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Green groups sue EU over inclusion of Portuguese lithium mine on priority list
Environmental campaigners and community groups are suing the European Commission over its decision to designate a controversial lithium mine in Portugal as “strategic” to secure the minerals it needs for the energy transition.
They argue that the Barroso mine, intended to supply lithium to the EV battery industry, poses serious environmental, social and safety risks and that the EU’s executive arm failed to properly assess the project’s sustainability. They filed the case at the European Court of Justice on Thursday.
A spokesperson for the EU Commission said it could not comment on the case as legal proceedings have now started.
The mine is one of 47 mineral projects, which the Commission labelled as “strategic“ to shore up the bloc’s reserves of energy transition minerals, granting them preferential treatment for gaining permits and easier access to EU funding.
London-listed Savannah Resources is planning to dig four open pit mines in the northern Barroso region to extract lithium from Europe’s largest known deposit. The company says it will extract enough lithium every year to produce around half a million batteries for electric vehicles.
However, local groups have staunchly opposed the mining project, citing concerns over waste management and water use as well as the impact of the mine on traditional agriculture in the area.
Savannah Resources did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
EU Commission rejected NGOs’ concernsThe lawsuit comes weeks after the Commission rejected requests by green groups to review the status of 16 controversial projects on its strategic list, including the Barroso mine, despite environmental concerns expressed by NGOs and local communities. The Commission found their concerns to be “unfounded” and argued that member states were responsible for ensuring that the projects comply with EU environmental laws.
Environmental NGO ClientEarth and the United Association for the Defense of Covas do Barroso (UDCB), which filed the case, argue that the Commission overlooked gaps in the assessment of the mine’s environmental impacts, including risks to protected species and the safety of a planned facility to store mining waste.
They are asking the court to quash the Commission’s decision to keep the project on its strategic list and to clarify its obligations to ensure that projects on the list follow sustainable mining practices.
“We are going to court because the Commission’s decision undermines fundamental EU legal principles,” they said in a statement.
“Labelling a project ‘strategic’ and in the public interest while turning a blind eye to well-documented risks to water, ecosystems, human health and local livelihoods is simply unacceptable. The energy transition must be based on law, science and justice – not political shortcuts that turn rural regions into sacrifice zones,” they added.
EU seeks to shore up access to mineralsUnder the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, the Commission identified a host of mining projects that could boost the bloc’s access to the minerals it needs to manufacture clean energy and other advanced technologies, as well as reduce its dependence on supplies from China.
The law allows the Commission to designate mineral projects as strategic if they meet a series of criteria, including that the project “would be implemented sustainably” and monitor, prevent and minimise environmental and adverse social impacts.
The status does not constitute an approval for the project and developers still need to obtain the necessary permits from the relevant national or regional authorities.
Earlier this week, the European Court of Auditors found that many projects designated as strategic remain at an early stage of development and will struggle to meaningfully contribute to securing mineral supplies for the EU by 2030.
The post Green groups sue EU over inclusion of Portuguese lithium mine on priority list appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pennsylvania lawmakers, health advocates rally at Capitol to ban toxic weedkiller paraquat
HARRISBURG, Pa. – A bipartisan group of Pennsylvania lawmakers joined farmers and public health advocates at the Capitol this week to call for swift passage of House Bill 1135 and Senate Bill 1158. The legislation would prohibit the use of the highly toxic herbicide paraquat statewide and protect Pennsylvanians from future exposure to the chemical.
The House bill, introduced last year by state Reps. Natalie Mihalek (R-Allegheny/Washington) and Melissa Shusterman (D-Chester County), would amend the Pennsylvania Pesticide Control Act of 1973 to ban all uses of paraquat across the commonwealth, starting in 2027.
If enacted, it would bring the Keystone State in line with more than 70 countries that have already outlawed the weedkiller, including China, Brazil and the European Union.
This week, companion legislation was introduced in the state Senate by Sens. Devlin Robinson (R-37) and Nick Miller (D-14), who joined their House colleagues at the event at the Capitol.
Research shows that people who work in or live near fields where paraquat is sprayed face significantly higher risks of developing Parkinson’s disease, with some studies showing the risk may double. One study, using data from the National Institutes of Health, found that people who applied paraquat on farm fields were twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease as those who handled other agricultural chemicals.
Paraquat exposure has also been associated with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, kidney cancer, thyroid disorders and – particularly in rural communities – a higher risk of childhood leukemia linked to prenatal exposure.
“Paraquat is so toxic that even small exposures can be deadly, yet it remains legal in the United States while much of the world has already banned the notorious herbicide,” said Geoff Horsfield, legislative director at the Environmental Working Group.
“The House and Senate bills are commonsense steps to protect farmers, farmworkers and rural communities from a chemical that science has clearly shown poses unacceptable risks,” he added.
“If links to cancer and Parkinson's aren't enough to drive change in Washington D.C., then we have to take action here in Pennsylvania,” Mihalek said. "If my bill were to become law, the Commonwealth would be blazing a path for 49 other states to also prohibit paraquat from being used.”
“Over 70 countries no longer permit the use of paraquat,” said Shusterman. “It’s embarrassing that the U.S. is so far behind. We have enough data, we have enough research, and we have enough knowledge. With the federal government unwilling to move to protect us, I believe that now is the time for states to act.”
“The dangers of paraquat to human health are well established through numerous scientific studies; more than 70 countries have banned its use, including the entire EU and China, where paraquat is made,” said Robinson.
“It’s very telling that the country that produces the product won’t even allow its own citizens to use or be exposed to it. Syngenta, the company that manufactures paraquat, has already paid millions in settlements to those it has harmed with this unsafe pesticide,” he added.
“Bottom line – exposure to paraquat is extremely hazardous and sometimes even fatal. This is why I am proud to partner with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, Reps. Natalie Mihalek and Melissa Shusterman, the Parkinson Foundation Western Pennsylvania, The Parkinson Council, and many other passionate advocates to support legislation to protect our farmers, agriculture workers, and Pennsylvanians from this dangerous pesticide,” said Robinson.
The press conference coincided with a day of advocacy at the Capitol, as farmers, medical professionals and leaders from public health organizations met with lawmakers to urge support for the legislation and immediate action to advance both bills.
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The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action.
