from rules-based multilateral hegemony—the form constructed after 1945 and renovated after 1991—to a hub-and-spoke bilateralism in which the United States maintains its power through personal deals with subordinate strongmen—transactional rather than rules-based, with the leader himself as the central interlocutor. This shift is consistent with the domestic state form: patrimonial rule at home and patrimonial empire abroad are the same political logic operating at different scales. Whether this is the political form of a hegemon managing its own decline—a cheaper, more transactional imperial economy of force—or a contingent political form that happens to fit a moment is, in my view, the central question of Marxist analysis of American empire. Arrighi’s framework of hegemonic transition supplies the materialist version of the first reading (Arrighi 1994; Arrighi 2007). In this interpretation, the patrimonial-Bonapartist form serves as the political-administrative framework for the United States’ transition from a hegemonic to a multipolar world economy.

The patrimonial-Bonapartist form serves as the political-administrative framework for the United States’ transition from a hegemonic to a multipolar world economy.

What does the American case look like in its concrete operation? It is worth being specific. We see the appointment of senior administrators based on personal loyalty rather than expertise; the use of pardons as commodities for personal allies; the dissolution of the conventional boundary between family business and state office; the assault on the civil service via the elimination of career protections and the reclassification of senior positions as political appointments; the use of tariffs not as instruments of industrial strategy but as personal levers for extracting concessions from foreign governments and domestic firms; the cultivation of personal loyalty within the security apparatus and the displacement of professional military and intelligence leadership; and the open use of the Department of Justice as an instrument of personal vendetta. These are not isolated abuses, but the systematic features of a regime being remade on patrimonial principles.

The assault on the federal civil service is the most consequential institutional dimension of this transformation. The Schedule F executive order, originally promulgated in 2020 and revived in 2025, reclassifies tens of thousands of senior career positions as political appointments removable at the president’s discretion. This is an administrative measure that converts an ostensibly merit-based bureaucracy into a patrimonial household in a single stroke. Combined with the reorganization of agencies along loyalty-political lines, the systematic dismissal of inspectors general, the politicization of military and intelligence commands, and the use of executive orders to bypass legislative authorization on questions of staffing and policy, the cumulative effect has been the most rapid transformation of the federal administrative apparatus since the New Deal, but in the opposite direction. Where the New Deal built a permanent administrative state on legal-rational principles, the present transformation dissolves that state into a network of personal-political appointments responsive to executive will. This represents the literal patrimonialization of the administrative apparatus.

The class beneficiaries are not the bourgeoisie as a whole but a determinate fraction: the politically connected rentiers; the family-capitalist and dynastic-firm fractions; and the new-tech and crypto fractions whose accumulation has been most dependent on political-regulatory favor; and the energy and military-industrial fractions whose interests align with the imperial reorientation. By contrast, the regime’s principal capitalist opponents have been the fractions of capital most disciplined by the bond markets and most exposed to global supply chains. However, their opposition has been sporadic and limited, as they lack a political vehicle to defect to.

The tensions of the form

Patrimonial Bonapartism is not a stable equilibrium. It carries within it real tensions that bear on its future.

The first is theoretical and points to a possible misreading. Classical Bonapartism presupposes a modernizing, rationalizing state apparatus—the prefectoral system in France and the imperial bureaucracy in Germany. The autonomy of the executive was, in classical Bonapartism, made possible by the existence of a developed legal-rational administration. Patrimonialism is, by contrast, the dissolution of that administration into personal-loyalty networks. So, when we describe a single regime as both Bonapartist and patrimonial, we are either describing a stable hybrid in which the autonomous executive captures and patrimonializes a still-functioning apparatus or a transitional form in which the political moment of Bonapartist concentration is the prelude to a deeper hollowing of the rational-legal state. The second reading is, I believe, closer to the truth of the American case, and it implies that we are not yet at the equilibrium point of the form but in its phase of active state destruction.

The second is the class-content tension. Bonapartism is supposed to be relatively autonomous yet ultimately functional for capital in general. Patrimonial rule, by contrast, is functional for a specific fraction. There are moments at which significant fractions of capital have opposed the regime’s policies, with the bond market’s intermittent disciplining of tariff policy as the clearest example. The repeated testing of limits and the regime’s retreat from its most extreme positions during bond market revolts indicate that capital generally retains a structural veto power. However, the fact that the limits keep being tested indicates that the regime is willing to push the relationship further than any postwar American regime has. Whether this represents capital reorganizing itself, building a state form adequate to the new political-capitalist accumulation regime, or a fractional capture of the state at the longer-term expense of total social capital is the central question of class analysis.

The third is the succession problem. Patrimonial regimes are notoriously brittle at the death or political eclipse of the patrimon. The personal-loyalty structure of the apparatus, the absence of institutionalized rules for succession, the family-dynastic ambitions of the ruler’s circle, and the rivalry of subordinate lieutenants all conspire to produce succession crises. The literature on neopatrimonialism in Africa documents this with grim clarity (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). The American case will face this problem within a determinate political horizon: the constitutional limit on presidential terms, however contested; the leader’s age and health; and the absence of an obvious successor who commands the same personal authority. How the regime will manage this transition, whether through a designated dynastic successor, a partial restoration of party-political mediation, or a deeper authoritarian institutionalization on the Hungarian model, is among the most important open questions of American politics.

