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File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

File:  ltr to Congress, 76 scientists 2012.pdfResource Type: Letters

Former Earth First! Journal editor Russ McSpadden just released a book of poems about the borderlands. What follows is an announcement of the book by publisher Logan Philips of Artspeak Press and the DirtyVerbs blog.

Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, 2020. Photo: Russ McSpadden

Entire mountainsides were being blown up, their green and tan living skins sloughing off to reveal the rock talc of their bones. Then the machines moved in, grinding, clawing, hauling – flattening. Ancient water was pulled from the earth and sprayed out by the truckload just to keep down the dust. This was – and is – the building of the border wall, slicing across the landscape of my heart, the land that raised me – and I was watching it all from the comfort of my own home.

This was 2020 after all. There was a pandemic raging and I was sheltering in place with Spring and the kids, then six years old. But of course not everyone would or could stay home. Even when I’d break quarantine to go into the streets to protest that hot summer, I would come home to this:

watching the destruction of the rising border wall on Twitter, via the camera lenses of those who were in the field doing the work of witness.

I didn’t know them personally then, but came to know their work intimately, near obsessively. Russ McSpadden and Laiken Jordahl were spending days and nights camped out in the remotest areas of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. The world could watch the messy, unnecessary and destructive spectacle thanks to them. Others such as Amber Ortega (Hia Ced O’odham) and Nellie Jo David (Tohono O’odham) were physically putting their bodies and voices on the line to protect the land, water and living creatures.

Later I had the honor of meeting them ‘in real life:’ Amber was (an amazing!) featured poet at our Cultivating Culture series last year at Tucson’s Mission Garden, and I was introduced to Russ by the writer and artist Johanna Skibsrud. Turns out many of us were deeply traumatized by watching what had happened (is happening) to the land, especially those who saw, heard, and smelled it first hand.

Turns out poetry was key in helping Russ process what he had witnessed: the intricate and beautiful biocultural life of these diverse ecosystems riven by greed and steel.

(And here, let’s be clear: there has never been an “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border, and people have always – always – moved between regions. The border wall is unnecessary and ineffective in its stated goals. The true, primary function of the border wall continues to be a massive transfer of public wealth from the tax-paying, working people of the U.S. to the bank accounts of a network of ultra-wealthy Trump cronies and construction company owners who bribed him via “campaign contributions.” The definitive book has yet to be written on this, but in the meantime I highly recommend The Case for Open Borders by John Washington – more book recs below!)

Russ and I got to know each other as I joined him on trips in the field, and bonded during the successful civil disobedience that stopped former Arizona Governor Ducey’s stunt of building a border wall out of old shipping containers.

I was impressed as I read Russ’s poems. There’s a clarity and precision to them that creates a very human opening.

The pain of capitalist extraction juxtaposed with the beauty of parenting and the ecosystems that hold us.

I wanted the world to be able to witness not only the images of destruction, but also understand what was happening from the perspective of a human heart.

So after many conversations, Russ and I agreed that I should publish his debut book of poems.

see the book

I’ve had Artspeak Press for years. This was the imprint I used for my early chapbooks starting with Arroyo Ink in 2009, then shifting to support Spoken Futures Press in publishing youth poets throughout the 2010’s. More recently the Press was the logistics through which I published the run of NoVoGRAFíAS libros, but now I’m widening the focus to others’ work which I find urgent, necessary, and unlikely to easily find a route to publication otherwise.

Borderlings is the first. I hope there’s more to come.

One way to fight is to witness. Another is to put your body between the gnashing machines of destruction and all that is holy. Another is to amplify what you love, to bring work into the world that celebrates life and reminds us of what’s at stake.

Google has come up with a way to better map Earth’s disasters, predict them, and be able to track which communities and ecosystems are going to be harmed. If you want to find out what’s straining the environment in your neck of the woods, all you have to do is ask.

Google Earth AI, a fusion of Google’s Earth and Gemini AI systems, was introduced in July. Part of that effort is an AI model called AlphaEarth Foundations, which turns terabytes of satellite data into useful data layers tracking the history of what happens across the surface of the planet.

The combined system lets users parse historical landscape data that can reveal great shifts in the climate over the years. For example, users can look at rising water levels in flood zones, chart changes in surface temperatures across regions of the planet, or see the effects of clean air policies by studying changes in air pollution.

Now, Google has revealed new capabilities coming to its Earth AI platform. Users can now interact with the AI model by asking it questions like you would with a chatbot. An example Google gave was asking Earth AI to “find algae blooms” to help monitor water supplies. The system will search satellite images and its troves of collected data to give a list of results.