Areas of Focus Farming & Agriculture Farm Pollution Family Health Paraquat Press Contact Alex Formuzis alex@ewg.org (202) 667-6982 February 5, 2026Main page
events:gta_members_statement_on_rojava_1.2.2026.pdf - created
February 5 Green Energy News
Headline News:
- “DOE Prepares To Send Nuclear Waste Cross-Country” • A rail journey years in the making will start from Dominion Energy’s North Anna nuclear plant in Virginia in the fall of 2027 bound for Idaho National Laboratory. A specially designed railcar will be used to move a 180-ton lead and steel cask containing spent nuclear fuel over 2,500 miles. [E&E News by POLITICO]
Railcar for transporting spent nuclear fuel (DOE image)
- “How Climate Economics Got the Risks Wrong” • A study by researchers associated with the University of Exeter and Carbon Tracker argues that widely used economic models underestimate the risks of climate change. They smooth impacts over time, rely on average temperature changes, and ignore shocks, tipping points, and cascading failures. [CleanTechnica]
- “Nova Scotia And Massachusetts Ink Offshore MOU” • The province of Nova Scotia and the state of Massachusetts signed a memorandum of understanding that could see Nova Scotia send offshore wind power to Massachusetts in the coming years. The agreement comes as the Canadian province hopes to launch its first seabed lease auction this year. [reNews]
- “Particle Pollution From Wildfire Smoke Was Tied To 24,100 Deaths Per Year In US” • Chronic exposure to wildfire smoke is linked to tens of thousands of deaths annually in the US, a study in the journal Science Advances found. Tiny particulates in wildfire smoke contributed to an average of 24,100 deaths per year in the lower 48 states from 2006 to 2020. [ABC News]
- “Oregon Bill Seeks Temporary Fast-Tracking For Siting Of Renewable Energy Projects” • Oregon lawmakers are considering a bill that would fast-track siting and permitting of renewable energy projects. The Trump administratio’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” imposed new deadlines on projects, and the state bill may help with that. [Oregon Public Broadcasting]
For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.
Anglo flags third De Beers writedown as Teck merger looms
Anglo American (LON: AAL) is weighing a third writedown of De Beers in as many years as weak diamond prices persist and the miner advances asset sales ahead of its merger with Canada’s Teck Resources (TSX: TECK.A TECK.B)(NYSE: TECK).
The century-old group said on Thursday it was reviewing the carrying value of its diamond business after average realized prices fell in 2025, warning the unit is likely to be lossmaking again.
The potential impairment comes as Anglo moves to finalize the sale of non-core assets, including De Beers. At the same time, the miner is preparing to merge with Teck in a transaction approved by shareholders and regulators late last year, creating Anglo Teck (official named confirmed).
Anglo booked a $2.9 billion impairment on De Beers in February last year, following a $1.6 billion writedown in 2024. The company, which owns 85% of the diamond company, offered few details on a sale process, saying only that it was “progressing”.
In a fourth-quarter production update, Anglo said diamond trading conditions “continued to be challenging” amid industry weakness, geopolitical tensions and tariff uncertainty. It said lower prices and market conditions could lead to an impairment when full-year results are released.
Diamond mining industry cracks under pressureDiamond prices have come under pressure from weaker consumer demand in China and competition from cheaper, lab-grown stones. De Beers’ average realized price fell 7% to $142 per carat in 2025, driven by a 12% drop in the average rough price index.
Anglo said the decline was exacerbated by selling inventory below cost, largely lower-value goods. Adjusted for that mix, the equivalent price index reduction would have been 25% year on year, suggesting some underlying resilience in the market.
De Beers sold 5.9 million carats in the fourth quarter, up from 4.6 million a year earlier, lifting revenue to $571m from $543m. Even so, Anglo said it was undertaking an impairment review that could result in another writedown.
Exit hurdlesThe prolonged slump complicates Anglo’s efforts to exit De Beers. Chief executive Duncan Wanblad said only that the sale was moving forward. A consortium led by former De Beers managing director Gareth Penny is seen as a frontrunner, though Botswana, which owns 15% of the company, has said it wants to take control. Namibia has also expressed interest, and former chief executives Bruce Cleaver and Penny have been mentioned as potential buyers.
The De Beers sale forms part of a restructuring unveiled in 2024. Anglo demerged its platinum arm, Amplats (now Valterra), in June 2025, while the planned sale of its Australian metallurgical coal mines stalled after Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU) walked away following a fire at Moranbah North.
Wanblad said on Thursday that the formal sale process for steelmaking coal was “progressing well”, without naming alternative buyers or addressing potential compensation from the US firm.
Copper reality checkCopper remains central to the Anglo-Teck investment case, but near-term output expectations have softened. Anglo cut its 2026 copper guidance to 700,000 to 760,000 tonnes from 760,000 to 820,000 tonnes, citing lower grades at several operations.
It also trimmed 2027 guidance to 750,000 to 810,000 tonnes, including at Collahuasi in Chile, which Anglo and Teck plan to integrate with Teck’s neighbouring Quebrada Blanca mine. For the longer term, the group added new guidance for 2028 of 790,000 to 850,000 tonnes.
A 15-km (9.3-mile) conveyor would be built to feed Collahuasi’s high-quality ore into QB’s new processing plants. (Click on map to enlarge)Copper production in 2025 was 695,000 tonnes, roughly flat year on year and at the lower end of guidance. Goldman Sachs said output missed its estimate by 5%, with Anglo’s Quellaveco mine in Peru falling short by 10% on lower-than-expected grades. Collahuasi’s underperformance was already known, while Los Bronces in Chile ended the year strongly.
Adjusting for Collahuasi, the underlying miss narrows to about 2%, which Goldman said better reflects what the market had already priced in.
Anglo-Teck $53B merger may create larger copper complex than EscondidaA sharp rise in copper prices in recent months has renewed interest in the metal and helped spur merger talks between rivals Rio Tinto (ASX, LON: RIO) and Glencore (LON: GLEN).
With ageing mines delivering lower grades and new projects costly and slow to develop, copper dealmaking has become more attractive as supply constraints tighten across the sector.
‘America needs you’: US seeks trade alliance to break China’s critical mineral dominance
The US is urging countries to form a critical mineral trading bloc to shore up access to resources that are pivotal to manufacturing energy, digital and advanced technologies and technologies, and to reduce the world’s dependence on China for mineral supplies.
Washington says this mineral club would provide countries with a tariff-free trade zone to buy and sell critical minerals with guaranteed minimum prices, helping them compete with Chinese producers and create more resilient supply chains.
China dominates global mineral refining capacity for 19 of 20 key minerals needed to manufacture clean energy technologies and advanced digital infrastructure.
“The Trump administration is proposing a concrete mechanism to return the global critical minerals market to a healthier, more competitive state,” US Vice President JD Vance told government representatives from 54 countries and the European Union attending the first US-hosted critical minerals ministerial meeting on Wednesday.
Large economies like India, Japan, France, Germany and the UK as well as resource-rich emerging and developing economies such as Argentina, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia were represented at the event in Washington DC.
“We want to eliminate th[e] problem of people flooding into our markets with cheap critical minerals to undercut our domestic manufacturers,” Vance said, without naming China.
“We want members to form a trading bloc among allies and partners, one that guarantees American access to American industrial might, while also expanding production across the entire zone. The benefits will be immediate and durable,” he added.
“In the end, it’s all in the US interest of course,” Bryan Bille, a principal at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, told Climate Home News. “At the same time, the Trump Administration realises that international cooperation is needed to address these challenges.”
“America needs you”“It feels like ‘thank you for coming, America needs your help’,” Patrick Schröder, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, said of the meeting.
“The US now have realised they cannot solve their critical minerals problem just on their own. To really reduce dependence on China, they need this bigger group of countries,” he said.
There is potential for a mineral trading club to become useful to diversify supply chains and support mineral production in developing countries “but it can’t be all about supplying the US with minerals,” Schröder told Climate Home News.
