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At the start of the Iran conflict, the price of sulfur was about $500 per metric ton for sulfur originating from the Middle East. It now sits above $800.

The economizing individual knows how to relish what one has, delight in the savvy of frugality, and thrive while doing so.

European summer 'deadliest' for heatwaves Channel News brendan 3rd November 2026 Teaser Media

Hoo boy. We made it, barely. Not stressed, really. But pretty wrung dry by the relentless lies, slurs, sludge, fearmongering in "the most nakedly bigoted American political campaign” ever by bottom-feeding crooks, hacks and pedophile-adjacent rapists scurrying to escape their well-deserved debacle (please). On the last day, they just disgorged more foul crap: "plunging" oil prices, millions of "illegals," transgender three-year-olds, "tremendous" algae problems, ubiquitous "jihadist leprechauns." Jesus. VOTE.

Philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) borrowed from Platonic skepticism to voice the now-time-honored tenet Non Sibi Sed Omnibus - "Not for self but for all" - espousing Stoic ethics, virtues and public duty to call for the denizens of a society to contribute to the general good by serving humankind through acts of kindness. Unsurprisingly, America's vapid, vicious right wing did not follow Cicero's wise counsel in an election campaign that, perhaps more than any other, became "a furnace in which pretense burns away and essential character is exposed." And unholy shit, it did and it was..

Campaigning for El Sayed - and touting Saddam Hussein's Cheesecake Factory - Obama cited a common historic arc. "Whenever a movement builds to challenge (a) broken system, the people who benefit from the status quo will say and do anything to stop that train from coming," he said, adding "they may even use" your name or faith to suggest you are less "American" than they are. "We have seen this movie before. I starred in it." After his initial Red Scare strategy failed and now a cornered animal in "the Apocalypse Now phase of his presidency," Trump has pivoted to a mainstay of American “exceptionalism” - bigotry.

Having long ago abandoned dog whistles, quaint niceties of old-school racism - "states' rights," “welfare queens,” "law and order" - and any rhetorical restraint, Trump has lurched from golden-escalator rants about Mexican rapists to banning all Muslims "until we can figure out what the hell is going on" to vitriolic, straight-out "Islamophobic tears" wherein Somali-Americans are "low-IQ garbage" who all drive BMWs and "don’t have to work because they steal so much” and feds are raiding the home of "terrible person" Ilhan Omar to haul off her phone and a Somali kids' phrase book her husband was using to learn English.

In final, moronic Islamophobic rants "like watching a man vomit up bigotry that has been poisoning his soul for decades," he called El-Sayed - a Michigan-born-and-bred Rhodes Scholar and doctor with two PhDs - a "communist" Muslim Brotherhood member (we know, we know) "on the side of the terrorists" who'd "have to go through a metal detector" before going into the Senate and who'd "open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas." El Sayed: "The man is an idiot...There’s no there there."

Still, Trump lackeys have dutifully jumped on the racist bandwagon. Awful JD argues housing costs have soared because "we allowed 20 million illegals" into the country, and they should all speak English to protect the "identity of the country.” RFK Jr. says the world's 500 million Arabs don’t produce science.or literature (Not, not, not.) Ted Cruz says Americans could die with El-Sayed, a “jihadist leprechaun,” in the Senate. Weary observers likewise dismiss "insanely racist" raving of a "wretched stain" of a human being. From Texas: "Racist pieces of shit to the bitter end. Fuck you very much."

Racists and rapists and sociopaths, oh my: There's also been Trump's defense of Vivek's grotesque ad exploiting Amy Acton’s childhood sexual abuse: "A rapist and pedophile defending another rapist and pedophile. Nothing to see here." The obsessive demonizing and fantasizing about the "mutilization (not a word) of our children" as "Timmy leaves the house and comes home as Sarah" after imaginary surgery by underpaid school nurses. The idiotic name-calling - South Carolina's cis Dr. Annie Andrews, mother of three, becomes “Annie Trannie" - and leering at asses and ongoing ICE violence and weird sounds

The weaponization of government, its (mostly inept) war on voting - "Like its war on Iran, opening the Straight of More Lose" - its many court losses: In California, a judge told them to stop threatening state election officials with criminal prosecution and they can't toss thousands of votes, an Alaska judge refused to prohibit certifying any winner besides the GOP incumbent, Washington's Secretary of State declined to provide a list of alleged "noncitizens registered to vote," ripping the ask as irresponsible, illegal, not in good faith and based on "deeply flawed" data as "confirmed by your incorrect statement the election is November 2, 2026."

There’s the dark money - Musk’s unprecedented $446 million, $377 billion in Trump corruption - amidst “These are the biggest guys on Wall Street” partying, “We’re (sic) making a freaking fortune” boasts and “I-don’t-give-a-damn” gloats about gas prices. The fury of people struggling to feed their kids with, outside a Trump hotel, the chalk writing on the wall: “4 days (now 1) Asshole” as blue waves lap. The hubris and absurdity of what Timothy Snyder calls "superpower suicide...Empires have risen and failed before, but (no) state has ever chosen to kill its own power (with such) world-historical levels of strategic buffoonery.”

The stupid it burns, notes HuffPost of its "not-even-remotely-exhaustive" list of 285 dumb actions by Trump et al. Among them: Tried to buy 10 737s, without engines, from a company that didn’t own them. Accidentally published classified data on its own website. Deleted historic photos of the Enola Gay because it had “gay” in the name. Said “Everything’s computer!” circumcision causes autism, “I love the inflation,” “Nobody knows what magnets are,” the Pope was "weak on crime," "The numbers are beyond any numbers,” Thanksgiving side dishes were called “surroundings." Accidentally fired the Ebola response team, the people who manage U.S. nuclear stockpiles, scientists who manage bird flu outbreaks, veterans running the Veterans Crisis Line. Spent $2 billion illegally rebranding the Defense Dept. the Dept. of War. Pepper-sprayed a toddler. Reclassified swastikas and nooses not hate symbols. Mislabeled every country on a map of Africa at a global AIDS conference with African officials. Hired a Naval Secretary who got the date wrong for Pearl Harbor, twice. Put a 22-year-old with no anti-terror experience in charge of terrorism prevention. Reassigned FEMA workers to ICE during hurricane season. Boasted the Reflecting Pool lining was “so powerful” it couldn’t be cut with a knife, then charged vandals cut it with a knife. Asked when New York's Mamdani reminded Spanish-speaking constituents, in Spanish, of their constitutional rights when confronted by ICE, "How is this not illegal?" Called the Iran war a “short-term excursion” that would end in a few weeks or "when I feel it in my bones." Declared it won 37 to 53 times. Still losing it.

Exhibiting his canny political instincts, Trump made a final bonkers pre-election appearance at...the Reflecting Pool, site of one of his worst fails: "I had it cleaned!" "This is a massive piece of...pool," he said, calling it "a work of art in many ways, but it was a work of art that never worked, but now it will work." He rambled about pipes, columns, stone, James Comey, top soil, grass: “Like the human being, grass has a life also." He held up photos of the pool - visual aids! - declared, "The algae is brutal," said, "We’re very proud of what’s behind me, but we’re much even more proud of the statues." He said oil prices are "plunging a record - nobody's ever seen a plunge like this," promised to protect former DOGE bro Big Balls from arrest, posted a mash-up of him and Elvis. Umm.

Other big dumb guns - JD and Jr. - took MAGA's compelling closing arguments to upstate New York and Ohio. Vance told a story about his four-year-old daughter - "despite my best efforts I have apparently raised a Democrat" - "stealing" her brother's toys to donate to somebody else "and that’s what we gotta do in just one day is beat the Democrats.” In Ohio, Don Jr. spluttered Democrats want to "open the border to tens of millions of illegals," "go after" three-year-olds to let them be trans, and "make Ohio a state." (Online: "They want to make Cleveland a city! They want to make guacamole a dip! They want to make cocaine illegal!") "They're saying these things out loud, they're not even hiding from it!" he exclaimed. "So the choice here is so clear." Amen.