Text searches access multiple data layers in Google Earth to fetch a list of results. Courtesy of Google

To run these queries, Google is using a Gemini-powered geospatial reasoning model to combine Earth AI models with other models tracking weather, population data, imagery, and historical data to identify patterns in how disasters or other widespread events affect the world. The hope is that the model will be able to predict not only where a hurricane is headed, but also which communities are most likely to shoulder the effects.

The new chatbot capabilities will only be available for users on Google Earth’s professional subscription plans, which Google introduced this month. The Professional tier, which lets users access more advanced data layers like surface temperature and elevation contours, starts at $75 per month. The Professional Advanced tier is $150. Some core Google Earth features, like the ability to see a time-lapse video of certain parts of the globe, are available on all plans, including the free standard version of Google Earth.

This release marks the latest effort by Google to show off its climate-awareness bonafides. The company has previously partnered with satellite manufacturers to better monitor disasters like wildfires from low Earth orbit. The company has also joined up with researchers to create a database logging the activity of the world’s power plants. Maybe Google’s efforts to curb environmental devastation will eventually offset the impacts of AI’s ever-growing energy needs.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Google Earth gets an AI chatbot to help chart the climate crisis on Nov 1, 2025.

By Jeremy Brecher,
Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

Listen to the audio version >>

The previous Strike! commentary evaluated the conditions necessary for “people power” uprisings or “social strikes” against MAGA authoritarianism and how they might be prepared for. But how could such actions actually be conducted? This commentary considers timelines and organization. The next one discusses goals, tactics, and endgames. 

No Kings Downtown Miami, 18 October 2025. Photo credit: Phillip Pessar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Discussion of general strikes, nonviolent “people power” popular uprisings, and similar forms of mass revolt has become widespread in the movement to resist the oncoming MAGA tyranny. The use of “social strikes” – mass action by a whole population — to overcome authoritarian regimes in Poland, the Philippines, Brazil, South Korea, and elsewhere lends credibility to such an approach. While today the U.S. is far from conditions that might lead to social strikes, the fact that they are even under disc.sion makes it worthwhile to consider what they might be like and how to conduct them.

It is difficult to envision concretely what social strikes would mean in the context of the struggle against Trumpian autocracy. We can presume that growing rage at Trump’s depredations may manifest itself at some point in some form, but what form will depend on many unpredictables: what the regime will do, what the people will do; what third parties will do. Many features of reality may be unknown and even unknowable. 

Social strikes could look like the extended periods of labor conflict that Rosa Luxemburg dubbed “mass strikes,” which have occurred at least half-a-dozen times in U.S. history. Or they might resemble the mass political uprisings that have removed authoritarian dictatorships around the world. They might involve a period of mass strike growing into a political uprising. They are likely to combine features of planned action and unplanned responses to emerging conditions. They are likely to exhibit both strategic and emotive behavior.

By far the two largest outpourings of popular protest in recent decades were Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Hardly anybody anticipated either of these movements, and the forms they took were very different from each other and from previous forms of action in the U.S. or, indeed, elsewhere in the world. In such a context of unpredictability, preconceived plans and assumptions can not only be wrong, they can be a disorganizing force. Any attempt to shape such events needs to start by recognizing their probable uniqueness.

Social strikes express power that results from the fundamental dependence of ruling groups on those they rule – a reality emphasized by both Marx and Gandhi. Social strikes cause a problem for the owners and managers of the businesses and institutions that they shut down. They appeal to and mobilize a wide public by embodying its values and interests in opposition to the regime. They demonstrate that the authorities depend on the cooperation and acquiescence of those they rule, and that they are vulnerable to the non-cooperation of the population.

These forms of efficacy can sometimes interfere with each other. For example, disorderly actions may frighten the authorities but at the same time also frighten a large part of the population. Much of the art of social strikes lies in appealing to a wide public while at the same time effectively confronting employers and the authorities. 

Vigilante violence, police and military attacks, abductions, persecutions, prosecutions, slanders, and similar tactics are part of the normal playbook of authoritarians in power. Social strikes in the MAGA era will surely be met by such repression. If people have the necessary courage, they can not only stand up to such repression, they can use “political jujitsu” to define it as proof of the authoritarian, anti-democratic character of those perpetrating it.

Social Self-Defense against a creeping or galloping MAGA coup is most likely to succeed through a combination of electoral and social strike methods. The overcoming of authoritarian regimes in the Philippines, Serbia, and elsewhere, while accomplished under circumstances far different from those in the U.S. today — provide examples of how they can be combined. 