On Wednesday, the US signed 11 bilateral critical minerals agreements with Argentina, the Cook Islands, Ecuador, Guinea, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, the UAE and Uzbekistan. This comes on top of 10 other deals signed in the past five months, including with Australia, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. The EU and the US have committed to conclude a deal within the next 30 days. The US government says the deals will form the basis for global collaboration.
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told a conference on Tuesday that “there is strong interest from another 20 countries” to sign similar deals.
The US also announced the creation of the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement (FORGE), which will succeed the Minerals Security Partnership and enable member countries to collaborate on mineral policy and projects. It will be chaired by South Korea until June.
Prioritising cleantechUS officials emphasised the growing need for minerals to power artificial intelligence, data centres and the digital economy but made no reference to the booming demand from cleantech industries manufacturing batteries, heat pumps, solar panels and wind turbines.
For Schröder, Europe could play a role in shaping the initiative by prioritising cleantech industries.
Any price-floor mechanism “should also be linked to ensuring that mining and processing is done to the highest possible environmental standards” and support efforts to improve supply chain traceability, he said.
The Trump administration argues that setting a minimum price for minerals will help create a stable environment to attract long-term capital into new mining projects.
But how this will work in practice remains unclear and complex. Prices vary for each mineral, each stage of the value chain and across different countries. “All of that needs to be discussed and agreed,” said Schröder, warning that a trading club could easily become “a cartel” and risk breaching World Trade Organisation rules.
Chinese dependenceThe US’s attempt to broker new alliances to secure mineral supplies comes as Washington is seeking to fast-track mining permits at home and announced plans to stockpile minerals to help shield domestic manufacturers from cheaper Chinese competition.
This is particularly acute when it comes to rare earths with China accounting for around 60% of mining output and more than 90% of global rare earths refining capacity.
The Trump administration has doubled down on efforts to diversify its mineral supplies, especially for rare earths, after American manufacturers faced supply shortages last year when China expanded export restrictions amid trade tensions with Washington.
Rare earths are pivotal to producing magnets that are used in wind turbines, electric vehicle motors as well as many other advanced technologies. Both countries reached a deal to lift the restrictions on supplies but some limits are still in place despite the truce.
“We just can’t be in a position where our entire economy… is in a position to be held hostage by someone that could change the world economy through a form of export controls,” US Secretary of the Interior Burgum said on Tuesday.
Yet, for many resource-rich countries, the US’s national security strategy poses the biggest risk to global supply chain stability, said Cory Combs, head of critical mineral research at advisory firm Trivium China.
Ultimately, global efforts to diversify mineral value chain mean China will lose market share. “But it’s not going to lose its advantages,” he told Climate Home News.
“Industry will still buy every Chinese material they can possibly get their hands on, because it’s cheaper, it’s better, it’s faster and more reliable when you don’t have the export controls,” he said.
Project VaultTo help shore up mineral reserves in the short-term, President Donald Trump announced the establishment of a US critical mineral reserve earlier this week.
Project Vault will “ensure that American businesses and workers are never harmed by any shortage – we never want to go through what we went through a year ago,” he said.
The US Export-Import Bank is providing up to $10 billion in loans – the largest deal in the bank’s history – to procure and store minerals in warehouses across the US for manufacturers to use in case of a supply shock.
Dozens of companies have committed an additional $1.67bn in private capital to build up the reserve. EV battery manufacturer Clarios, GE Vernova, which produces wind turbines and grid electrification technologies, as well as carmakers Stellantis and General Motors and planemaker Boeing have said they would participate.
Mineral analysts warn that stockpiling might be a short-term solution to securing minerals but in the case of rare earths it could in fact deepen reliance on Beijing if Chinese supplies remain the cheapest on the market and are therefore used to fill the vault.
The post ‘America needs you’: US seeks trade alliance to break China’s critical mineral dominance appeared first on Climate Home News.
The Olympics are ditching PFAS waxes — and the ‘ridiculous’ speed they gave skiers
Tim Baucom has done this before. The Milan Cortina Games will be his third Olympics as a wax technician for the United States’ cross-country ski team, a job characterized by long flights schlepping tools and duffel bags of gear halfway around the world, and even longer days prepping skis. His objective is to help American athletes gain even a fraction of a second in competition. But for the first time at an Olympics, he won’t have what was once one of the most powerful tools in his kit: fluorinated ski waxes.
In sports where a gold medal can be decided by inches, downhill and cross-country skiers and snowboarders across the competitive spectrum have used so-called “fluoros” since the 1980s. Typically sold as powders or blocks of hard wax, these lubricants are renowned for their ability to wick water and shed grime, making it easier to glide through snow with minimal resistance, especially in warm conditions. “There’s nothing in the chemical world that I’m aware of that can replicate their hydrophobic and dirt-repelling properties,” Baucom said.
But the reason these products work so well is that they contain PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. This class of 15,000 so-called “forever chemicals” is notorious for their harmful effects on human health and the natural world. After years of mounting concern over human exposure and environmental contamination, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, known by its French acronym FIS, banned the use of fluoros in 2023. “I think it kind of is our duty as a winter sport to have some concern for the environment,” said Katherine Stewart-Jones, a cross-country skier who will represent Canada at the Games, which begin tomorrow.
Katherine Stewart-Jones of Canada competes during the Individual Sprint Quali in the FIS Cross-Country World Cup on January 24 in Goms, Switzerland.Leo Authamayou / NordicFocus via Getty Images
While athletes have had two World Cup seasons to get used to the change, this marks the first Winter Games without the advantage conferred by these once-ubiquitous products. It will be the highest-stakes test yet for racers and wax technicians’ ability to work with products that are less effective and more sensitive to what’s happening on the trails and slopes.
“There are a lot more unknowns with the new waxes,” said Julia Kern, a U.S. cross-country skier who has won two World Championship medals and hopes to add Olympic hardware to her collection. “I definitely think it makes it more challenging.”
A technician performs a basic ski wax at Mountain to Sound Outfitters in Seattle. The technician (1) melts hot wax and (2) irons it deep into the ski, then (3) scrapes off the excess wax and (4) brushes it into a smooth layer.People have been lubricating skis for centuries. The History of Lapland, published in 1704, describes Sámi skiers using pine pitch or rosin to create a smooth, waterproof surface for their wooden skis. By the 1800s, athletes were experimenting with glycerin, whale oil, kerosene, and spermaceti, and the early 1900s brought water-repellent shellacs. In the 1940s, the Norwegian company Swix — a portmanteau of “ski” and “wax” — helped popularize petroleum-derived paraffin waxes.
PFAS proliferated after the 1938 invention of Teflon — the stuff used in nonstick pots and pans — and were added to everything from takeout containers and outdoor clothing to firefighting foam and upholstery. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that PFAS made their way to skiing and snowboarding. These chemicals promised greater speed with less fuss in changing conditions. California entrepreneur Terry Hertel was among the first to dabble with the stuff after buying a fluorocarbon sample from the chemical company 3M. After realizing they made skis “faster than anything before,” he began adding fluorocarbons to his company’s waxes. Companies like Toko and Swix quickly followed.