"We would use different forms of plastic, like fiberglass. we'd take a mold, they'd take it to the shop, they'd fill it up, it's the exact here, now they put it here, and voila! you have a nice window again. but stones were broken, stones were chipped. i came in, 20 years ago i went to the white house, i said, boy, this building's in bad shape. you'd pull up to the front door and you'd have a stone where the stone is practically falling off the wall. it just was terrible. it's now pristine, it's in beautiful shape, and you look at it and you see those pictures. i've even put two flagpoles up. never had a flagpole, i've had the little flagpole on top. put two flagpoles here. i mean, little things, i have a lot of flagpoles i have, i'm all over it, my place in los angeles. i have on the ocean, magnificent place. yeah, i have, yeah, right. but i have a guy, it's life. i call him flagpole jim, his whole life. that's all he does. believe me, when you order a flagpole, there are good flagpoles and there are bad flagpoles. there are ugly flagpoles. you ever see the ones that go up dead straight and they're flat on the top? that's called the piece of steel, that's not a flagpole. these are beautiful with a beautiful bronze top on it. the wires, the cords are inside so it doesn't look bad and so it doesn't make noise. the best flagpoles, i mean, you know, the flagpole jim, if you asked him to cross the street, please, he couldn't do that, but for flagpoles, he's great. best in the world. and we put not only one, we put one on the front and one on the back because you can't see 'em. you're in between the white house and they're beautiful and a lot of people love it. i mean, everybody loves it. who the hell is not gonna like a flagpole? but we put two beautiful, big, tall, tapered, beautiful tapered flagpoles with the american flags on both sides of the board. and barack hussein obama said, why is trump spending so much time fixing up the white house? because the white house has to be pristine. it has to be perfect. it can't have exterior moldings half falling off. it can't have broken windows at the main entrance where the window's been broken for years. it can't have all these things. barack, i'll teach you that sometime, cleanliness. i'll teach you cleanliness. i'll teach you a little bit about real estate, a little bit about, and here's the guy that built one of the ugliest places i've ever seen in chicago. but i wish him well, look, i do. i wish him well, but that place is stone cold, not good looking. stalag 11, no, it's a terrible, not good, but i hope it does well. i don't know where the hell he got the money. i heard they were totally short. all of a sudden, they came up with like $2 billion. who the hell gave? how come they never, you know, they look at me. we're, you know, we have great patriots. all of us were putting a lot of money, like, into the ballroom and making it great. but here's the guy, he's way short, billions short. the thing's way over budget. all of a sudden, he comes up with all this money. where the hell did he get? i don't hear any investigators in congress with me. he gave a ballroom, yeah, it was free. we don't care if it was free. we don't care, it's free. they say, we wanna know why did he give a ballroom. no, no, you don't understand me. it's a gift to the united states of america. we don't care. we don't care. but here's a guy got billions of dollars to build this thing. nobody's saying who put up the money. you know, i believe it might've been very much the same people that are backing mohammed. i call him mohammed, not abdul. you know what, i called him mohammed, and i did it for certain reasons. number one, he said, why does he call him? because i'm president, abdul, and i have the right to call you whatever the hell i want. i have the right to call you whatever i want. and we don't wanna have people that are gonna destroy our country. abdul, you'll just, he's an arrogant guy. do you ever see him where he's being questioned? they said i was arrogant, and now they find me to be an extremely nice gentleman. no, the level of hatred. the guy asks him a normal question. what work do you have to ask me? that question is right. he's a disaster, he's a nasty guy. and hopefully he gets his ass kicked because that's what he does. so, under my leadership, and these are a few points, and you've seen me every once in a while, just for fun, i'll walk off the stage. i'm finished because vote for these two and vote for our congressmen and women, vote for a few other people. just vote republican up and down the line because these points solve the whole thing. income for hard, these are what they call big points. these are the big ones. income for hardworking americans is soared to the highest level ever recorded. okay, so your income is at the highest level by a lot ever recorded, okay? and by the way, your inflation for the last three months is 1.7%, way down. i inherited high prices from sleepy joe biden. i didn't cause it. and by the way, my oil, i stopped, they're never gonna have a nuclear weapon, right? i stopped iran from having a nuclear weapon and i knew oil would, but the oil is much lower than it was for, the oil is much lower, gas, much lower than it was for Biden, much lower than it was for Barack Hussein Obama. and we've stopped. and by the way, when that war is over, it's gonna come plunging. it's gonna go back to the $1.85 that I saw in Iowa just before I said, let's make that journey into the middle east. 'cause we cannot let iran have a nuclear weapon. i said, let's make that little journey. and i thought, to be honest, i thought it would go up much higher than it went up. and, you know, i don't wanna say because they'll say, oh, he thinks it's, well, it's a very small price to pay for the security of this country and for the world, very small. thank you. it's gonna be over very soon, very soon. and you're gonna see. but prices are way down. prices are coming down. but i inherited the prices. my first day in office, i had a news conference. at first, i had, like, hello everybody. but the second day, i had a news conference. and those people right there, some of them, boy, that's a lot. you don't know many ways you'd like them to stop covering you so much 'cause they're so fake. but they get good ratings. i mean, it's very, they get good ratings when we're here together. but think of it, i had a news conference. so january 20th ago, january 21st, i have a news conference. first question from that guy right there. why are the prices so high? i said, i just got here. tell me about eggs. when will eggs go down? they're five times higher than they were just four years ago. that's my administration. i had very low egg prices. i said, i'll have to check that out. i've only been here for much less than 24 hours. so, this is ridiculous. this is ridiculous. and so, as soon as i walked in, and then came the word that they use all the time, i have never heard used this way. they looked at me. one guy said, affordability. i've been there for about 16 hours. affordability, sir, affordability. he had a little accent, affordability, meaning affordability. it's the first time i've ever heard the word in that context, okay? i mean, we're all smart, we know the word, but never heard. and every time i get to the thing, every time i have a news conference, i inherited these high prices. i inherited the highest inflation in american history. and i've got it down to 1.7. now it's my turn, you know, but. but it's the first time i've ever heard it. and every damn time i get up to do a news conference, they say two things. you're very unpopular, sir. i said, i don't think so. i think i'm really popular. you know, they used to say that before. i won three times, in all fairness. but they used to think, i love you, too. you sound like a nice gentleman. generally not my thing, but i'll take it. sounds very nice. had a lovely voice. no, i inherited these prices. i inherited all the problems with the farm prices. they caused the problems. democrats hate farmers, remember that? they hate you, they're not gonna give you anything. democrats hate farmers, they hate ranchers. but it's the first time i've heard it. and every damn time i have a news conference, yes, ladies, affordability, sir. it's all about affordability. what are you gonna do about it? i've been there for a short period of time. i've done a great job. prices are coming way down. you saw the chart, way down. and when the oil comes down, that's the big one, but when the oil comes down, remember, it's lower than it was with these guys. and we've done something, we've stopped them. we hit them with those b2 bombers. they still don't know what the hell happened to them. we hit their nuclear capability. but you know the eggs that they talked about? they're screaming at me about eggs. i said, tell me about eggs. what's the problem exactly, if you don't mind? they were five times, they were like literally five times. do you know that eggs are now as low as they were as they were in my administration? we've got eggs way down, we've got everything. and the oil's gonna come down very quickly. but the problem with it is, the democrats caused the high prices, the democrats caused affordability problems, the democrats caused them, and we're fixing them. they caused them, they caused everything. they caused the border problems, they caused transgender mutilization of your children, they caused men and women's sports. who the hell wants men playing in women's sports, a weightlifter, huh? my wife goes crazy when i talk about that stuff. darling, i love you very much, but please don't talk about weightlifters and showing the strain of the woman trying. it's not presidential, darling. i love you, you're so handsome. but it's not presidential where the young lady comes in trying to break, she's gonna, they put an eighth of an inch in here, a record that stood for 19 years, one eighth of an ounce here, little tiny piece of nothing, like a penny. they put one here, which i got rid of because we saved 10 million, don't we? so, it's hard to believe you have to save money. they put a little piece here, little piece here, she's going for the record, and ah. so my wife hates it. just don't strain someone. but she was straining, this is a young girl, lifting 211 pounds." - Donald J. Trump

Trump's closing argument, facing the wrong way.Screengrab from Bluesky

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Having clung to the technologies that built its past fortunes, Europe’s car industry missed the electric revolution. Now, just as the EU considers a tougher stance on Chinese competition, German and European carmakers are teaming up with Chinese companies for cutting-edge components and software. Can Europe protect industrial jobs while catching up on technology?

This article will feature in the Green European Journal’s winter 2026 print edition, dedicated to the rise of China and its implications for Europe. Subscribe now and be among the first to receive a copy in December.

There is a story about the German car industry I keep hearing again and again. Most recently, one of Germany’s best-known economists told me that story again. It is a comforting story. The car industry had a big crisis in the 1990s and came out of it with flying colours. It has hit more crises since and always bounced back. Sure, the current crisis is big, maybe the biggest ever, but there is no reason to think that this time is different.

I beg to differ. This is not the usual competitiveness crisis. Nor have German automakers fallen behind the competition in the product cycle. What is happening to the European car industry is that the motorcar from the analogue era is being replaced by products that look increasingly like digital devices.

A good analogy is the story of typewriter producer Smith Corona, one of the great US manufacturing success stories. It successfully managed several technological transitions. Mechanical typewriters became electric. Electric typewriters became electronic. In the 1980s, when the personal computer was launched, the company added word-processing functions to the typewriter, and turned it into a miniature computer. But Smith Corona could not imagine a world in which the typewriter itself disappeared. The personal computer was not a better typewriter; it was able to do what a typewriter did, but it could do so much more.

The German car industry has reached a Smith Corona moment – with some differences. An electric car is still recognisably a car. It has four wheels, seats, and a steering wheel. However, this superficial similarity disguises the scale of the technological change that is under the hood. The combustion engine, transmission, exhaust system, and much of the mechanical complexity around them disappear. In their place come batteries, power electronics, electric motors, sophisticated thermal management, and, increasingly, a software architecture controlling the entire vehicle.

An electric revolution

A German engineer, Gottlieb Daimler, invented the car – which he named after his daughter, Mercedes. Another engineer, Nicolaus August Otto, had earlier invented the combustion engine. Based on those two 19th-century inventions, one of the most successful industries on earth grew stronger and stronger, creating healthy profits well into this century. But the components that generated most of those profits – engines and transmission systems – are precisely the ones that are now disappearing.

In the electric era, the most important and commercially most lucrative technologies are battery chemistry and manufacturing, semiconductors, power electronics, software, and artificial intelligence. The competitive advantage consequently shifts.

Chinese producers supplied almost three-quarters of the batteries installed in electric cars worldwide

Batteries illustrate Europe’s problem. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China produced about 70 per cent of the world’s electric vehicles (EVs) in 2025 and more than 80 per cent of its battery cells. It also produced about 85 per cent of cathode active materials and more than 90 per cent of anode active materials, the primary chemical ingredients in a battery. Chinese producers supplied almost three-quarters of the batteries installed in electric cars worldwide.

Scale has translated into cost efficiency. The IEA estimates that in 2025, battery-pack prices in China were about 35 per cent lower than in Europe. Chinese producers benefit from a combination of supply-chain integration, accumulated manufacturing experience, higher production yields, and intense domestic competition. This matters because the battery is one of the largest single costs in an electric vehicle. This is not a disadvantage Europe can bridge.

The technological frontier is also moving rapidly. In April 2026, the Chinese battery maker CATL announced a third-generation battery with an energy density of 280 watt-hours per kilogram and a claimed range of 1000 kilometres. One version even claimed a 1500-kilometre range. It also announced a new battery capable of charging a car in six minutes. I have not tested this myself, and there is no doubt some marketing hype surrounding these claims. But it is also clear that the innate disadvantage of electric cars – limited range and the time it takes to charge them compared to filling a petrol tank – is slowly disappearing.

Europe is not technologically absent. Germany produced 1.67 million electric cars in 2025, making it the second-largest EV production location after China. Forty per cent of German passenger-car production was already electric. BMW recently said its new generation of battery cells increases energy density by 20 per cent, and charging speed and range by up to 30 per cent. The problem is therefore not that Germany cannot manufacture electric cars. The problem is where the technologies, intellectual property, supply chains, and economies of scale surrounding those cars reside.

The contrast is clearest in China itself. Electric cars accounted for almost 55 per cent of Chinese new-car sales in 2025, compared with 28 per cent in Europe. That gives Chinese manufacturers an enormous home market in which to develop products, reduce costs, and gather experience.

Price competition is brutal. In 2025, nearly 70 per cent of battery-electric cars sold in China were already cheaper, before subsidies, than their combustion-engine equivalents. In Europe, by contrast, fewer than 10 per cent of available battery-electric vehicle (BEV) models cost less than 30,000 euros.

Software adds another dimension. The car is increasingly becoming a software-defined product whose functions can be changed after manufacture. Driver assistance is part of this transformation. As of October 2026, Tesla reports more than 15 billion miles driven using its self-driving system. It is not autonomous, but driver-supervised. Still, Tesla is years ahead of all of its European competitors.

Germany retains an important lead in one narrower category. In December 2024, Mercedes-Benz received German approval for Drive Pilot, a Level 3 autonomous driving system that can operate at up to 95 km/h on German motorways. BMW also offers Level 3 driving under more restrictive conditions. China approved its first Level 3 production vehicles in December 2025. But these systems are not to be confused with fully autonomous driving. It is incomparably easier to let a car drive on a motorway than in a city, where children and animals step into the street and must be identified immediately.

Different systems operate at different automation levels and under different regulatory conditions. The strategic question is who develops the software platforms, computing architecture, artificial intelligence, and data ecosystem from which increasingly automated cars will evolve. This is in many ways not fundamentally different from the old fuel-driven car, where the big money was earned through patented technologies.

Employment and joint ventures

It is telling that European manufacturers are increasingly seeking partnerships for precisely these value-added technologies. In September, Stellantis’ Chinese joint venture agreed to work with Chinese autonomous-driving developer Momenta. BMW’s new strategy similarly envisages greater reliance on Chinese partners for autonomous-driving and integrated software technology.

We can already see the economic consequences of the shift in the value-added supply chains away from Germany. German passenger-car production was 4.15 million vehicles in 2025 – slightly higher than in 2024, but still 11 per cent below 2019. During the first half of 2026, production remained 15 per cent below its 2019 level. Employment figures are more revealing. Germany’s automotive workforce fell from 772,949 in 2024 to 731,928 in 2025. Employment among parts suppliers fell by 11.1 per cent in a single year. Hardly a day passes without some news that a well-known car supplier company has to close down.

This is where the electric transition becomes socially important. A simpler drivetrain needs a different supply chain. An industry organised around engines, transmissions, exhaust systems, and thousands of specialised components cannot simply substitute batteries for petrol tanks while leaving everything else unchanged.