The fourth is the comparative-conjunctural question. The Hungarian model of institutionalization through judicial and constitutional reconstruction has been studied by American conservative intellectuals associated with the regime, and elements of it have been imported into the United States. However, the American context is different in important respects: the federal structure, the relative independence of state-level political systems, the continuing institutional weight of capital fractions opposed to the regime, the residual organizational density of the labor movement and the social movements, and the simple fact that the United States is a hegemonic state with imperial responsibilities and not a small open economy. These factors may make full Hungarian-style consolidation more difficult, or they may produce a distinctively American variant of the form whose features are not yet fully visible.

The fifth is legitimation. Postwar American politics has rested on a specific form of legal-rational legitimation: the claim that authority is exercised through rule-bound, constitutionally constrained, professionally administered procedures. Patrimonial Bonapartism cannot continue to claim that form of legitimation, since its administrative substance contradicts it. The regime has been visibly groping for alternative legitimizing idioms: the charismatic-populist register addressed to its mass base, the civilizational-nationalist register addressed to elements of the right intelligentsia, the transactional-deal-making register addressed to the business class, and the providential-religious register addressed to evangelical constituencies. None of these has the unifying capacity of the legal-rational legitimacy it is displacing. This deficiency is a structural weakness of the form, and it is one of the conditions on which a counter-hegemonic project might be built.

Futures

What, then, are the plausible trajectories?

The first is intensification toward institutionalized authoritarianism on the Hungarian model: a consolidated patrimonial Bonapartism. This requires that the regime succeed in remaking the federal judiciary, universities, civil service, and federal apparatus to a degree that endures political transition. The regime must successfully delegitimate the opposition party or politically constrain it from full alternation. Moreover, it requires that the major factions of capital that have not endorsed the regime nevertheless accommodate themselves to it. This trajectory is possible but not guaranteed; the federal structure and the residual political density of the opposition both work against it.

The second is a succession crisis and regime instability: patrimonial Bonapartism in collapse. This trajectory follows if the regime fails to manage its succession, if the personal-loyalty networks fragment in factional conflict, or if the leader’s eclipse produces a vacuum that no designated successor can fill. The historical record of this trajectory is well documented in the neopatrimonialism literature: Eegimes built on personal rule tend to undergo turbulent transitions (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). The American outcome of such a transition is impossible to predict in detail. However, it is likely to involve a partial restoration of party-political mediation under conditions of significantly weakened administrative capacity and democratic legitimacy.

The third, and to my mind, the most probable, medium-term scenario is a prolonged organic crisis without resolution. Neither the consolidation of the regime into a stable authoritarian institutional architecture nor the restoration of the antecedent neoliberal-democratic order is fully achievable in the medium term, given the underlying conditions of secular American decline, capital’s fractured strategic orientation, and the weakness of organized political alternatives to the regime’s right. We will likely see, in this scenario, a continuing oscillation between phases of intensified patrimonial rule and phases of partial institutional restoration, with the underlying state apparatus becoming progressively less capacitated and the political form becoming progressively less recognizable as the postwar American republic.

The strategic terrain on which the socialist Left must operate is the possibility of an organized political alternative built out of the working class, the social movements, and the residual democratic-republican forces.

The fourth, which is the strategic terrain on which the socialist left must operate, is the possibility of an organized political alternative built out of the working class, the social movements, and the residual democratic-republican forces. This alternative takes the regime’s patrimonial-Bonapartist character seriously. It frames its political project as a defense and renovation of democratic-republican institutions in the service of a working-class program. This is not the same as a popular front of “democracy against authoritarianism,” which dissolves class content into a constitutional defense. It is also different from a third-camp abstentionism that treats the conflict between patrimonial Bonapartism and the residual democratic order as a quarrel of bourgeois fractions in which the workers’ movement has no stake. It is, rather, a political project that recognizes the regime as a determinate enemy of the working class, since its assault on the civil service, on labor enforcement, and on the public goods that working-class life depends on is not collateral but central, while refusing to subordinate the workers’ movement to the political vehicles of the displaced neoliberal order.

A serious socialist political project in this conjuncture must operate on several fronts simultaneously. It must defend the legal-rational institutions of the residual American republic—the civil service, the courts, the universities, and the regulatory state—not because these institutions, in their existing form, fully serve working-class interests, but because their destruction strengthens patrimonial rule and weakens the working class’s capacity to compel reform. The destruction of the National Labor Relations Board’s enforcement capacity, the gutting of OSHA, and the politicization of immigration enforcement against workers and their families: these are not collateral consequences of a regime focused elsewhere. They are central elements of a regime whose class character, in its everyday operation, is anti-working class.

It must, at the same time, refuse the political subordination that the “defense of democracy” framing demands. The neoliberal-democratic order that the regime has displaced was itself in deep crisis, and its restoration on its old terms is neither possible nor desirable. The political project of subordinating the workers’ movement to the Democratic Party’s restorationist agenda, one that has organized much of the institutional Left over the past decade, is a strategic dead end. It can neither defeat the regime decisively nor offer the working class a political instrument adequate to the conditions of organic crisis.

The third front is the slow, difficult work of building, within and against the existing parties, an independent political vehicle of the working class, a vehicle that takes seriously the patrimonial-Bonapartist character of the regime, that organizes for the defense and renovation of democratic-republican institutions in the service of a working-class program, and that begins, gradually, to compete for political authority based on a different resolution of the organic crisis. The conditions for such a project are unfavorable; they were unfavorable for most of the great party-building efforts of the past two centuries. The category of patrimonial Bonapartism does not, by itself, deliver such a project. However, it specifies the regime we are confronting, and a clear specification of the enemy is the first condition of strategic clarity. The category is, in the end, a Marxist contribution to that clarity, and the use we put it to will determine whether the next phase of American politics is one in which the working class is a strategic subject or merely a spectator at its own defeat.

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