Nathan Schultz, a former U.S. cross-country racer who now owns a ski shop in Denver, remembers trying fluoro formulas for the first time in the mid-‘90s. “You put that stuff on your skis and it was like you were floating,” he said. Quantifying the exact advantage they conferred was difficult, since cross-country, downhill, and snowboard courses vary widely and race-day conditions differ from season to season. Still, he said, the effects were tangible, especially on wet snow. At first, fluoros were predominantly used by racers at important events because of their high cost. But by the time Schultz retired in 2006, everyone was using them.
“If you tried to do a race without fluorinated wax, you would not be competitive,” Schultz said. “The amount of speed you could buy on your skis was really ridiculous.”
An article from the January 1989 issue of Ski Magazine alludes to the exclusive advantages that come from expensive fluorinated waxes. Gary Hovland / Ski MagazineThere was only one problem: The world could no longer ignore the dangers of PFAS. The chemicals were turning up everywhere, contaminating soil, food, and drinking water. Studies increasingly linked exposure to thyroid disease, developmental problems, and cancer.
Baucom experienced that growing awareness himself, first as a collegiate racer and, starting in the late aughts, as a professional cross-country ski tech. Talk of the health risks was swirling through his sport’s often cramped and poorly ventilated wax rooms, where techs heated fluoro wax and ironed it into ski bases, kicking vapors and particulates into the air along the way. Wearing a mask or cracking a window provided only so much protection. “Any time you’re breathing in fumes and smoke, no matter what it is, it’s probably not great for you,” said Baucom, who was concerned about the growing body of research on the chemicals’ health risks. “It was pretty obvious right out the gate that these products have potential carcinogenic components.”
Evidence of the risk mounted throughout the 2010s. One particularly alarming study from 2010 found that PFAS accumulated in the bodies of Scandinavian wax technicians, whose blood levels of the compound PFOA averaged 25 times higher than those of the general population. A 2024 study later confirmed the concentrations in people like Baucom “are among the highest of any occupation investigated to date.”
“There was high exposure intensity, frequency, and duration,” said Kate Crawford, an author of the more recent research and an assistant professor of environmental studies at Middlebury College.
John Steel Hagenbuch, a Nordic, or cross-country, skier on the U.S. Ski Team, recently had his blood tested and discovered his PFAS levels are higher than average. “The main concern with [PFAS] is that they’re so persistent,” he said. “They can remain in your blood or in water for a really long time.”
PFAS’s durability means these chemicals don’t break down as they move from skis to snow and then into the soil and nearby watersheds. The full extent of contamination remains difficult to quantify, but growing evidence suggests it extends well beyond wax rooms.
Read Next The EPA is rolling back drinking water limits for 4 PFAS. Thousands more remain unregulated. Joseph WintersIn 2021, officials in Park City, Utah, detected the compounds in three wells drawing from an underground aquifer, including one near the start line of White Pine Touring Nordic Center race course. At first, water quality specialist Michelle De Haan suspected firefighting foam, but local agencies hadn’t used it. She later came across a study examining fluorinated race lubricants and, of the 14 related compounds identified in the study, 11 matched those found in the city’s aquifer. “That became a clearer picture to us,” De Haan said. While not definitive on its own, the finding suggested a likely link — one echoed by sampling in Europe that has found elevated PFAS levels on ski slopes there too.
The impact can be especially significant when ski racers bring PFAS to places that might not otherwise be contaminated. “In some instances, people would be [using fluorinated waxes] in relatively pristine areas,” said Crawford. “It becomes a relatively significant environmental problem.”
For years, these issues with ski wax lurked in plain sight. But as scientists learned more, the ski and snowboard community found itself caught between the knowledge that fluoros carried serious risks and the desire for easy speed.
By the late 2010s, the unease surrounding PFAS had begun to shape policy that impacted, or even targeted, ski waxes. Regulators in the U.S. and Europe restricted some of the most-studied PFAS, in part by requiring manufacturers to get formal approval before using them in new applications. A handful of smaller races implemented their own fluoro bans — “wax truces,” as Schultz described them — though it remained difficult to compete without them in events that didn’t participate.
Momentum grew in 2019, when the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, or FIS, announced plans for a blanket ban covering all 7,000 Nordic, Alpine, and snowboard competitions under its purview, including the World Cup. The decision elicited “surprise/shock,” said Lars Karlöf, the sanctioning body’s technical adviser, but it was intended to “limit the environmental impact of our activities as much as possible.”
That’s when Swix disposed of its stockpile of fluoro waxes, says Geoff Hurwitch, commercial director for Swix USA. While he’s not sure exactly how much the company got rid of, or how it did so, he knows it was “a lot.” But, he said, it was no longer in compliance with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards and the company knew it wasn’t going to be able to sell it anyway. Jeremy Hecker, chief of operations at the ski division of another wax company, Rex Wax, said the move away from fluoros resulted in up to $30,000 in “dead inventory” — containers of fluoros that have either been destroyed or are collecting dust in storage.
The FIS ban, while announced in 2019, did not take effect until the winter of 2023. Other sanctioning bodies, resorts and even towns across North America and Europe followed suit. Park City, for example, went fluoro-free in 2023 and allowed skiers and snowboarders to swap their stash for eco-friendlier options. TIn the fluoro ban’s first year, the city collected more than 600 pounds of the polluting wax during the ban’s first year.
Technicians wax skis at the Falun World Cup in 2023.Leann Bentley / U.S. Ski & Snowboard
Overall, the transition has worked “relatively smoothly,” said Knut Nystad, a wax technician for the Norwegian Ski Association. Kern, the U.S. cross-country skier, attributes that in part to the culture of the sport. “People in the cross-country community are very environmentally conscious,” she said. “They want to have clean water, they value their health a lot.”
That broad buy-in, however, doesn’t mean the change has been seamless.
One complication involves testing and enforcement. Because fluorinated compounds do not break down easily, traces can linger even on skis and snowboards that have been thoroughly cleaned, leading to false positives. But the steepest learning curve has been for the teams as technicians and athletes adjusted to a new generation of waxes.
“It took a while for technicians to learn the new chemistry,” said Julia Mehre Ystgaard, who works withcoordinates Canada’s Nordic World Cup team. Schultz said early fluoro-free waxes were “very inferior” to fluorinated options. “It was kind of crazy,” he said. A ski might feel “pretty good” in one sunny stretch of a course and “terrible” in a shadier section.
The modern alternatives still tend to be slower, and as U.S. cross-country skier Hagenbuch put it, they don’t do as well in late-season snow that’s warm and wet “like mashed potatoes.” He said it has become more common for his team to “miss the wax,” meaning skis aren’t well matched to the day’s conditions. Kern agreed, adding that the effect is especially noticeable on downhills. “You’re right behind [someone] at the top of a hill, and then they just pull away even though you’re in the draft where you should be pulling up on them,” she said.
That impact can be compoundingly decisive: Less glide at the bottom of a hill makes it harder to crest the next one, and less lubrication demands more effort to maintain speed. Suddenly an athlete is off the podium. Alpine and snowboard races are generally much shorter than Nordic events — minutes versus potentially hours — but the high speeds and friction also make wax choice critical.
“Fluoros were easier because fluoros were fast,” Hagenbuch said. “[They] have been referred to as, like, a ‘great equalizer.’”