The German manufacturers’ difficulties in China add to the problem because China had become their second home market. China was the big story in German industry in the last decade. That’s where they invested. Volkswagen delivered 2.69 million vehicles in China in 2025, 8 per cent fewer than in 2024. More strikingly, the company’s Chinese BEV deliveries collapsed by 44 per cent to 115,500, even as its electric sales grew strongly in Europe. This is an important distinction. Volkswagen is capable of selling electric cars. What it struggles to do is compete in the world’s largest and most technologically aggressive electric-car market.

BMW’s China sales fell from about 848,000 vehicles in 2021 to 626,000 in 2025, a decline of roughly 26 per cent. Mercedes sold 552,000 cars in China in 2025, down 19 per cent in a year. Its passenger-car adjusted return on sales fell from 8.1 per cent in 2024 to 5 per cent in 2025, with the company citing lower volumes, particularly in China, alongside tariffs and pricing pressure.

By 2026, restructuring moved from warning to implementation. Volkswagen’s operating margin fell to 3.8 per cent in the first half of the year, compared with 7.9 per cent in 2022. In September, its supervisory board approved 50,000 job reductions, bringing the total agreed under successive restructuring measures to around 100,000, while the future of four German plants remained unresolved. BMW, traditionally the strongest of the three German premium manufacturers, announced around 8000 job cuts in July after its automotive operating margin fell to 2.3 per cent in the second quarter.

BMW’s response contains another indication of where the industry is heading. It intends to increase localisation in China and use more Chinese technology, while considering exports from China to Southeast Asia. In other words, a German car company can remain successful while progressively shifting parts of the technological and manufacturing centre of gravity away from Germany.

The same pattern is visible outside Germany. Stellantis provides perhaps the most interesting European example. While it previously invested heavily in electrification, under its current CEO Antonio Filosa it has retreated from the idea of a rapid transition to electric cars. In February 2026, it announced approximately 22.2 billion euros of charges associated with a strategic reset towards what it calls customer “freedom of choice” – a euphemism for failing to keep up with the latest technology. Stellantis has not quite exited electric cars, but it has recognised that its earlier assumptions about the speed of electrification proved too expensive.

The paradox is that Stellantis is simultaneously becoming more dependent on Chinese electric technology. It has pursued production with Chinese partners in Europe, including plans involving Dongfeng’s Voyah brand in Rennes. Chinese BYD has discussed acquiring underused European factories, including plants belonging to Stellantis and other manufacturers.

Volkswagen is moving in the same direction on batteries. In September 2026, China’s Gotion agreed to invest 1.1 billion euros for a 49 per cent stake in Volkswagen’s battery plant in Valencia. These investments may preserve European manufacturing employment. But ownership of a factory and ownership of the underlying technology are not the same thing.

What tariffs can’t do

As European car companies lose market share, profitability, and jobs, governments are taking notice. The German government of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats even created a special section on cars in its coalition agreement, defining it as a key industry worthy of protection. At EU level, a discussion is raging about whether to increase tariffs on Chinese cars.

This debate comes after the EU imposed countervailing duties on Chinese-made BEVs in October 2024, based on a finding that Chinese producers benefited from subsidies that threatened injury to European manufacturers. The additional duties range from 7.8 per cent for Tesla’s Chinese production to 17 per cent for BYD, 18.8 per cent for Geely, and 35.3 per cent for SAIC, on top of the EU’s normal 10 per cent car tariff. In 2026, the European Commission began accepting price undertakings as an alternative in individual cases, including an agreement covering Volkswagen’s China-built Cupra Tavascan.

Tariffs can change prices and the geographical location of production. They can make Chinese imports less competitive and give European factories more time. They can also encourage Chinese manufacturers to build inside Europe, which is already happening. What they cannot do by themselves is create battery chemistry, manufacturing expertise, software platforms, or competitive products. Nor can an EU tariff protect Volkswagen, Mercedes, or BMW in China, Southeast Asia, Latin America, or other export markets. Protection can therefore defend a domestic market without restoring global competitiveness. On the contrary, the history of protectionism has not been an encouraging one. It helps over short periods, but the innovation gap usually widens.

What [tariffs] cannot do by themselves is create battery chemistry, manufacturing expertise, software platforms, or competitive products

This is why the distinction between a cyclical crisis and a structural one matters. Germany will continue making cars. Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes will not disappear like Smith Corona. Premium brands may prove more durable: Rolex survived the digital watch because at the luxury end the purpose of a watch is not to tell the time. The same may be true of a Mercedes S-Class, a Porsche 911 or a top-end BMW. But the big money in the German car industry comes not from these models, but from the Volkswagen Golf and Polo ranges, the BMW 3 series, and the Opel Astra.

The German car industry is not simply a collection of famous brands. It is a network of factories, engineering companies, chemical producers, machine-tool manufacturers, component suppliers, research laboratories, and highly paid skilled workers spread across the country. In 2025, more than 730,000 people were still directly employed in Germany’s automotive industry. Its economic significance extends far beyond that number.

The way ahead

The Smith Corona question is not whether Germans will still build cars in 20 years from now. It is about who will own the technologies, where the high-value-added components will be produced, where the software will be written, and how many German and European workers will be needed.

The German car industry managed to exert regulatory influence that exceeded its size precisely because it was commercially so successful, and because it fed a large value chain. This is how it kept competitors out of the market – by getting the EU to impose safety and quality standards on components, on which German suppliers specialised. This form of regulatory control was also one reason successive German governments, even those with participation of the Green Party, never introduced a speed limit on motorways. Components need to be a lot more durable if the car has the theoretical ability to drive at 250 km/h. You can still speed on German motorways, but the car industry failed to teleport its past successes into the new era of electric cars and autonomous driving.

The German car industry still has a lot of engineering know-how that will be relevant in the age of the electric car

Europe has never experienced industrial decline on this scale before. When industries die, the best long-term strategy is not to protect them, but to let them settle down and find their own way to maximise value. The German car industry still has a lot of engineering know-how that will be relevant in the age of the electric car. The best outcome would be for it to build new commercial relationships, including foreign joint ventures, rather than forcing it to stick to its existing business models. Protectionism turns second-rate companies into third-rate companies. Instead of investing in new growth sectors, we are wasting money protecting the unprotectable.

CALGARY — As tariffs, trade uncertainty and concerns about economic sovereignty are reshaping investment decisions, carbon pricing is playing an increasingly important role in industrial competitiveness. Canadian businesses are facing growing...

At a time when tariffs, trade uncertainty and concerns about economic sovereignty are reshaping investment decisions, carbon pricing is playing an increasingly important role in industrial competitiveness. This report by the Pembina Institute and...

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Who would have imagined a few years ago that masses of people around the world would be reading, praising, arguing over, and condemning a book about an obscure Jewish socialist organization that effectively came to an end nearly 80 years ago?1https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-the-story-of-the-jewish-bund/ A book about an uncompromisingly anti-Zionist organization? Who would have imagined such a book having rave reviews in the New York Review of Books 2Adam Hochschild, “A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth”, New York Review of Books, 28 May 2026; https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/a-dream-of-a-socialist-commonwealth-the-jewish-bund/ and The New York Times and being on the latter’s bestsellers list? 3Max Strasser, “What Does Judaism Look Like Without Zionism?” New York Times,  April 6, 2026; https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/books/review/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-molly-crabapple.html

The Israeli state is carrying out a genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, and increasing apartheid laws inside Israel. Not only does the world stand by and allow this—the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia (where I live) support, arm, and encourage the Israeli government, and succumb to pressure to cancel and criminalize pro-Palestinian activity. The conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism means not just a distortion of Zionism and what it stands for, but a loss of the historical reality of antisemitism. It also results in a distortion of Jewish history, a loss of the history of the majority of European Jews of the first half of the twentieth century, who were socialists, not Zionists.

At a time like this, we need more than ever books that rediscover the other Jewish tradition, the history of radical struggle, opposition to Zionism, and socialism.

The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, generally known as the Jewish Labor Bund or just simply the Bund, was founded in 1897 in Vilna (Vilnius, now in Lithuania) in the tsarist empire. It is one of the most important but least recognized socialist organizations in Europe.

In its early years, the Bund was revolutionary. It was the first socialist group to turn away from narrow circle work to agitation among workers in the late nineteenth century. It was also the first organization in Russia to implement many of the features we see today as characteristic of the revolutionary party: an agitational paper, professional revolutionaries, and the need for the party to be rooted among workers. The Bund also took the lead in organizing systematic self-defense against pogroms, which were endemic in the tsarist empire.

Because of its resources and organizational skills, the Bund was central to organising the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1898. By the Second Congress in 1903, it had 30,000 members, compared to 8,400 total for the other affiliates. Before the 1905 Revolution in Russia, one third of the prisoners in the Siberian labor camps were Bundists, and the party played a key role in that revolution.

At the 1903 Congress, the Bund opposed Vladimir Lenin’s concept of the party. However, after the 1917 revolution, a sizable group broke away from the Bund and joined the revolutionary movement. The remaining Bund organization relocated to newly independent Poland, where it affiliated with the Second International.

But there was little scope for reformist careerism under Józef Piłsudski’s authoritarian regime, and even less during the increasingly fascist period after he died in 1935. Subservience did not save the Polish Communist Party from destruction by Joseph Stalin. With Trotskyism virtually nonexistent, many of the best working-class activists were to be found in the Bund and in the Polish Socialist Party, also a member of the Second International. As they had done previously, the Bund continued its working-class-based activities, organizing workers into trade unions and leading self-defense groups against increasing fascist antisemitism.

During World War II, the Bund also played a critical role in resistance to the Nazis, most notably during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943.

So much of this story appears to have been forgotten or relegated to footnotes. While there is a significant body of literature on the Bund, it has been treated as a niche topic, one for specialists in Jewish history.

In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple has written a work of popular history. Although the author has undertaken original archival research, the book is unapologetically non-academic. To read it is more like reading a novel, a thriller, or a family saga. It is a page-turner, with a large cast of actors and vigorously drawn characters. Events are fast-paced, and the story unfolds against a backdrop of wars, revolutions, civil unrest, and local conflicts.

Above all, this is a book about people’s personal experience. Crabapple is a visual artist, and reading this book is like watching a series of vignettes passing before your eyes. Central is her great-grandfather Sam Rothbort, who at 15 became an activist Bundist in the small town of Volkovysk (present-day Belarus). Rothbort participated in Bund-led strikes and gatherings in the forests, but eventually fled to the United States in 1904.

Crabapple never knew her great-grandfather, but she did have a wonderful source of material in a shoe box of memorabilia, handwritten memoirs, and hundreds of paintings he left behind. This treasure trove inhabits the book almost as a living entity. Throughout the book, she draws on memoirs, letters, and personal accounts of many Bundists, men and women, young and old, leaders and rank-and-file members. She shows them to us as living human beings who were active players in history.

Far from using an authorial distance and objectivity, Crabapple tries to enter the minds of her protagonists, to write subjectively. She speculates about how individuals must have felt and thought.

Here is an example from the 1905 Revolution, sparked by the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. Crabapple creatively describes the experiences of the Bundist soap box orator Anna Lipshitz:

Soon, to move between neighbourhoods, Anna would have had to weave around overturned tramcars and slip behind barricades…She would have witnessed the beatings of police officers…and likely heard the explosion of anarchist bombs. It must have thrilled her. This moment was meant to be hers…

Anna Lipshitz heard the news alongside the rest of the city. A battleship named Potemkin had just dropped anchor…It was flying a red flag.