Timelines

The detailed timelines of social strikes cannot be known in advance. They are likely to grow out of a gradual and not always visible buildup of harm — and resentment at harm. This is already occurring. It could lead to a series of escalating struggles, possibly punctuated by defeats or concessions generating temporary quiescence. Popular opposition could also diminish as a result of repression, MAGA counter-maneuvers, a sense of futility, or other “unknown unknowns.” A period of apparent quiescence with a rising sense of grievance might eventuate in a sudden explosion of popular rage and a mass uprising. Whether gradually or rapidly, social strikes will need to develop the power necessary to reduce MAGA power enough to bring an end to its rule through elections, collapse of political support, or social disruption.

There is a difference between a protest action, lasting perhaps a day or two, and an open-ended struggle for power. An effective one-day general strike would be a valuable augmentation of the marches, demonstrations, days of action, and other protests that are already in progress. Beyond that, in countries ranging from the Philippines to Tunesia to Korea, a protracted social strike has been the ultimate means to overcome tyranny.

Organization

Second No Kings Protest in Chico, California, 18 October 2025. Photo Credit: Frank Schulenburg, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Social strikes are most likely to involve a combination of existing and newly emerging forms of organization. They often require coordination of both formal organizations and rapidly improvised informal ones.

A cluster of organizations have taken the lead in organizing the Hands Off, Mayday, and No Kings days of action. The most prominent are Indivisible, 50501, and MaydayStrong, all highly decentralized networks with minimal national structure, originally developed in the first and second Trump presidencies respectively to oppose his rising authoritarianism. They have coordinated with more than 200 other organizations; without formal organizational umbrella or coalition structure they have so far been able to agree on program and strategy for the days of action.    

Immediately after the October No Kings Day, sponsoring organizations announced a No Kings Alliance, “a nationwide rapid response network built to meet this moment: coordinating across our movement to push back in real time against authoritarian attacks.” Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin told a mass call with thousands of participants, “The alliance is an effort to coordinate the full diversity of our movement and use the leverage that we have with the people power we’ve collectively built.”

Experience indicates that informal coordination can be effective in resisting MAGA authoritarianism. Expanded national coordination can play a further role in social strikes, but it will need to develop new capacities in order to do so. It will need to be able to: 

• respond to rapidly changing states of the public mind
• function despite repression 
• deepen its coordination, developing a common strategy and becoming able to act together on a daily basis 
• “on-board” new constituencies and engage in new modes of action 
• avoid factional splits

Labor unions are almost always a component of social strikes. However, in the U.S. the leading labor federations have never led a general strike – indeed, as we have seen in a previous commentary in this series, they have almost always opposed them. Organized labor’s participation in social strikes will therefore most likely depend on the development of networks of activists within and across unions who are willing to lead or join in emerging actions. They can also endeavor to draw official union structures and leaders into the struggle.

Self-organization at the grassroots will be a crucial ingredient for any social strike. This will be especially so under conditions of serious repression, when unions and other large-scale organizations are likely to be under immobilizing attack.

Historically, self-organization for U.S. social strikes in the absence of large-scale union leadership has taken a variety of forms. One is small “affinity groups” that send representatives to “spokescouncils” — highly effective in the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” that shut down the city of Seattle and the World Trade Organization’s founding convention. Another is “workers councils” where workgroups send delegates to a representative body. This is particularly important where unions don’t exist or are unwilling to act. Large wildcat strikes like the 1970 postal wildcat have sometimes been coordinated in this way. A third is general assemblies like those that played a central role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, open to anyone and generally moderated by trained facilitators.

There are currently many potential seeds for such self-organization. Pro-democracy, anti-MAGA days of action have been organized in more than two thousand seven hundred locations. These are generally sponsored and organized by local coordinating groups that may or may not be affiliated with one or another national organization but that often coordinate locally across organizational lines. In many cases they have developed activities far more continuous than the periodic national days of action. And many are pursuing more disruptive forms of action. They can begin to define one of their roles as building support and preparing for social strikes.  

In a context of repression, multiple forms of communication within a movement are essential. Internet and social networking tools have proved themselves crucial in recent social strikes, but they need to be supplemented by a wide range of phone trees, personal networks, word-of-mouth communication, and other media beyond the reach of repressive authorities. Communication needs to perform two functions, each of which has its own requirements. Communication must allow for rapid formation of opinion and consensus. And it must make possible rapid coordination of action.