John Steel Hagenbuch, a cross-country skier on the U.S. Ski Team, says professional skiers are struggling to adapt to non-fluorinated waxes. Hagenbuch describes fast fluorinated waxes as “a great equalizer.”Dustin Satloff / NCAA via Getty Images
Hurwitch, at Swix, says the new class of waxes are three to five years away from being as fast as the fluoros, and that company chemists are putting in thousands of kilometers of testing to reach that goal. Until then, however, the great equalizer is gone and other determinants of speed have taken on outsize importance. That, of course, includes physical conditioning and technique. You have to “make sure you have the steak first before you add the salt or the pepper,” said Nystad. But choosing the right equipment has become more important too.
The art of grinding skis has become especially critical. The process involves passing a ski or snowboard over stone, to inlay a pattern designed for a specific snow condition, or set of conditions, like a tire tread. Zach Caldwell, a former Nordic racer and owner of a Vermont ski shop, said this is one reason he’s seen a “dramatic” increase in the number of cross-country skis teenage racers buy: so they can have pairs optimized for different circumstances. Baucom, the wax tech, said these pre-wax decisions once accounted for 80 to 90 percent of a Nordic setup’s speed, but without fluoros they now account for as much as 97 percent.
The shift has raised concerns about competitive balance. While fluoros weren’t cheap, they were less expensive than perfecting grinds on an ever-larger armada of skis. Grinding machines alone can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and require tremendous expertise to run. Some athletes worry that this gives an advantage to countries like Norway — home to many major ski and wax companies — with deeper research budgets and larger wax tech teams.
Hagenbuch said fluoros “brought the delta between how good people’s skis were together.” Without them, the gaps are remerging. He pointed to a December skiathlon in Trondheim, Norway, where his teammate Gus Schumacher was in contention for a medal yet finished 21st. Something similar happened at a 50-kilometer race last March, where only one athlete on Schumacher’s brand of skis finished in the top 20.
“It wasn’t the wax. It wasn’t the athlete. … That was the skis,” said Hecker, with Rex Wax. And anyone with the wrong skis in Milano-Cortina will almost certainly miss their shot at the podium — something no amount of non-fluorinated wax will fix.
Fluorinated ski wax, once ubiquitous among professional skiers, will be banned from the 2026 Winter Olympics over concerns of PFAS pollution. Jesse Nichols / GristEven as fluorinated waxes disappear from competition, some athletes and technicians caution against assuming all problems have been solved. Nystad was among several people who noted that there’s no guarantee replacement products are benign. “A lot of people think that a fluoro ban means that now all waxes are healthy and you can almost use it as a jam on your sandwich and eat it,” he said. “But that’s not the case … You could have other chemicals in there that are not equally harmful, but that are harmful to nature and to individuals.”
Because formulas are proprietary, it can be difficult to know exactly what newer waxes contain. They likely include petroleum-derived ingredients that can transfer to snowpacks. Even so, some industry insiders question how much attention wax deserves compared with snow sports’ other environmental implications. “It doesn’t make sense to me to discuss the environmental impacts of this until we have really cleared house on the environmental impact of travel, and the food we eat, and the clothes that we wear,” Caldwell said.
Ski and snowboarding wax is also a minor contributor to the PFAS problem, globally. Crawford called it a “comparative drop in the bucket,” pointing to the fact that almost all commercial carpeting in the world is laden with PFAS. But the relative success of the ban in ski waxes is unique and could offer lessons — and hope — to anyone trying to get the chemicals out of other products.
“There are always options,” said Hurwitch, noting that none of Swix’s new products — from outerwear to waxes — contain PFAS. “The water repellency in jackets may not be as good as it was with a PFAS based product but it’s still a great product. The wax may not be quite as reliably fast, yet, but for the vast majority of us skiers, it’s still plenty fast. It will come though.”
The Olympic cross-country schedule begins Saturday with the women’s skiathlon. Kern will be racing at her second Games in temperatures that are expected to hover around freezing, where wax could be crucial. “We’re pretty much always testing skis,” she said. “We have to rely on and trust our wax team.”
Hagenbuch will make his Olympic debut in Milan Cortina. The ban creates additional stress, he admits, but he believes it’s worth it. “For Tim and the other service technicians and for me and for our groundwater and for the environment, yeah, I think it’s good that we don’t do fluoros,” he said. “Do I miss them? Yeah, a little bit.”
toolTips('.classtoolTips11','An acronym for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are a class of chemicals used in everyday items like nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and food packaging that have proven to be dangerous to human health. Also called “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down over time, PFAS can be found lingering nearly everywhere — in water, soil, air, and the blood of people and animals.');
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Olympics are ditching PFAS waxes — and the ‘ridiculous’ speed they gave skiers on Feb 5, 2026.
Vegan fine dining had a moment. Now it’s over.
When then 31-year-old Brazilian culinary student Letícia Dias walked into Eleven Madison Park on a Sunday evening last August, she had no idea a meal was about to change her life. A longtime vegan, it was her first time dining at the world-class New York City luxury restaurant, which in 2021 made the bold move to ditch meat and dairy and offer a fully plant-based menu. When her lips met the deceptively simple-looking corn velouté, something new clicked between her taste buds and brain.
“I drank that, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is insane,’” Dias recalled. “Like, I understand why this is different than other places that I’ve been to.”
It wasn’t just the food that made the dinner unlike any she’d ever had. It was also the ambience and level of personal attention — the mid-meal tour of the famously quiet kitchen, the waitstaff appearing seemingly from nowhere to refill her water glass between sips, and the stories that accompanied each dish down to the ingredient.
Eleven Madison Park, also known by its initials, EMP, has long been considered a bucket list destination for serious foodies. In 2017, it appeared at the top of a list of the world’s 50 best restaurants. After it dropped meat and dairy, it became the first restaurant in the world to be awarded three Michelin stars for a fully plant-based menu. For vegan cooks in training like Dias, who does not want to work with animal products, EMP’s shift away from meat opened up an elite career opportunity. The restaurant has long had a robust training program that helps aspiring chefs cut their teeth and gain valuable skills for the luxury food world and beyond.
“It’s a teaching institution,” said Matt Ricotta, owner of the plant-based cottage bakery Manifold in Venice, California, who was a pastry intern at the restaurant in 2022. “It’s one of those famous, famous places where everyone wants to go and learn.”
A maître d’ at Eleven Madison Park in New York City checks the dining room before dinner in 2017.Spencer Platt / Getty Images
By the time her meal was over, Dias had decided she wanted to apply to EMP for her externship — a temporary, entry-level kitchen job required by many culinary schools to help graduating students gain experience and valuable industry connections. After the staff found out she was a vegan culinary student, one of the chefs even gave her their business card.
So it was a shock when, just three days after Dias’ visit, Eleven Madison Park chef and owner Daniel Humm announced that the restaurant would be adding a limited amount of meat and dairy back to the menu — say, an optional cameo of lavender-glazed duck here, an if-you-want-it lobster course there — starting in October 2025. Humm told The New York Times that the change was meant to attract a wider base of guests, both for financial reasons and to reflect a hospitality philosophy of wanting to welcome everyone.