Hoarse, bleary, her dress stiff with dried sweat, Lipshitz would have pulled herself off the floor of her safe house and joined the crowds clambering toward the port. The ship gleamed like a dream.

It is this sort of creative writing that animates this book, bringing to life the experience of revolution, war, and pogroms in a deeply effective way. We know, without it being articulated, that the dream that ends this passage is the possibility of a new world, one that inspired many participants in the revolution.

Some reviews have criticized this approach. But in my view, Crabapple’s use of this form of creative nonfiction is valid, as long as it’s clear what is actually factually based and what is imagined by the author. The book offers something sometimes lacking in historical writing, and helps the reader imagine historical events as they were lived. It gives the sense that revolutionaries and socialists are actual human beings with enthusiasms and foibles, strengths and doubts, dreams and hopes. And that they live without the benefit of hindsight and the analytical books that came after them. The personal experience approach takes us to a particular time and place, and gives the reader the feeling that they are accompanying the protagonists on this journey.

For example, when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there were scenes of chaos. Crabapple brings these to life through realistic detail: the scramble to get news, organize meetings, make decisions, find food, locate relatives, and organize transport and visas. Their agonised debates: “All around Warsaw, rank-and-file Bundists were making similar calculations. Should they stay or run?” Crabapple does not take a position on this. She simply describes the dilemma.

The events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 are already well-documented, but Crabapple gives us telling details. On the day it started, April 19, the Jewish Combat Organization battle squads mobilized at 2.00 am. “From balconies and windows, the fighters watched the nazis goose-step down Nalewki Street, singing a cheerful march. [Marek] Edelman had taken care to dress well that night, in a red angora sweater and two leather bandoliers, crossed like Pancho Villa. As he saw the convoy enter the ghetto, he imagined the Germans’ thoughts.”

We know quite a bit about Edelman, who is famous for his account of the Warsaw Ghetto.4Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, Bookmarks 2014 (and many other editions). But who knew he was wearing a red angora sweater at that moment? The book is enlivened on every page by similar less well-known details.

Viktor Alter, who “liked the ladies,” was nicknamed “the Cary Grant of labor.” Bernard Goldstein is well-known for strong links to the criminal underworld, but he showed a softer side while in hiding during the Uprising, when he gave a young couple privacy in his apartment. Sophia Dubovna, when young, had a crush on the family maid (Sophia came from a rich family) and had briefly dated the right-wing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky. In 1934 she gave talks about love and sex at the Bund youth group, Tsukunft (Future). As a small child, Edelman had attended protests on the shoulders of comrades, “red flag in his tiny fist.”

The accounts of pogroms and the suffering and destruction in the book show very vividly what antisemitism actually is historically. In so doing, they reveal contemporary attempts to reduce the concept of antisemitism to uncomfortable feelings in the presence of political slogans or keffiyehs as a horrifying trivialization of the historical oppression of Jews.

The wonderful politics of the Bund shine throughout the book: its internationalism, its commitment to fighting antisemitism and to self-defense, to struggle, and to the working class. While the Zionists argued that antisemitism could never be defeated and so advocated emigration, the Bund promoted remaining and fighting against their oppression. But they took it even further. Using a biblical comparison, one Bundist declared that Jews should “stay and fight there, amongst the Egyptians, until they won a freedom that encompassed even their oppressors.”

Bund leader Henryk Erlich made a similar argument. In 1937, against a backdrop of rising antisemitism and daily attacks by Polish fascists, increasing immiseration, and a clearly imminent war, Erlich urged his audience to look past their own concerns:

You must briefly step out of the confines of your Jewish misery… Look about and you will see– the Jews are not the only ones who are suffering. The overwhelming majority in the country, whether Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, or others, is suffering from the economic crisis…scarcely able to eke out a daily existence.

Shift your gaze beyond the borders of Poland toward the wide world and you will see: Seventy million people are languishing under the heavy boot of Hitlerism. Not only the 500,000 Jews – the whole German people has been transformed into a nation of slaves… Forty million Italians have been turned into a footstool for the ‘great’ Mussolini… millions of working people in other, smaller countries which have become areas of reaction are sunk in privation and bondage.

Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Federation in the interwar years, wrote in 1903 that their hardest struggle everywhere was conducted against the Bund. In return, the Bund described Zionism as “the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat.”

In 1933, Erlich wrote:

If Jewish nationalism, as a general rule, is not bloodthirsty, this is only out of necessity, not virtue; if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations.

No we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of other nations.

In an open letter in 1938, Erlich summarised how they were the party that truly fought for the Jewish people: they had organized self-defense groups in tsarist Russia and in Poland, called protest strikes against pogroms, and argued against attempts to deport Jews.

In relation to Palestine, he wrote:

If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine… Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?… Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?

Concentrating on personal experience gives Here Where We Live Is Our Country strengths. But the method also has its weaknesses. Foremost is a lack of analysis. One should not read this book expecting an evaluation of the 1905 Revolution, the Bolshevik/Menshevik split, the role of the soviets in the 1917 revolutions, the growth of Stalinism, the civil war, the coming to power of the Nazis, or the causes of World War II.

This is not the book’s objective, and these matters are very well covered elsewhere, but the lack of context is at times frustrating. While Crabapple features quotes and summaries of discussions, I wanted her book to engage more fully with the organizing principles and politics of the Bund. Consider the seminal event when the Bund sided with the Mensheviks in the famous split in 1903. Crabapple is dismissive: “Medem ruefully listened to rumors that the Iskrites had begun to fracture over the question of party membership. Should the RSDLP be a mass party of workers, as Martov envisioned? Or should it be the top-down conspiracy Lenin wanted, in which a central committee commanded and a full-time cadre obeyed? ‘Lenin had bared his teeth,’ Medem wrote.”

Crabapple goes on to describe Lenin’s “personality traits that would shape the coming century.”  Quoting Medem, she concludes Lenin resembled “a crafty Russian grain dealer… When you speak to him, he looks at you with his small eyes…(and) cunning devilish smile.”

As Donny Gluckstein asks, “whether or not that characterisation was true, was Lenin right to believe a decentralised RSDLP facing the most centralised authoritarian state in the world was ‘a recipe for failure’?”5Donny Gluckstein, International Socialism Journal (forthcoming). Nathaniel Flakin also points out how the focus on Lenin’s personality prevents Crabapple from seriously grappling with the Bund’s political weaknesses and strategic mistakes.6Nathaniel Flakin, https://www.leftvoice.org/bundism-zionism-bolshevism/.

The concentration on personal experience also results in a lack of appreciation of collective experience and of competing social forces. This is particularly obvious in the account of the 1905 Revolution, in which her depiction of the turning of the tide is graphic but occurs for no apparent reason. The same happens with the growth of antisemitism in interwar Poland.

This lack of social context results in an absence that is significant. Although the Bund became the leading Jewish organisation in Poland, it was not the only outlet for Jewish radicalism: Jews were prominent in other Left organizations. There was significant Jewish membership in the Polish Communist Party and the Polish Socialist Party. The left Zionist group Poale Zion joined in self-defense groups. None of this appears in the book.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country has been rightly celebrated for its account of the Bund’s commitment to “Doykait” (“hereness”), meaning that Jews should not go elsewhere to escape discrimination but were entitled to equal rights and justice wherever they lived. Most writers seem to assume this meant that the Bund itself could be at home in any country. Yet it is abundantly clear that, although they were internationalist in spirit, the Bund’s roots were essentially in the Eastern European Yiddish-speaking working class, in particular in Poland by the 1930s.

The Bund did not, in fact, transplant well. In the United States, with its more than two million Jewish immigrants, the Bund organization was small, mostly active in raising money to send to Europe and in the welfare-oriented Workman’s Circle and focusing mainly on cultural work and the promotion of the Yiddish language. While Bundists were likely involved in the mass strikes among Jewish clothing workers in New York before World War II, among which socialists were very active, the Bund played no clear role as an organization.

Although there were individual Bundists in the United Kingdom who participated in a range of activities with other socialists, their work concentrated on collecting money for Poland and promoting Yiddish education.7Benjamin Nadel, “Bundism in England”, Jewish Socialist Group, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/jsg-bundism-uk.pdf The story is similar in Australia.

This explains why the book ends when it does. The Holocaust destroyed the Bund’s roots among the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class of Eastern Europe. As the war-torn regions of Europe slowly reorganized after 1945, the remaining Bund members tried for a time to hold on to their principled politics, particularly anti-Zionism. In two articles in 1948, the Bund leadership warned its readers that “the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish State would lead to a new catastrophe, not only for the Jews in Palestine but for the Jews all over the world” and “the country became from the very start a source of Irredentist movements, Jewish-Arab conflicts, and an open threat of war.”8“Jewish Labor Bund and the Jewish-Arab war in Palestine”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, April 1948 pp3-5; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-4.pdf. “The Jewish Labor Bund and the state of Israel”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, August-September 1948 pp 1-4; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-8-9.pdf.p

These articles generated a “veritable deluge” of condemnation from the entire Jewish press and the Jewish community as traitors. The Bund response was to argue, “We shall not be diverted by any temporary nationalist trend.”9 “We will not be bulled”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, August-September 1948 p 4; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-8-9.pdf

Unfortunately, the trend was not temporary. With the state of Israel firmly established, and the core organization in Poland destroyed, remnant groups in other countries faced a dilemma. The historian of the post-war Bund, David Slucki, shows how the movement came to a pragmatic accommodation with Zionism.10David Slucki, “The Bund abroad in the postwar Jewish world”, Jewish Social Studies, Vol 16, No 1, 2009, pp 111-144.

Paradoxically, new international organizing principles allowed the local Bund groups to focus more on local activities, where they tended to straddle “the divide between mainstream Jewish communities and the non-Jewish socialist left.” Despite continued talk about socialism, bundists in the post–World War II era now saw “cultural continuity as their chief mission.” Thus, despite the formal opposition to Zionism, pragmatism led to an accommodation with Zionism, leading Bundists in Australia and elsewhere to send money to Israel.

The political consequences became evident following the events of October 2023. Although some members of the Australian Bund are conspicuous and principled supporters of Palestine, the organisation has forefronted defense of Israel, publishing only three very short and weak statements (and none since 2025).11https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-on-events-in-gaza; https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-enough; https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-regarding-the-ongoing-horror-in-gaza. Writers associated with the Bund have even criticized Crabapple’s book as seeking to “delegitimise Israel” and even as “hijacked by anti-Zionists.” 12Allan Preis, “The Bund Lives”, 20 July 2026 https://michaelgawenda.substack.com/p/the-bund-lives.

It is sad to see contemporary Bundists repudiating their own history.13Janey Stone, “The International Jewish Labor BUND and the State of Israel”, Verso blog, 12 March 2025 https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-international-jewish-labor-bund-and-the-state-of-israel-1?srsltid=AfmBOoqwvfG38HoXxzCSde4smFpBwKNyL929gYVG_m05MSqmf_bGmnFF But this history remains available to the rest of us. Its existence and predominance stand against the Zionist claims to represent Jews historically. The Bund’s internationalism and its position on Zionism prior to 1948 are beacons to contemporary anti-Zionists.