Social strikes against MAGA tyranny are unlikely to follow a preconceived plan. They require flexible improvisation. But that doesn’t mean there is no way to prepare for them. The best preparation is to have “cadres in place” — grassroots activists who understand the need for and possibility of social strikes. To paraphrase Flight Attendants Union president Sara Nelson, these are people who are already engaged in “coordinated solidarity” — and who are “ready to strike.” 

The next commentary in this series will address the goals, tactics, and endgames of social strikes against MAGA domination. 

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The post Social Strikes: Timelines and Organization first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Part One of this month’s bumper crop of books for reds and greens

Source

Last June, record flooding swept through the rural town of Rock Valley, Iowa. As the wall of water began to overtake Chelsie Ver Mulm’s 10-acre plot of land, she rushed into action, rapidly evacuating her family’s gaggle of cows, sheep, chickens, pigs, horses, and goats to higher ground. When the floodwaters receded, Ver Mulm returned to find much of her family’s farm, equipment, and pasture destroyed. In the days and weeks that followed, over a dozen animals died from stress and diseases contracted from the flood. 

From there, the costs of rebuilding continued to climb. Because the flood had ravaged the surrounding areas, Orange Creek Farms also lost many of its customers, who were grappling with damages of their own and could no longer afford to buy local food. All the while, Ver Mulm kept applying to emergency USDA loans and disaster relief programs — only to be denied again and again, as the tiny operation confronted burdensome application issues and eligibility restrictions. 

Because of the steep costs of recovery, the farm has fallen behind on its bills, and caring for a bigger herd became too expensive. Now, Orange Creek Farms is down from 40 cattle to just four. All told, the flood put the business in a “really, really bad spot,” according to Ver Mulm. So in April, almost a year after the flood, she made a last-ditch effort to turn things around, applying for a USDA Rural Development grant that she was hoping could help them offset their losses and keep the business afloat. 

When the government shutdown began over a month ago, the USDA furloughed the vast majority of the its workforce that was left, and brought most services to a sudden halt. Ver Mulm still hadn’t heard back about her application — and now the waiting is itself becoming the problem.

As the shutdown nears a historic, yet grim, milestone, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it has already created financial losses of at least $7 billion for the U.S. economy. Battling some of the most consequential impacts of these losses are those who grow and sell the food we eat — especially the farmers and ranchers also dealing with the compounding effects of extreme weather and an eroding federal safety net. 

Approximately 20,000 Department of Agriculture staffers have lost their jobs this year — a rapid and radical transformation of the agency resulting in administrative struggles, overworked employees, and significant delays in processing of payments and financial assistance applications. This summer, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released a controversial reorganization plan that experts expect to result in further staff reductions and a skeleton workforce. The USDA announced last week that approximately 2,100 county-level USDA Farm Service Agency offices would be reopened beginning Thursday, October 23, with two staffers reinstated per office, to help farmers get access to $3 billion in aid from existing programs, though further details about what programs, payments, and services will be resumed and to what extent remain unclear. 

All the while, small farmers and ranchers have spent the last ten months facing off against mounting pressures wrought by major administrative changes to food and agriculture policy that have exacerbated the nation’s exceedingly volatile farm economy. 

Read Next The shutdown is poised to deepen hunger in America — just as the Trump administration stopped tracking it Ayurella Horn-Muller

The impact on producers, whose businesses require advance planning — in a time of the year normally filled with finalizing future growing plans, buying seeds and other resources, and shoring up winter reserves — will only grow the longer the shutdown persists.

And so will the broader economic and societal ripple effects unfurling nationwide: President Donald Trump’s administration declared that it would not use billions of congressionally appropriated emergency funding to maintain the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, during the shutdown. Without that emergency funding, the USDA has said that SNAP benefits, which are used by nearly 42 million Americans who struggle to afford groceries, will be suspended on Saturday, November 1. (Money from SNAP is also a crucial source of income for many small farmers.) A cohort of more than two dozen states sued the Department of Agriculture on Tuesday, seeking to preserve funding of SNAP during the shutdown by tapping into USDA contingency funds reserved to fund operations when regularly appropriated monies are unavailable. Two federal courts ruled Friday afternoon that the agency must tap into those contingency funds to cover at least some of the food program’s benefits for the month of November. The Trump administration is expected to appeal the decision. 

Prior to the rulings, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins blamed Democrats for the shutdown and possible loss of benefits for millions of Americans, while stating that the department does not have the legal authority to distribute the agency’s contingency funding. In a Friday press conference, Rollins criticized SNAP, remarking that the shutdown exposed a program that, under the purview of the Biden administration, became “so corrupt.” 