As the news spread, concern grew among the members of Dias’s cohort at the Institute of Culinary Education, where she was enrolled in a program geared toward vegetarian and vegan chefs. Just the day before, one of her classmates, Autumn Henson, had sent their completed externship application to the institute’s career adviser to forward to the restaurant. An experienced vegan baker, Henson had wanted exposure to plant-based haute cooking at a place with name recognition: “It’s important that there’s [vegan] representation at all levels,” they explained.
But as soon as Henson heard the news, they rushed to a computer and quickly shot off a follow-up message. “The subject line was, ‘Don’t send in my application to EMP.”
Likewise, Dias decided to put aside her partially finished EMP externship application and look for employers with a fully vegan menu. “The options for if you want to do plant-based fine dining are few and far between, and getting fewer,” she said.
Even before Eleven Madison Park’s menu change, opportunities to train in exclusively plant-based, high-end kitchens were scarce. The short list of such restaurants in New York City — a city with more vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants than anywhere else in the country — already meant cooks like Dias and Henson have a harder time finding their place within the ultra competitive food industry. As more elite kitchens step back from fully plant-based cooking, the ripple effects go beyond individual careers: Fewer chefs trained in plant-based techniques means fewer restaurants able to execute them at a high level, and fewer chances for plant-forward dishes to shape what ends up on menus more broadly.
At a moment when experts say cutting back on meat and dairy is essential to a sustainable diet, the loss of these training grounds could slow the cultural shift needed to make that future feel both desirable and delicious.
Kimberly Elliott / GristEven for more established vegan cooks, part of what made Eleven Madison Park’s return to meat so upsetting was that it had once represented the ultimate achievement for sustainable cuisine, the ascent to the top of the American cultural food chain.
Within the world of fine dining, vegan kitchens share many of the same hallmarks as traditional haute dining establishments — prix fixe menus, meticulous presentation, premium ingredients, and a price tag that’s typically north of $100 per person (before drinks!). And yet the concept of a luxurious, formal, plant-based meal is still a culinary outlier in many parts of the United States, with many top-tier restaurants only emerging within the last few decades.
Like the Michelin star system itself — a rating guide that has become the go-to barometer for ranking the world’s best restaurants — special occasion food has historically been dominated by French culinary tradition, which is heavily reliant on meat and dairy. The 1960s through 1980s saw the rise of nouvelle cuisine, a lighter style of French cooking that emphasized simplicity and freshness and ditched heavy sauces, yet remained firmly tied to animal products.
That’s not to say delicious vegan fare didn’t exist, of course. Yet in popular culture, it was largely associated with healthful self-denial. In many restaurants, diners who eschewed meat often found themselves poking at plates of steamed vegetables over brown rice — hardly cause for gastronomic celebration.
But in the early 1990s, that started to change. Millennium Restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area was an early pioneer of upscale vegan cooking when it opened in 1994, offering world cuisine-influenced dishes like tempeh glazed with Filipino-style banana barbecue sauce and a cornmeal-crusted maitake mushroom over grits drizzled with Calabrian chile sofrito oil. In the late aughts, vegetarian fine dining restaurant Dirt Candy in New York City gained national acclaim for its trailblazing playfulness with vegetables, like sweet cauliflower chilaquiles for dessert. Next came Vedge in Philadelphia, Crossroads Kitchen in Los Angeles, Avant Garden in New York, and other elevated vegan restaurants that helped nudge plants from the appetizer menu to the main course in the 2010s.
Then came the COVID pandemic. While American restaurants in general struggled, interest in plant-based diets peaked. During the pandemic, the plant-based food industry expanded by 27 percent, according to a survey conducted by the consumer group Strategic Market Research. Whether they were motivated by concerns over health, the climate impacts of meat and dairy, or the ethics of consuming animal products, increased consumer demand for plant-based products could be seen in grocery aisles and white tablecloth restaurants alike.
But it wasn’t until Eleven Madison Park’s 2021 divestment from meat and dairy that vegan fare became associated with the ultimate level of culinary luxury, which has since come to also include other plant-based dining destinations such as Fabrik in Austin, Texas; Astera in Portland, Oregon; and Michelin-starred MITA in Washington, D.C.
Chef Miguel Guerra (right) confers with guests in the dining room at MITA restaurant in Washington, D.C., in 2024. Scott Suchman for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesFor the last few years, upscale vegan restaurants have provided new training grounds for the next generation of vegan chefs and bakers, many of whom have taken those plant-based lessons beyond the haute dining scene.
Internships and externships in vegan fine dining kitchens teach budding plant-based cooks things that omnivorous kitchens teach, too — like how to chop vegetables on a very, very, very even dice — which you can either call fundamentals or grunt work. (Both descriptions are true.) But these experiences also usually teach some of the skills that are especially important for vegan haute cookery.
More so than meat dishes, cooking fine plant-based fare requires an advanced understanding of what ingredients are at the peak of their season and ripeness, and how to prepare them in ways that accentuate their flavor, said Dan Marek, director of plant-based culinary and content development at Rouxbe Online Culinary School. Cooks training in haute vegan restaurants might gain specialized skills that are highly tailored to the chef’s approach or to the cuisine the restaurant serves. If they’re at a fancy vegan sushi place, they might learn how to roll vegan sushi. Elsewhere, maybe they’d learn spherification, a molecular gastronomy technique that forms tiny, liquid-filled pearlettes that look like caviar but can taste like anything — Key lime, passionfruit, a peak September tomato.
Whole roasted carrots with black lentils and green harissa prepared by Rich Landau of Vedge in Philadelphia and his wife, co-owner Kate Jacoby.Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post via Getty Images
At the pastry station of many high-end vegan kitchens, pastry cooks need to be versed in using plant-based baking substitutes, especially butter. Ricotta of Manifold Bakery said his internship at Eleven Madison Park helped him grasp the importance of using acidic ingredients and generous amounts of salt to heighten flavor, plus exposed him to vegan substitutes and thickeners — part of what he believes sets apart his plant-based baking style today.
“All that came from my time there,” he said. Ricotta said that if he were seeking an internship today, the presence of meat on the restaurant’s menu wouldn’t dissuade him, so long as the pastry program remained fully vegan. Eleven Madison Park says it will “at this time.”
Vegan fine-dining chefs who stay in that part of the field and open their own restaurants also need to eventually learn, or at least consider, the extra element of performance that some restaurants leverage to help vegetable-only dishes feel worthy of a lofty price tag. Eleven Madison Park brought that to the plant-based culinary scene with dishes like its famous carrot tartare, ground at the table and mixed up by the diners themselves, like a big, playful wink at steakhouse expectations.
But for all its innovation in the kitchen, plant-based eating recently began showing signs of trend fatigue. Meat is making a cultural and political comeback in America. Carni-bros, farm-to-table acolytes, and people looking for easy, protein-filled weeknight recipes alike are on the bandwagon. In January, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released updated federal dietary guidelines that championed red meat and dairy in a major reversal of previous recommendations.