And it’s clear that people are responding to this beacon. Jacobin applauds what it sees as the Bund’s “growing relevance,”14Grant Morgan, “The Jewish Labor Bund Stood Against Zionism”, Jacobin 22 April 2026; https://jacobin.com/2026/04/jewish-labor-bund-crabapple-review/ noting that where “the Bund has long been regarded as a historical artifact, it’s now reasserting itself as a living tradition.” New groups are springing up under the auspices of a body called the International Jewish Labor Bund (IJLB),15Joseph Mogul, “The Bund is Back”, The Progressive Magazine, March 31, 2026, https://progressive.org/latest/the-bund-is-back-mogul-20260331/; International Jewish Labor Bund Website https://jewishbund.org/ following its declaration in 2023.16“Today We Remake the Jewish Labor Bund”, https://derbund.org/#today-we-remake-the-jewish-labor-bund There are now 11 chapters or organizing committees in the United States and six in Europe, 17https://jewishbund.org/chapters plus an online journal, Der Spekter.18https://www.derspekter.org/?shem=aimgspe (Interestingly, the remnant groups in Australia and elsewhere are not part of this movement.)

The renewed interest in the Bund, its history, and its ideas, not surprisingly, has not been welcomed by everyone. Many of the negative responses to the book are trifling. Objections to Crabapple’s Puerto Rican roots, questioning whether she really is Jewish, and her past work as a burlesque dancer have only added fuel to the fire.

Not surprisingly, Zionists have led the counter-attack. Their responses are defensive, and often abusive. Their fire is directed not at the book’s primary readership, but at a Zionist audience among whom this book (or the publicity it has generated) might raise doubts. A review in Haaretz is typical.19  Joseph Hillyard, “A Missed Opportunity to Learn From the Legacy of the Bund” Ha’aretz, September 18, 2026; https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-09-18/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-missed-opportunity-to-learn-from-the-legacy-of-the-bund/000001a0-b4db-d91d-afeb-fcdb5c980000?gift=8d084db683a8479ba5304dc323911bd1

One strategy is nit-picking very small errors: Eliezer Aryeh, for example, devotes several articles to a forensic analysis of Crabapple’s nearly 2,000 endnotes and comes up with four errors.20Eliezer Aryeh, “What the Footnotes Don’t Say: Here Where We Live Is Our Country gets the Bund right and Palestine wrong” and other articles, May 29 2026 and subsequent dates, https://eliezeraryeh.substack.com/archive?sort=new Others complain that Crabapple “oversimplifies,” is “selective,” or makes “no attempt at representing historical accuracy. Seth Mandel, a conservative anti-Trump Republican, hardly touches on the content of the book at all, but claims (without evidence and despite many of the rave reviews being written by Jews) that the prevailing opinion among Jewish writers is that Crabapple’s book “exhibited a heartfelt nostalgia for a time and place that never really existed…it is a fictional story.”21Seth Mandel, “So You Want To Be a Bundist”, Commentary 7/4/2026; https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/so-you-want-to-be-a-bundist/?shem=aimgspe

Writing in the Jewish Review of Books, Allan Arkush goes further, claiming Zionism “has by and large been rooted in humanitarianism, led by noble men and women dedicated to constructing and sustaining a Jewish state for the benefit of their own beleaguered people and, indirectly, for others.”22Allan Arkush, “An Abusable Past”, Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2026; https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/20334/an-abusable-past/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwY2xjawUixP1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABwZG9mAWJyaWQRMU9rcld4elZHTjFpV01IdjRzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeGMZdDT0dDz9ZAqrLpDKj2K2lAkxDIWrd8iO5N1lnIYFE9XL5FcUol7cmiVM_aem_hpiD7t7BnHx3PQckSppt1A The Wall Street Journal review, written by a British Trump supporter apparently with the use of AI, regurgitates standard support for Israel for a non-Jewish audience.23Dominic Green, “Here Where We Live is Our Country Review: Defiance in the Diaspora”, Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2026; https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-review-defiance-in-the-diaspora-4b2b2b88

This book is not an academic study. The bibliography is small. Crabapple certainly carried out extensive new archival research, resulting in fascinating personal detail about her protagonists. But the book is rightly focused on introducing the Bund to wider audiences. The need today is not for more academically rigorous studies, to be read only by a limited audience, but for the core ideas in this book—struggle, resistance, solidarity, social justice, and above all socialism—to be spread further.

Whatever its limitations, Here Where We Live is our Country is a wonderful new addition to the history of the Bund and, through this, to the broader tradition of Jewish radicalism and socialism of which it is a part. This history is a part of our collective story, and its legacy belongs to all of us. Read this book in that spirit.

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: Unknown; modified by Tempest.

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This is a republication of November’s edition of The Climate Agenda – a subscriber-only newsletter designed to keep you informed of the key events, negotiations and announcements happening every month. If you want to receive The Climate Agenda straight to your inbox at the start of each month, sign up as a subscriber today.

COP31 begins in one week, and we’ll have five specialist reporters on the ground in Antalya, Türkiye, bringing you every development as it happens. From the negotiations to leaders’ speeches and side events, we’ll be there to dissect what it all means for international climate policy on electrification, just transition, adaptation finance and much more.

Here’s what you need to know for November, why it matters and what to expect.

US midterm elections Tuesday 3 November – United States

The geopolitical highlight for the first week of November is the US midterm elections, which will show whether American voters are in any mood to forgive President Donald Trump for failing to bring down the cost of living. From an energy perspective, his pro-oil and gas stance hasn’t led to cheaper prices for consumers, pushed up by the US-instigated Iran conflict. And his diesel deal with Russia won’t yet have made a difference at the pump.

The key issue for climate and energy policy is whether the Republicans hold onto their governing trifecta. If so, then expect continued dismantling of regulations that protect the environment, as well as strong backing for fossil fuel production. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, which polls suggest is possible, it could trigger a push to restore Biden-era clean energy tax credits, and support states wanting to restart mothballed wind and solar projects. 

Data centres have been a hot-wire issue, with growing community opposition to their expansion – partly due to concerns over rising utility bills as the facilities gobble power. Whether Republicans or Democrats win Congress, both are likely to make tech firms pay for the extra electricity production they need, with the latter favouring renewable sources.  

Governor races are also taking place in key states for climate issues, including Democrat-run California, which has used the courts to fight Trump’s attacks on clean energy.

Read more: National climate plans now promise half the emission cuts expected by UN

Read more: The more Europe relies on the US for energy, the more it’s vulnerable to pressure by Trump

Brazilian President Lula da Silva, speaks next to the COP30 President and COP 30 CEO during the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belem, Brazil on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/COP30) Brazilian President Lula da Silva, speaks next to the COP30 President and COP 30 CEO during the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belem, Brazil on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/COP30) COP30 Deforestation and Fossil Fuel Transition Roadmaps Tuesday 3 November – Brazil

Brazil is set to unveil two global roadmaps: one for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the other for ending deforestation.

The COP30 presidency promised them in the dying hours of the Belém summit last November as a last-minute fix to break a political impasse. Since then, it has been consulting with countries, experts and campaigners around the world to gather ideas and sketch out the elements to include in these blueprints. 

Don’t expect the roadmaps to offer any new global targets or give direct instructions on what countries must do, either to cut fossil fuel production and consumption or better protect forests. Rather, Brazil has said the documents will identify barriers and priority actions, highlight existing mechanisms and present a range of options that can be adapted to different national contexts.

It remains unclear what will happen with the reports once they are delivered on Tuesday. At the Bonn talks last June, a group of European and small island nations called for the roadmaps to be brought into the official negotiations, warning that a one-off report won’t cut it. But such efforts would undoubtedly face stiff opposition from fossil fuel-producing nations that objected to drafting the energy transition roadmap within the formal UN process last year. 

Read more: European, island states seek clear future for global roadmap to cut fossil fuels

Read more: COP30 roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to draft domestic plans

Read more: What we need to see in the roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels

Leaders will visit a Green Climate Fund-backed coastal resilience project in Tuvalu during the Pre-COP31 meeting in the Pacific. (Photo courtesy of the Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31) Leaders will visit a Green Climate Fund-backed coastal resilience project in Tuvalu during the Pre-COP31 meeting in the Pacific. (Photo courtesy of the Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31) UNEP Adaptation Gap Report Wednesday 4 November – Nairobi, Kenya

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) will publish its annual assessment of how well the world is planning, implementing and – crucially – financing measures to cope with worsening climate impacts.

Past editions have made for grim reading. Last year’s report warned of a widening gap between what developing countries need for adaptation and what they can access. It estimated they will need $310–365 billion a year by 2035, which is 12 to 14 times current international flows. The report also found that a goal of doubling international public adaptation finance by 2025 was likely to have been missed.

This year’s edition will be closely watched with adaptation expected to be a big-ticket item at COP31. Governments are likely to discuss the specifics of a commitment to triple adaptation finance for developing nations by 2035, agreed at COP30 last year – particularly what the baseline for that pledge is. Negotiators will be debating how to track progress against the 59 indicators of the Global Goal on Adaptation.

Read more: Editor’s Desk: Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap

Read more: Bonn climate talks end in “gridlock” on adaptation and emissions-cutting

Read more: New data shows rich nations likely missed 2025 goal to double adaptation finance

Photo: IRENA@COP31 Photo: IRENA@COP31 COP31 Climate Conference Monday 9 November – Friday 20 November – Antalya, Türkiye

The climate community’s attention turns this month to Antalya for the annual UN climate summit. From the outset, COP31 will have an unprecedented, and potentially explosive, set-up: Türkiye is COP president overseeing the non-negotiated Action Agenda, while Australia runs the negotiations. 

Billed, once again, as an “implementation COP”, the talks come amid a global energy crisis largely sparked by the actions of the US government, which is not expected to show up on the Turkish Riviera. It is also the first COP in the era of climate overshoot, coming just weeks after the UN officially confirmed the 1.5C warming limit will be breached and set out a narrow pathway to bring temperatures back down to the most ambitious Paris goal.

Unlike most recent COPs, the formal negotiations lack a clear headline item. Countries are due to establish and define the scope of the Just Transition Mechanism agreed in Belém last year, including its rules, governance and possible funding arrangements. On adaptation, vulnerable countries want a clearer path to delivering last year’s pledge to triple finance by 2035 and to putting the new progress indicators to work on the ground.

Governments are also likely to clash over next steps on the transition away from fossil fuels, and especially over whether the mitigation work programme – the forum dedicated to emission-cutting measures – has any future beyond this year.

Notable events to look out for in Antalya:

Opening session (9 November): The summit kicks off with the customary first-morning plenary. After the usual pageantry from the host nation, negotiating blocs and individual countries will deliver statements setting out their stall for the next two weeks. Watch out for a potential fight over the summit’s agenda – perhaps on issues relating to finance and trade following submissions requesting additional items – also a COP tradition. 

Electrification (10 November): On Energy Day, the Turkish presidency is expected to formally launch its flagship electrification pledge, revealing which countries have signed up. Signatories will voluntarily commit to raising electricity’s share of global final energy consumption to 35% by 2035, though the current text does not require that power to come from clean sources. There is also a question mark over whether and how this can be included in the political cover decision the COP co-hosts have said they will aim to produce. 

Leaders Summit (11-12 November): Heads of state and governments will jet into town for the traditional high-level segment in the middle of the first week, where world leaders typically talk up their climate record, air their grievances and call for more action.

Relatively few powerful leaders are on the list this time. Brazil’s Lula is set for another star turn this year, fresh from his surprise election win in October. The UK’s Andy Burnham, Spain’s Pedro Sanchez and China’s vice-premier Ding Xuexiang are expected, alongside Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Australia’s Anthony Albanese. In addition, African and small island nations will feature prominently.