It wasn’t the ideal professional landscape for Dias and Henson, as they looked for other plant-based externship options in New York last August. Going down the list of high-end plant-based restaurants in New York, they discovered their options were rapidly dwindling. In 2025, at least 20 well-known vegan restaurants in the city closed permanently, two others closed temporarily, and another two, including Eleven Madison Park, de-veganized.
While restaurant turnover is part of the food industry, it’s notable that most of the recently shuttered vegan businesses in New York are not being replaced by new vegan eateries. Marek attributes a broader nationwide contraction to an overly saturated market: The U.S. restaurant scene got to a point where there were more plant-based eateries than the market of vegan and vegan-curious eaters could actually support. “We’re seeing a lot of closures in the past year,” he said — more than can be attributed to the inherent challenge of targeting a niche clientele.
“The bigger the swell, the bigger the fall.”
Kimberly Elliott / GristThough the vegan restaurant scene has shrunk compared to its post-pandemic high, it’s by no means gone. There are still about a dozen high-end meatless restaurants in the Big Apple alone. A few — like Dirt Candy, Bodai, and Omakaseed — are formal fine dining, centered on tasting menus. Others, like abcV and Avant Garden, are upscale, with enough gastronomic ingenuity to be listed on the Michelin guide. Dirt Candy is the lone one in the bunch with a Michelin star, one of just a few meatless restaurants nationwide with the honor.
Before applying to Eleven Madison Park, Dias had applied to almost all the city’s high-end vegan kitchens, including Omakaseed and the vegan restaurants owned by the groups Overthrow Hospitality and City Roots Hospitality. But by the end of August, she hadn’t gotten any replies. She decided to look beyond the city’s entirely plant-based upscale options, applying to abcV, which is vegetarian and is owned by renowned French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant group. The restaurant’s use of some eggs gave Dias pause, but abcV is still considered vegan-friendly. She really admired its approach to letting vegetables be vegetables instead of leaning on meat substitutes.
“It’s like school. Sometimes the benefits outweigh whatever I may feel,” she said.
Henson, meanwhile, had also sent an externship application to Overthrow Hospitality, which owns Avant Garden and the elevated homemade pasta spot Soda Club among others, but didn’t hear back. (Overthrow Hospitality later told Grubstreet that it plans to close almost all of its New York City restaurants “over time” in favor of launching a national chain of pizza-and-pasta locations.) After inquiring about City Roots Hospitality, they learned the vegan group doesn’t take externs. After doing a trail (or job tryout) at both abcV and Dirt Candy — two restaurants they were excited about — they learned that Dirt Candy’s sole externship spot had gone to another plant-based student in their culinary class.
“I gotta say, it’s been a little harder than I thought,” they said to Grist about a month into their search.
Lunchtime diners at abcV, a vegan restaurant in New York City. Deb Lindsey For The Washington Post via Getty ImagesOutside the U.S., plant-based fine dining and training pathways into it for budding vegan chefs look like they may actually be expanding, inch by inch — even in France, of all places. Arpège, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris helmed by chef Alain Passard, said last summer that it would ditch all animal products except honey. The French culinary school Le Cordon Bleu, meanwhile, has launched plant-based cooking and pastry programs at its Paris, London, Malaysia, São Paolo, and other locations over the past several years.
But inside the U.S., the spotty landscape of meatless culinary school training opportunities just took a hit. While Henson and Dias were still in classes at the Institute of Culinary Education, they learned that their program, which had been entirely vegetarian, would be changing beginning with the following cohort. A previous iteration of the program had been plant-forward but with some instruction in poultry and seafood — taking inspiration from the shuttered vegetable-centric culinary education pioneer the Natural Gourmet Institute. Last fall, the institute’s vegetarian program reverted back to this model, reincorporating a few lessons with chicken, fish, and shellfish.
That shift may not matter much for early-career cooks who are flexible on the presence of meat in their educational program. It might even be helpful for broadening their career opportunities, since they’d be well-poised for work in a vegan kitchen but could also walk into a traditional kitchen knowing how to filet a fish. Vegan or plant-forward chefs who are OK with the presence of meat in their work environment have more places to do haute vegan cooking than those who draw the line at steak. There are 20 or so Michelin-starred omnivorous restaurants around the country that offer dedicated vegan or vegetarian tasting menus — The French Laundry, Le Bernardin, Per Se, and now Eleven Madison Park among them. Many more without a Michelin star do the same. The field of vegetable-centric restaurants that serve meat is much larger.
But for vegan chefs like Dias and Henson who really want to avoid meat due to their personal convictions, shifts like the ones at Eleven Madison Park and the Institute for Culinary Education make it harder to see themselves in the field at all. The U.S. now has only one major professional culinary school offering a vegetarian culinary diploma in person — the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Boulder, Colorado. (Escoffier didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether it has any plans to incorporate more animal products into its in-person or online program.) Marek said Rouxbe’s online programs, which he described as “1,000-percent vegan,” aren’t going anywhere.
While Dias and Henson were willing to apply to vegetarian externships, both said that they wouldn’t have attended the Institute for Culinary Education at all if their program had included poultry and seafood. “I feel kind of lucky that I got in while it was still meat-free,” Henson said.
Courtesy of Autumn HensonThat wasn’t Henson’s only break. In late September, they finally received an externship offer — from abcV, the same restaurant where Dias was training — with a starting date in early October.
A few days into the role, Henson started running the restaurant’s dosa station solo. Dias, who started a few weeks earlier, had recently learned how to make abcV’s Sichuan tomato broth for her favorite dish — wontons filled with late-summer sweet corn and shiitake mushrooms. She was getting additional instruction in how seasonality figured into the design of a tangy heirloom tomato salad served with fruit. She watched how the chefs chose different fruits to include, depending on what they got from the farmers market.
“It’s always so beautifully presented,” Dias said.
In mid-November, Dias finished her externship, which she called “very enriching.” Between her time at culinary school and abcV, she felt ready to move forward with her dream of menu consulting, developing vegan recipes for omnivorous restaurants, beginning with her family’s. By December, she was back in Brazil, feverishly developing plant-based dishes for a new pan-Asian bar-restaurant her family was opening before Christmas.
Henson’s time at abcV looked a little different. They ended up staying at the dosa station for the entirety of their two-and-a-half-month externship due to what they described as “worker shortages.” When their training ended, they decided to leave haute cuisine and continue their vegan bakery business in California, with the goal of eventually scaling it up to wholesale.
Reflecting back on their externship, Henson was glad they’d done it but had mixed feelings about its utility. The experience had given them new skills, including familiarity with new produce and herbs — helpful knowledge for developing their own future vegan pastry flavors. But compared to culinary school, which had given them more breadth of knowledge, they weren’t sure it had been truly necessary. They felt it would have been essential — probably more so than school — if they had gone into actual restaurant work, fine dining or otherwise.
In the end, Henson saw their externship less as a prerequisite than as one narrow path among too few.
Fine dining has long functioned as a testing ground for ideas that eventually reach far beyond white tablecloths and Michelin stars. Techniques, flavors, and expectations incubated in elite kitchens tend to migrate outward, influencing what other restaurants attempt and what diners come to want. As fewer of those kitchens commit fully to plant-based cooking, the question isn’t only where vegan chefs will train. It’s whether the knowledge needed to make vegetable-centered food feel ambitious, indulgent, and culturally central will continue to spread at all — or quietly slip off the menu.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Vegan fine dining had a moment. Now it’s over. on Feb 5, 2026.