Our COP31 Briefing newsletter will offer a more in-depth preview of the talks later this week.

Read more: Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31

Read more: COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment

Read more: From Belém to Antalya – gains, gaps and challenges for a new Just Transition Mechanism

International Maritime Organization (IMO) Shipping Talks Monday 23 November – Friday 4 December – London, United Kingdom

One year on from explosive talks in which Trump’s officials teamed up with Saudi Arabia to delay a deal to make the shipping industry greener, governments will gather on the banks of the Thames for another attempt to reach agreement.

The Net Zero Framework, provisionally agreed in October 2025, includes a series of emissions reduction targets for the owners of large ships along with penalties for not meeting them, rewards for doing so and measures to make the maritime transition fair.

The framework is likely to be either tweaked or radically rewritten so that it’s more acceptable to the US and Saudis. Brazil and Japan have submitted compromise proposals. Analysts find those will move shipping further away from being able to meet its climate goals. 

There will be closed-door talks between November 23-27 and a second week of talks open to accredited media from November 30 to December 4. Agreement on a proposal, perhaps decided through a vote, is expected after long and technical negotiations. The shipping industry’s 3% share of the world’s emissions is at stake.

Read more: London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal

The post What’s on the climate calendar for November 2026? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Registered nurses at Providence St. Joseph Hospital Eureka and Providence Redwood Memorial Hospital in Eureka and Fortuna, California, respectively, voted overwhelmingly in favor of ratifying a new three-year contract Oct. 30, winning protections to improve patient safety and nurse retention.

Step into Oakland Chinatown, and you are immediately welcomed by the heartbeat of a community shaped by generations of history, culture, resilience, and belonging. The sounds of neighbors greeting one another in multiple languages, the laughter of families gathering in Lincoln Square Park, the activity of local businesses, and the vibrant rhythms of lion dances and community celebrations reflect a neighborhood deeply rooted in tradition yet continually evolving.

In Summer 2024, APEN, Friends of Lincoln Square Park, the City of Oakland, and The California Endowment launched the Rooted and Resilient initiative through the Partners for Places Round 21 Grant Program, building on this enduring foundation in Chinatown. More than a climate resilience initiative, it reflects a community that has spent decades investing in relationships, preserving cultural identity, and working together to shape its future.

This report documents the engagement, partnerships, lessons, and outcomes that shaped the Rooted and Resilient initiative and the Lincoln Recreation and Resilience Center. It also shares adaptable lessons for communities, governments, funders, and practitioners advancing community-centered resilience. Use the buttons below to access the full report, or to download a short Community Brief with highlights in English or Chinese.

 

View the full report View the community brief (English) View the Community Brief (Chinese)

The post Rooted and Resilient: Climate and Community Resilience in Oakland Chinatown appeared first on Asian Pacific Environmental Network.

Satellites are catching huge pollution events from the oil and gas industry in New Mexico. These events are going largely unreported by companies. The state’s new rule would hold them accountable.

New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Board will hold a hearing to help hold polluters accountable on December 1-8. Here’s what our analysis shows and how you can help.

SIGN THE PETITION

Most of the pollution coming from oil and gas operations, like methane, is invisible to the naked eye, but not to satellites now orbiting Earth and observing New Mexico. For years, operators in the Permian Basin and San Juan Basin have reported their own emissions to the state. Satellite data now lets the public check that work. Unsurprisingly, self-reporting is not working.

In October, Earthworks and the Gas Leaks Project released Plumes in the Permian, to review pollution in the New Mexico Permian Basin, part of the most productive oil and gas region in the country. Oil and gas companies are required to report pollution from their facilities to the state. In this report, we used publicly available satellite observations and our own optical gas imaging (OGI) field work, and compared it with that operator-reported data.

What did we find? In short, operators are NOT reporting. New Mexicans deserve more. A super-emitter program is the best answer right now.

The report findings:

The study covers January 1, 2025 through April 30, 2026.

• 166 super-emitter events (plumes of methane and toxic pollutants so large you can see them from space) were linked to 121 oil and gas facilities in the New Mexico Permian.
• One in three plumes was an extreme point source, meaning it released more than 500 kilograms of methane per hour. If the emission event were to last an entire day, that would be enough to power 70 homes for an entire year.
• Midstream operations: compressor stations, gas plants, and pipelines accounted for 105 of the 166 events.
• At 6 facilities, our OGI footage suggests emissions ran far longer than a single satellite pass captured. 
• Modeling of 29 events found nearly 37,000 people in Eddy and Lea counties may have been at risk from unsafe benzene exposure. Benzene is a volatile organic compound created as a byproduct of the oil and gas extraction process; it is a known carcinogenic.

The most troubling finding is what operators told the state.

• For permitted facilities, only two percent of the plumes lined up with an excess emissions report filed with the New Mexico Environment Department. 
• Only ten percent of facilities reporting venting and flaring data logged a significant event on the day a plume was seen. 
• And forty-seven percent of facilities filing monthly venting and flaring data reported venting zero gas at those sites for the entire month.

The biggest polluters are midstream giants. Energy Transfer accounts for twenty-one percent of emissions observed, followed by Targa at thirteen percent. 

The San Juan Basin has long been one of the country’s most visible methane hotspots from space. Satellite monitoring continues to show large releases from aging wells and processing infrastructure across the region, which sits beside Navajo Nation and Pueblo communities. Earthworks has also observed plumes consistent with satellite data in the Four Corners region, which also go largely unreported.

Why This Matters Now

These leaks waste a public resource, worsen climate change, and expose families to benzene and other toxic air pollutants. And most of them are going unreported. Many of these problems could have been stopped months sooner.

At the same time, the federal government is retreating. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin used a visit to New Mexico in October to propose canceling the federal Super Emitter Program, the main tool that lets independent monitors flag large leaks and requires companies to respond. 

New Mexico does not have to wait on Washington DC. The New Mexico Environment Department has proposed a state Methane Abatement Rule that would:

• Create a “super emitter program,” letting certified third parties using satellites, aircraft and other report sensing report large leaks to NMED.
• Set a low pollution threshold, so more serious leaks get caught.
• Require operators within 50 meters of a detected plume to investigate and repair the source.
• Require zero-emission pneumatic controllers, eliminating a major routine source of methane.

This rule is a common sense solution to a widespread problem that harms thousands of New Mexicans and our climate. Industry groups are already fighting to weaken or delay it, and the Board needs to hear support from the public and those who live with the consequences.

Take Action

The Environmental Improvement Board will hold its public hearing on the rule December 1-8, 2026. Members of the public can give comments in person or online.

1. Sign the petition urging the Board to adopt a strong Methane Abatement Rule.
2. Email me at asackett@earthworks.org to get more information about the December hearing, including talking points and logistics on how to participate. Share this post with your community. 

It’s time we hold polluters accountable in New Mexico instead of relying on self-reporting.

SIGN THE PETITION

The post New Mexico Super Emitter Program Would Hold Oil & Gas Accountable appeared first on Earthworks.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

This week I listened to a fascinating Catalyst episode with Olya Irzak of Frost Methane, which featured the eye-opening estimate that 50 GW of new behind-the-meter gas could result in 380 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent over 18 months once methane leaks are taken into account.

This is a real problem. In their rush to power data centers are building the least efficient fossil gas generation, often with high equipment gas leakage, many of which are located in gas production regions that are in turn characterized by high leakage rates.

But its also a problem with a reasonable achievable near-term solution: if we are going to build data centers, we should ensure that they are connected to the grid rather than building dirty off grid gas generators. But to make this case, its important to understand just how much worse off-grid gas turbines are from an emissions standpoint, as shown in the figure below:

Here we examine four potential gas combustion technologies that off grid data centers could use. According to Cleanview’s tracker, simple-cycle turbines are planned for around 46% of off-grid data centers, reciprocating engines ~34%, fuel cells ~14%, unattributed generation around 6%, and on-site combined cycle plants effectively 0% today. These values are weighted by planned datacenter size, but only ~30% of planned capacity has identified equipment, so take these numbers as directional rather than precise.

The calculations here are also a bit generous to off-grid gas, as they use a nation-wide average 2.3% of methane production leaked upstream of generation based on Alvarez et al. 2018 (though more on that assumption later!). The grid numbers are 2023 averages from EPA’s eGRID for ERCOT, PJM and the US as a whole. They include the grid’s own upstream gas leaks, coal-mine methane and 3% transmission losses, all of which push the grid number up. Engine slip comes from EPA’s reporting factors for lean-burn engines, about 2.8% of the methane going in.1 Heat rates come from manufacturer data sheets for the equipment showing up in Cleanview’s tracker of behind-the-meter projects.

Reciprocating engines come out at about 740 kg of CO2-equivalent per megawatt-hour (MWh) and simple-cycle turbines at about 705. That is 63 to 80% more than average grid power in ERCOT, PJM or the US. Methane leakage (including engine slop) adds between 70 and 190 kg per MWh to that gap. But even without methane leakage the gap would be large; on CO2 alone, engines and turbines are 31% to 63% above the grid, because they are quite inefficient at turning gas into electricity.

There are more efficient options that are closer to grid emissions, but these are much more rarely installed today given longer build times or lower equipment availability. Fuel cells (mostly Bloom’s, which represent about 14% of identified behind-the-meter capacity in Cleanview’s data) and an on-site combined-cycle plants only emit 7% to 10% more than the US grid average, and are similar to what a utility would build to serve the same load.

That being said, US electricity grids are decarbonizing over time with the rapid deployment of clean energy. Existing gas that is grid connected can reduce capacity factors when low-cost renewable generation is available in a way that off-grid generators cannot (at least unless they also build on-site renewables or grid connect in the future). There is a real risk that off-grid gas generators become locked in over long periods of time while the rest of the electricity generation system decarbonizes.

Emissions also depend on where the data center is

Off-grid projects are clustered in a few specific regions, and both the local grid and the local gas supply differ a lot in terms of generation mix and leakage rates. So I reran my comparison for seven different datacenter hotspots in Cleanview’s tracker. For each region I used the 2025 grid average from EIA’s hourly grid data (counted on a consumption basis so that imported power is included). Each region also gets an upstream leakage rate for both on-grid and off-grid gas generation measured in the gas basin most likely to supply it, which are measured from aircraft and satellite surveys (e.g. MacKay et al. 2026, Varon et al. 2026, and others).2

The figure below shows how each option compares with the local grid average:

Engines and simple-cycle turbines emit more than the local grid in six of the seven regions, by between 36% and 95%. The exception is Cheyenne, Wyoming, where coal still generates nearly 60% of the grid’s power. There, engines and turbines are comparable to the grid average, but they still emit 55% to 64% more than a new gas combined cycle plant on the grid would. Large new loads can also delay coal plant retirements, which would make plugging into that grid worse than its average suggests.

So what is the path forward here?

Engines and turbines off-grid are the most polluting way to power new load in six of the seven hotspots where data centers are being built today. Fuel cells and efficient on-site plants are roughly as bad as building new gas on the grid, but relatively few data centers are planning on building them near-term.

Data center developers would generally prefer to connect to the grid than build their own off-grid systems. Off-grid systems require more redundancy and higher costs; low-efficiency gas generators or turbines run constantly are very expensive (and high emissions) form of generation. But in many cases its the only option they have, as the timelines associated with getting grid connections are too long or there simply is not sufficient generation available on-grid.