Indigenous concerns surface as Trump calls for seabed mining in Alaskan waters
President Donald Trump is considering allowing companies to lease more than 113 million acres of waters off Alaska for seabed mining. Alaska is the latest of several places Trump has sought to open to the fledging industry over the past year, including waters around American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Like those Pacific islands, Alaska is home to Indigenous peoples with ancestral ties to the ocean, and the proposal is raising cultural and environmental concerns.
Deep-sea mining, the practice of scraping minerals off the ocean floor for commercial products like electric vehicle batteries and military technology, is not yet a commercial industry. It’s been slowed by the lack of regulations governing permits in international waters and by concerns about the environmental impact of extracting minerals that formed over millions of years. Scientists have warned the practice could damage fisheries and fragile ecosystems that could take millennia to recover. Indigenous peoples have also pushed back, citing violations of their rights to consent to projects in their territories.
Trump, however, has voiced strong support for the industry as part of his effort to make the United States a leader in critical mineral production. He has also pushed for U.S. companies to mine in international waters, bypassing ongoing global negotiations over international mining regulations.
Kate Finn, a citizen of the Osage Nation and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute Center for Indigenous Economic Stewardship in Colorado, said she worries the seabed mining industry will repeat the mistakes of land-based mining.
“The terrestrial mining industry has not gotten it right with regards to Indigenous peoples,” Finn said. “Indigenous peoples have the right to give and to withdraw consent. Mining companies themselves need to design their operations around that right.”
It’s not yet clear which companies, if any, are interested in mining off Alaska. A spokesperson for The Metals Company, one of the leading publicly traded firms in the industry, said it has no plans to expand to Alaska. Oliver Gunasekara, chief executive officer of the startup Impossible Metals — which has asked Trump to allow mining around American Samoa despite Samoan opposition — said his company has no plans either.
“We do not have current plans in Alaska, as we do not know what resources are in the ocean,” he said. “If there are good nodule resources, we would be very interested.”
Read Next American Samoa says no to deep-sea mining. The Trump administration might do it anyway. Anita HofschneiderThe potential lease area under consideration is larger than the state of California. Cooper Freeman, director of Alaska operations for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said the scope is so broad that it includes ecologically important waters already closed to bottom trawling, a fishing method that drags heavy nets across the seafloor.
“A lot of these areas, particularly in the Aleutians, have been put off limits for bottom trawling because there are nurseries for commercially important fish and ecologically important species and habitat, ” Freeman said.
In its announcement, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, the agency responsible for regulating deep-sea mining, said the proposed area included depths more than 4 miles deep near the Aleutian Trench and the abyssal plains of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, at depths as low as 3.5 miles. “BOEM is particularly interested in areas that have been identified by [the U.S. Geological Survey] as prospective for critical minerals as well as heavy minerals sands along the Seward Peninsula and Bering Sea coast.”
The waters are off the coast of a state that is home to more than 200 Alaska Native nations. Jasmine Monroe, who is Inupiaq, Yupik, and Cherokee, grew up in the village of Elim in Alaska’s Bering Strait region. She said she became concerned about what the proposal could mean for the seafood her community relies on after learning the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management opened up a 30-day public comment period last week on potential leases.
“We eat beluga meat, we eat walrus, we eat seal, we eat whale,” she said. “Whatever happens in the ocean, it really does affect our way of life.”
“It just feels like we don’t have any say on whether it happens or not,” she said. “It just feels like the system is set up for failure for us.”
The Alaska Federation of Natives, an organization representing Indigenous peoples of Alaska, did not respond to requests for comment.
Monroe, who works on water quality issues at the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, said she feels disempowered by what she described as a top-down approach and short timelines for public input.
Kate Finn from the Tallgrass Institute said Indigenous peoples have the right under international law to consent to activities in their territories and warned that U.S. federal regulations alone may not be sufficient for companies to meet international legal standards, particularly amid deregulation.
“Companies will miss that if they’re only relying on the U.S. federal government for consultation,” she said.
Finn added that Indigenous nations have their own economic and cultural priorities and that some have chosen to work with mining companies under specific conditions.
“There are Indigenous peoples who work well with companies and invite mining into their territories, and there is a track record there as well,” she said.
Monroe said she recognizes that seabed mining could supply minerals used in technologies like electric vehicle batteries, similar to other mining proposals she’s opposed in Alaska including a graphite mine that could pollute waters. But she doesn’t see electric vehicles in her community, and said the environmental and cultural cost is too high.
“It really feels like another false solution,” she said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous concerns surface as Trump calls for seabed mining in Alaskan waters on Feb 5, 2026.
Paraguay: An exclusionary model forged under dictatorship | ICARRD+20 Series
The economic model imposed during the Stroessner regime consolidated a dependent and extractive latifundia structure geared toward the production of raw materials for foreign capital.
The post Paraguay: An exclusionary model forged under dictatorship | ICARRD+20 Series appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
IWW Leipzig: Debanking stoppen!
Knapp 400 Organisationen (Stand 04.02.), darunter auch die IWW Leipzig, haben den offenen Brief gegen die Kontenkündigungen mehrerer linker Organisationen unterschrieben. Mit dem sogenannten Debanking wird politische Arbeit empfindlich gestört. Wir sind solidarisch mit all jenen, die für ihre antifaschistische, emanzipatorische und gewerkschaftliche Arbeit angegriffen werden. Auch hier gilt: Ein Angriff auf eine*n, ist ein Angriff auf alle!
Den offenen Brief findet ihr hier!
Weitere Infos zum Netzwerk Debanking Stoppen hier: debankingstoppen.de
Die IWW Leipzig
Der Beitrag IWW Leipzig: Debanking stoppen! erschien zuerst auf Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) im deutschsprachigen Raum.
First four turbines erected on expansion project that will deliver state’s biggest wind farm
The first four of 30 new turbines at the Warradarge wind farm have been erected, with the rest due to be up by August.
The post First four turbines erected on expansion project that will deliver state’s biggest wind farm appeared first on Renew Economy.
All you need is love
February 3, 2026 Read Greenaction & Allies Written Comments to California EPA/Department of Toxic Substances Control critiquing pro-polluter draft regulations on hazardous waste facility permit criteria on cumulative impacts and community vulnerability
February 3, 2026
Read Greenaction & Allies Written Comments to California EPA/Department of Toxic Substances Control critiquing, pro-polluter draft regulations on hazardous waste facility permit criteria on cumulative impacts and community vulnerability.
Click below to Read
Comment_Updated-Hazardous-Waste-Facility-Permit-Criteria_2026-02-03
Mexico: Final Declaration of the VIII Continental Congress of CLOC-Via Campesina
From 2 to 9 December 2025, the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC) held its VIII Continental Congress to reflect on the challenges, threats, and concerns facing its peoples; in the search for initiatives, actions, articulations, and proposals to achieve food sovereignty and systemic transformation.
The post Mexico: Final Declaration of the VIII Continental Congress of CLOC-Via Campesina appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.
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