Ultimately we need to make our grids more robust – with new generation met by low-carbon energy sources, a modernized transmission grid, and lots of grid-scale storage – if we want to avoid a world where massive amounts of islanded gas generation gets built in the coming decade. In the meantime we should ensure that any off-grid data centers that are built meet existing air pollution regulations, encourage them to supplement gas with on-site solar and storage, and pursue broader efforts to reduce gas leakage (many of which, unfortunately, have been recently rolled back by the Trump administration).

In case its helpful, I’ve put the code and data to reproduce this analysis on my GitHub here.

1 Engine slip (often called methane slip) is fuel gas that passes through an engine without burning and leaves in the exhaust as methane. In reciprocating engines, some of the fuel-air mixture gets trapped in small gaps around the pistons where the flame can’t reach. Some also blows straight through while the intake and exhaust valves are both open. The lean fuel mixtures these engines use to cut NOx also burn less completely. EPA’s reporting factors for four-stroke lean-burn engines works out to about 2.8% of the methane going in, while modern gas turbines leak only around 0.02%. Running engines at partial load also can raise slip, and Olya Irzak said she has seen measurements as high as 12%, though most off grid data centers are expected to have relatively high capacity factors.

2 Note that for accounting purposes all gas leakage in a basin is being counted against gas production in the basin rather than being counted against oil production, even if the gas produced is associated with oil production.

Sign the Petition New Mexico Says No

Along with Republicans Sen. Mike Lee (UT), Sen. Shelly Moore Capito (WV), and Rep. Bruce Westerman (AR), New Mexico’s senior senator, Democrat Martin Heinrich, has proposed legislation that would sacrifice everything our state holds dear and line the pockets of industry. It contains 77 distinct environmental attacks. This assault on regulation would reward big corporations that will always put quarterly profits ahead of a livable planet and future generations.

Here’s what you need to know about the so-called Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act:

• It would allow massive data centers, fossil fuel projects, pipelines, transmission lines, and huge fossil fuel power plants to be pushed through without significant public input and would limit the ability to fight them in court.
• It would let hyperscale data centers — many of which are fueled by enormous fossil fuel power plants — start construction and operation sooner, regardless of community opposition and environmental or cultural impacts.
• It would exempt new transmission lines — stretching across federal and state public land as well as private property — from important federal laws, opening the door to further harm to people, water, land, and cultural resources. This could allow data centers to connect more quickly to the electrical grid.
• It would eviscerate states’ and Tribes’ ability to protect their clean water from federally permitted development.
• It would weaken Tribal consultation, leaving most Tribal nations with no meaningful way to protect their sovereignty when faced with potential fossil fuel projects on their lands.
• It would gut the Endangered Species Act, potentially pushing cherished New Mexico critters like Mexican wolves, Gila trout, and New Mexico meadow jumping mice to the brink of extinction.
• Its massive rollbacks of the Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and National Historic Preservation Act would make it less likely that community and Tribal concerns would be heard and respected, facilitate oil and gas development in the Greater Chaco landscape.
• Its gutting of bedrock environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act would strip crucial, decades-old tools used to combat destructive projects that threaten public lands, wildlife, water, and cultural heritage.
• It would create new obstacles to lawsuits challenging dangerous and destructive projects.
• Making matters even worse, the deal could lock in the Trump administration’s interpretation of bedrock environmental laws, hindering future administrations from restoring protections and undoing the damage.

Sen. Heinrich has a reputation as a conservationist with a love for outdoor recreation. He’s spent time on our public lands hunting and fishing to feed his family, just like so many other New Mexicans. This bill, negotiated in secret, would undermine everything we hold dear — along with his own legacy.

In a ruling on Nov. 2, Federal District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan denied the DOJ’s motion for a stay pending appeal in Common Cause and individual voters’ ongoing lawsuit challenging the federal agency’s attempts to obtain sensitive voter data and exercise control over states’ election processes. In response, Common Cause and its legal counsel issued the following statement:

“Once again, the Trump administration's efforts to hijack the elections have been stopped by a federal court. As today's decision reaffirms, the executive branch has no business meddling in how states manage their voter rolls—and no legal authority to do so. As they get increasingly desperate, the Trump administration keeps trying new twists on the same plan to meddle in November’s elections, and the courts keep saying ‘no.’ States have the constitutional authority to run elections, not the President.

“In American democracy, voters choose their elected leaders, not the other way around. Today's decision deals yet another blow to the Trump administration's efforts to gerrymander the voter rolls. The Department of Justice has no authority to — and no legitimate purpose for —consolidating voter data.

“Voters can cast their ballots this November with confidence that their personal information is protected.”

View the opinion here.

By Jan Morrill, Earthworks and Diana Martin, MiningWatch Canada 

This month representatives of communities living in the shadows of the Pueblo Viejo gold mine and their allies traveled almost 30,000 kilometres around the world to draw attention to the impacts of its mining on their homes and families. They are calling for action to protect their health, safety, and to defend the rights of their communities. This shouldn’t have to be the case. 

These Dominican activists visited Belgium, Panama, and Canada calling for more transparency and accountability from the Canadian company operating the mine, Barrick Mining, better oversight from the Canadian government, and the safe relocation of 450 families who say they are already suffering environmental and health impacts. 

Calling out harm in London

The trips come on the heels of a complaint filed with the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), an accreditation authority for gold, silver, and other precious metals. The complaint alleges the company’s public record of human rights violations and environmental harms is incompatible with LBMA’s internal guidelines, and therefore gold from the mine should not be traded on the London Bullion Market. The complaint highlights the pollution, health problems, and impacts on crops in communities around the mine. According to the lead lawyer filing the complaint, “If you sit in London and you set standards but don’t police them — to enable highly profitable metals trading to go on — then you should expect to be held to account.”

Communities search for answers 

Communities have raised longstanding concerns about water contamination, air pollution, and other health impacts. One of Latin America’s largest open-pit gold mines, Pueblo Viejo has generated vast quantities of mine waste since commercial operations began. Barrick is now pursuing a major expansion that includes a new facility designed to store hundreds of millions of tonnes of additional mining waste and extend operations for decades. 

The Comité Nuevo Renacer (CNR), an organization representing five communities affected by the Pueblo Viejo mine in the Dominican Republic — La Cerca, La Piñita, Las Lagunas, Jobo Claro, and Jurungo — has advocated for years for community relocation in response to the environmental and health problems they associate with living near the mine.

This advocacy includes unsuccessful efforts to obtain essential information from Barrick Mining Corporation regarding the mine’s environmental impacts and tailings facilities. Since 2021, the CNR and its partner organizations have written to Barrick, its CEOs, and to investors, requesting access to information and transparency about the impacts of the mine on communities and families. These requests for information have been ignored or answered with information that is incomplete or not relevant to their requests. 

Calls for more transparency in Belgium

During the first week of October, Fernando Peña from the National Space for Transparency in Extractive Industries (ENTRE) and the Public Policy Observatory from the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo attended the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) annual meeting. Peña, the official representative for civil society from the Dominican Republic,  highlighted the LBMA case and the concerns of local communities during the official event and in other spaces. 

Government accountability in Panama 

On October 27, Casilda Lima, resident of Las Lagunas, member of the CNR and plaintiff in the LBMA complaint, presented testimony before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. As part of a hearing on the international obligations of Canadian extractive companies and their impact on human rights, Ms. Lima shared her experiences of living less than a kilometer from the tailings dam holding back mine waste for the Pueblo Viejo mine. She testified to the many health problems she is experiencing like headaches, nausea and trouble breathing, the dust that blows from the tailings and covers her house on a daily basis, and the noise from mining operations that keeps her awake at night. She highlighted the community calls for relocation, stating “…they should move us …to a place where we have water, where we have rivers, like what we had before [mining], now we don’t have anything.” 

The CNR also presented written testimony as part of the proceedings, calling on the Canadian government to investigate the actions and impacts of Barrick, and to take all necessary measures to remedy the damages. They also asked the Canadian government to work jointly with the Dominican government to implement the resettlement project, which has been on hold for seven years, and urged the Government of Canada to take action to ensure that Canadian companies, including Barrick, comply with international standards and regulations on access to information and transparency, such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management, and others.

Taking the message to Canada 

From October 28 through November 4th, Leoncia Ramos, a representative of the CNR and resident of the community of La Piñita, and another plaintiff in the LBMA complaint,  traveled to Canada to provide a first-hand account of the impacts of extractive activities on agricultural and rural communities in the Dominican Republic. Her testimony was included in a parliamentary press conference and she brought her concerns to representatives of the Canadian government, who committed to looking further into the issue. The Canadian Network for Corporate Accountability, representing over 40 civil society organizations, invited Ms. Ramos as a speaker at their biannual members meeting. 

While Canada expands trade globally, back home the government is narrowing already limited avenues for accountability for abuses by Canadian mining companies abroad. Ms. Ramos leveraged her visit to urge Canadian decision-makers to act on community concerns and address the risks posed by mining expansion. She called on the government to implement due diligence legislation that ensures affected people have meaningful access to accountability and remedy. 

Bringing justice home

There should be measures in place to protect communities from harms associated with mining and ensure they have the information they need to make decisions about what is best for themselves and their families. When communities suffer harm, there should be timely and appropriate remedy taken by companies and national governments. If communities raise concerns, standards setters like the LBMA, and governments where the companies are headquartered should assume responsibility and take action. 

The post The Long Journey to Hold Canadian Mining Accountable appeared first on Earthworks.

This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Tomorrow’s midterm elections are widely viewed as a referendum on Trump’s second presidency. Prior studies have found strong associations between protest and U.S. election outcomes, including the 2010 and 2018 midterm elections. Protests can influence popular opinion on policy issues, boost turnout among eligible voters, and shape how candidates set policy priorities.

At the Crowd Counting Consortium, or CCC, we have tallied an extraordinary number of protests since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. The majority of protests in Trump’s second term so far have named democracy or the presidency itself as a primary claim — think the nationwide Hands Off and No Kings protests in 2025 and 2026. 

But among protests focused on more specific policy domains, one key theme stands out. The administration’s anti-immigration policies and expansive, violent crackdown on immigrants have generated active, grassroots support networks in neighborhoods across the country and fueled a wave of protests in support of immigrants’ rights. During Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and St. Paul, protests took place in over 30 percent of counties containing 80 percent of the nation’s population. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history. A significant proportion of these protests occurred in counties that Trump won in 2024. 

Trends in immigration-related protests since January 20, 2017

Of course, the current wave of protest builds on a longer-term foundation of pro-immigrant demonstrations. Since the CCC started collecting data on protest in the United States in 2017, we’ve seen that protests against the federal government’s immigration policies have been a constant feature of the protest landscape across all three presidential administrations — Trump 1, Biden and Trump 2 (see Table 1). 

Table 1: Immigration protest events as a share of all left/liberal protests

Little more than a week after Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, numerous protests took place around the country in response to his Jan. 27 signing of Executive Order 13769, sometimes called the “Muslim Ban,” which restricted citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. On Jan. 28 and 29, mass protests occurred in and around airports, where immigrant rights groups and community members assembled to ensure the safe arrival of citizens of those countries who were in transit when the executive order went into effect. Protests against the executive order continued in February 2017 under the slogan “No Ban No Wall.” The Trump administration ultimately revised the executive order to a narrower version that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld as lawful; multiple protests followed on June 26, 2018. 

But the biggest jumps in protest participation came on coordinated, nationwide days of action related to the administration’s immigration policies. The first, on June 30, 2018, was a national day of action declaring that “Families Belong Together.” These protests demanded an end to the administration’s “child separation policy” — the practice of separating migrant children from parents and caretakers upon arrival at the U.S.-Mexico border — which was in effect under the Obama administration but escalated under Trump. This protest campaign was highly effective: The pressure placed on the administration led the White House to end the policy through an executive order, though loopholes remained.

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On Jan. 19, 2019, the third annual Women’s March on Washington represented an additional increase in coordinated nationwide protests in which immigrants’ rights were a core issue. And July 12, 2019 saw the Lights for Liberty day of action, which attempted to pressure elected officials (particularly in the newly Democratic Congress) to close detention centers and adopt more humane immigration policies. Ultimately, congressional Democrats introduced legislation in 2021 to reunite immigrant children with their families. In sum, the first Trump administration saw an impressive range of protests on behalf of immigrants’ rights, some of which had powerful impacts. 

Overall, the Biden administration saw a decline in such protests, with about 60 percent fewer than during the first Trump administration (seven percent to 11 percent as a share of overall left/liberal protests, respectively). Notable days of action during the Biden administration included continued protests calling for closure of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention centers, as well as protests against ongoing family detention and separation practices, and protests against asylum restrictions during a major surge in deportations in 2024. 

During the second Trump administration, such protests have seen a breathtaking rise. 

Figure 1 provides a comparative view of the number of immigration-related protests under the second Trump administration, compared to the first. The y-axis, showing the cumulative number of immigration-related protests since Trump’s two inaugurations, demonstrates the massive scale and steady climb of protests during his second term so far.

Figure 1: Counts of pro-immigrant protest events during Trump’s first and second terms

Figure 2 shows the frequency of such events on a monthly basis. There have been more protests in support of immigrants in seven of the months since January 2025 than in any of the 48 months of Trump’s first term. In 10 of the first 17 months of the current term, protests against Trump’s immigration policies made up over 20 percent of total protests. Few other protest claims have animated the public with such enduring salience over time.

Figure 2: Pro-immigrant protests in the U.S., January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Figure 2 also shows clear increases in the number of immigration-related protests during nationwide anti-Trump protests. Spikes in activity occurred on April 19, 2025 during the Hands Off protests; on October 18, 2025, when many No Kings protests adopted opposition to ICE and Trump’s mass deportation agenda as a central claim; and on March 28, 2026, when the third No Kings protests again made immigration a primary claim. Our tallies have also documented 170 repeater events (protests that are scheduled to take place daily, weekly or monthly) that specifically mention immigrant rights or opposition to ICE in their stated claims.

In Illinois and Minnesota, protests started local and went national

Trump’s immigration policies have produced particularly intense local mobilizations in areas that saw escalated ICE deployments, which then diffused to solidarity protests nationwide. For example, from early September to mid-November 2025, ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz targeting immigrants in Chicago. During that period, the CCC documented 3,491 protest events in opposition to Trump’s immigration policies, starting in Chicago and spreading across the country during the No Kings mobilization on Oct. 18, 2025, which named immigration as a central issue.

Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, also provoked powerful opposition locally and beyond, with over 4,400 protests taking place between Dec. 2, 2025 and Jan. 31, 2026. Significant numbers of protests responded to specific, publicized government abuses, such as aggressive law enforcement actions against immigrants, the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and the detention of a 5-year-old child of a Colombian immigrant. Three waves of action stood out: the ICE Out For Good weekend of action on Jan. 10-11; the Day of Truth & Freedom on Jan. 23, which was concentrated in Minnesota; and the National Shutdown and ICE Out of Everywhere actions, which mainly spanned Jan. 30-31, with some events lasting into Feb. 1. 

Figure 3 shows the number of counties that saw pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, after Operation Midway began in Chicago and Operation Metro Surge began in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Overall, these two states saw higher-than-average numbers of counties featuring protests, including among counties far afield from the major cities in which ICE focused its deployments. 

Figure 3. Pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota during and after ICE operations in Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul

Nationwide, the total volume of protest produced during early 2026 is extraordinary. 

January 2026 alone featured the fourth-most protest events recorded in all 10 years of CCC data, owing to the massive number of protests in Minnesota and around the country in opposition to Operation Metro Surge and its impacts, and to Trump’s immigration agenda in general. 

And the events in Minnesota seem to have been a flashpoint. Anti-ICE protests continued in February and March 2026, and anti-ICE claims were central to the nationwide No Kings mobilization on March 28. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history (see Table 2).

Table 2: Top 10 months by total protest events, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Protests opposing Trump’s immigration policies were reported in 933 counties during Operation Metro Surge, between Dec. 2, 2025 and Feb. 1, 2026 — about 30 percent of all counties in the U.S. These counties were densely populated: Together, they contain more than 80 percent of the U.S. population (see Figure 4). From March 2026 through May 2026, the CCC continued to record thousands of events protesting ICE, with hundreds of distinct civic organizations and hundreds of thousands of people participating. 

Figure 4: U.S. immigration protests following ICE deployments to Minneapolis

Nor are protests against ICE operations an exclusively liberal phenomenon. Instead, there has been a stark increase over time in the number of pro-immigrant protests in counties that Trump won in 2024 by at least a 5-point margin (see Figure 5). Among the pro-immigrant protests that occurred in March 2026, about 40 percent of them occurred in such counties. 

Figure 5: Pro-immigrant protests in counties Trump won by >5 Points in the 2024 Presidential Election, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Across the country, a broad range of constituencies using a variety of means have expressed opposition to Trump’s immigration policy. Demonstrations have just been one method. Those activating on behalf of and in support of immigrants include people forming human chains to protect immigrant workers; neighborhoods organizing support networks for affected immigrant families; students engaging in walkouts from schools and protests at college career fairs; people engaging in hunger strikes in support of international and undocumented students; knitters engaging in “craftivism”; people holding encampments outside of ICE facilities or noise demonstrations outside of hotels in which ICE agents were housed; consumers engaging in boycotts and sell-backs at Target and Home Depot; clergy engaging in civil disobedience; communities holding vigils for slain immigrants or those killed while advocating for them; community members building raised beds across thoroughfares to prevent ICE vehicles from accessing facilities, and more. Institutions and employers have raised their voices: Local businesses and business associations have called for the end of ICE operations in their towns, ranchers and farmers have decried treatment of their immigrant employees, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has condemned mistreatment of immigrants as well.

Counter-protest was minimal

Trump’s immigration policies have supporters in the country, particularly among Republicans. But few people have rallied or marched in defense of them. Right-leaning protests made up fewer than two percent of all immigration-related protests during the first 14 months of the first Trump administration, and less than 0.7 percent of immigration-related protests during the same stretch of his second administration. 

The frequency of pro-immigrant protests during Trump’s second term has eclipsed that of anti-immigration protests by 145 to 1. The vast majority of anti-immigration protests have been counter-protests occurring at demonstrations in support of immigrants and their rights. 

However, right-leaning protests have been increasingly characterized by anti-immigrant claims over the past three presidencies. Whereas anti-immigrant protests constituted 1.68 percent of all right-learning protests during Trump’s first term, that proportion has increased sevenfold so far during his second, to 12.43 percent. 

Table 3: Anti-immigration protest events as a share of all right/conservative protests

A powerful and growing pro-immigrant constituency

Today’s mass protests in support of immigrants’ rights build on a durable pattern of pro-immigrant and anti-ICE protest in the U.S. To wit, the CCC has documented a prayer protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that has been held every Friday for the past 20 years. 

But the recent increase in pro-immigrant protests and their intensity is notable. The breadth and volume of pro-immigrant protests show that committed activists and organizations have succeeded in rallying huge numbers in favor of justice and dignity for immigrants, indicating a durable underlying infrastructure. In this essay, we focused on street protest as one indicator in the overall picture. But community mobilization on behalf of immigrants has meant far more than demonstrations. Mutual aid and neighborly support, observing and documenting ICE operations, litigation, support to immigrants in detention, and direct appeals to public officials have all been central to America’s response to Trump’s immigration policies. The growth of pro-immigrant protests reflects a (potentially growing) constituency willing to take risks to defend a multicultural vision of America, potentially widening its appeal. 

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In short, we see capable organizers and the mass public pushing hard for humane treatment of immigrants for the foreseeable future. Neither political party has figured out how to address immigration in a way that resolves the need for safe and secure borders and the need to treat everyone on U.S. soil with dignity, decency and due process. But the impacts of Trump’s policies on immigrants, their families and their broader communities provide a galvanizing issue for Americans who otherwise agree on little else. For example, some conservative faith communities and various progressive groups increasingly find themselves on the same side when it comes to immigration. 

Policymakers often resist turning to activists, civil society organizations and community groups for policy solutions. But the persistence of multi-sectoral immigration activism, as seen through protest alone, also reflects a powerful and growing constituency in favor of just and humane approaches to immigration. Protests reflect and shape the existing moral consensus but also can reorient constituencies in favor of a new consensus. We hope the members of the next Congress pay attention.

This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Effective Aid Ukraine, an Irish charity helping the Ukrainian community, is combining farming, cooking, and residential care reform to give young people of Lviv, Ukraine practical skills, confidence, and choice.

The project is based at Rozdil Friends Home, a residential center for boys and young men with disabilities. Residents displaced from eastern Ukraine after Russia’s invasion grow vegetables in a greenhouse, harvest fresh produce throughout the year, and learn how to cook and preserve food for future meals.

“It’s not just about teaching children how to grow food,” Tom McEnaney, Founder of Effective Aid Ukraine, tells Food Tank. “It’s choosing what you’re going to eat and being able to make it yourself,” he says. “That’s what leads to people having more fulfilled lives.”

Growing food also helps stretch the limited budgets of the nonprofit. Vegetables produced on-site reduce food purchases, leaving more money for clothing, repairs, and other daily needs.

Effective Aid Ukraine is now working to rebuild the center’s kitchen. When it is finished, residents will help prepare meals while kitchen staff become teachers instead of cooks. They will learn food safety, meal planning, and cooking skills they can use later in life as a career and to live independently.

The organization hopes their work will serve as a pilot to support a broader shift taking place across Ukraine. McEnaney sees the country moving toward community-based care. Working with the Lviv Regional Authority and its governor, Maksym Kozitzkyy, Effective Aid Ukraine is helping test how food production in residential care facilities can be scaled up and out.

Four years after Russia’s invasion of the country, more than 10 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance in Ukraine and 3.8 million are internally displaced, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Effective Aid Ukraine sees rebuilding daily routines and pathways toward greater independence as an important part of the country’s broader recovery.

The UNHCR leverages food and cooking as catalysts for recovery across emergency settings and during times of conflict. The World Food Programme, along with UNHCR, call for decisive actions to ensure access to safe and sufficient nutritious food in times of crisis. Initiatives like the one in Rozdil build on those findings by connecting agriculture with everyday independence.

McEnaney believes the lesson of their work is simple: “It’s about giving people purpose, dignity, and fulfillment.”

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Effective Aid Ukraine

The post How Food Is Helping Transform Residential Care in Ukraine appeared first on Food Tank.

Becoming certified organic is often a way for farmers to communicate their values to customers. It symbolizes a prioritization of environmental practices, especially within pockets of their market that they are unable to connect with face-to-face. With so many farmers already being worn thin with responsibilities, the often career-long decision to get certified can be daunting, especially without full clarity about what benefits await on the other side.

The post The Road to Organic Certification appeared first on RAFI.