The USDA did not immediately respond to Grist’s request for comment. 

Meanwhile, Hill policymakers have continued to sling accusations across both sides of the aisle in their budget standoff over federal healthcare. Trump has urged congressional Republicans to unilaterally end the shutdown by getting rid of the filibuster, an unprecedented move by the president, though many GOP Senators still remain in support of the rule. If Congress is still at an impasse come early next week, it would mark the longest-ever shutdown in U.S. history.

Every day of delay brings more prolonged uncertainty to farmers like Ver Mulm. Even if lawmakers manage to vote to reopen the government in the near future, the second-generation Iowa farmer worries that the backlog USDA staffers will be facing after all the time spent furloughed, compounding with the already-strained workforce, will translate to further bottlenecks. 

Over the last year, Ver Mulm has drained her savings to stave off having to sell the farm, living off of credit cards. Now, her credit score is shot, and Orange Creek Farms is on the cusp of insolvency. And with each day that passes with the government remaining in limbo, the small window to save their farm gets smaller. Ver Mulm is emotionally preparing herself for what’s to come — a growing likelihood that her family will soon need to close the chapter on feeding their community. 

“We’ve exhausted all of our options,” she said. “This grant is our last chance to keep the farm going. It’s our last lifeline.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For a struggling Iowa ranch, the government shutdown may be the last straw on Oct 31, 2025.

As world leaders prepare to meet for the 30th annual United Nations climate change conference, or COP30, in northern Brazil later this month, a new report has found that climate change is already killing millions of people every year. The “Countdown on Health and Climate Change,” which is compiled by researchers around the world, has been published every year since 2015 by the British medical journal The Lancet.

The missives have grown increasingly dire over that decade. In 2020, the report warned that climate change threatened to “undermine the past 50 years of gains in public health.” Five years later, the same document suggests that this erosion is well underway.

“Climate change is increasingly destabilising the planetary systems and environmental conditions on which human life depends,” the countdown’s authors wrote.

Extreme heat now kills one person every minute, according to the report, noting that the rate of heat-related deaths has risen 23 percent since the 1990s — a trend the authors attribute in large part to planetary warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The vast majority of the heatwave days endured worldwide between 2020 and 2024 would not have occurred in the absence of climate change.

But it’s not just extreme heat: The risk of death due to inhaling dangerous particulate matter in wildfire smoke and the spread of infectious diseases such as mosquito-borne dengue fever are also on the rise. The number of deaths linked to wildfire smoke inhalation in 2024 was 36 percent higher than the baseline established from 2003 to 2012. More severe droughts and heatwaves spurred by rising temperatures were also connected to 124 million more cases of moderate or severe food insecurity in 2023, compared to a baseline average from 1981 to 2010.

A young girl gets treatment for dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness, at Mugda Medical College and Hospital in Bangladesh on October 3, 2023. Munir Uz Zaman / AFP via Getty Images

In sum, the report paints a picture of populations ill-equipped to cope with the shifting environmental parameters of a changing climate. “This Lancet report is a devastating global health audit,” said Harjeet Singh, founding director of a nature advocacy group called the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, who was not involved in the assessment. “Our fossil fuel addiction is killing us by the millions.” 

Identifying the extent to which any isolated factor affects human health is no easy feat. A person’s wellbeing is linked to myriad behavioral, environmental, and social threads. In the past few decades, researchers all over the world have sought to isolate the role climate change plays in amplifying existing health trends and spurring the movement of disease. The process is not unlike how climate scientists seek to understand how the qualities of a particular hurricane or drought can be attributed to above-average sea surface or land temperatures. 

But because humans are so variable, attributing health impacts to planetary warming is an imperfect science. Reporting from the frontlines of climate hot spots in the world’s richest countries shows that illness and death that could be linked to climate change — heat stroke in Arizona emergency rooms during record-breaking heatwaves, for example — are rarely recorded as such. Conversely, top-down efforts to calculate the extent to which climate change may be influencing the spread of diseases such as tick-borne Lyme potentially overstate the effects of climate change by inadvertently underweighing the effects of urban sprawl, outdoor recreation, and other factors that put people in contact with ticks. 

The difficulty of separating signal from noise is what makes The Lancet’s annual report so important; it’s one of the only global efforts to make sense of the wide landscape of research at the intersection of climate and health. It tracks how 20 “health indicators” such as air pollution, food insecurity, days of extreme precipitation and drought, among others, have changed over the preceding 12 months. The 2025 report found that 13 of the 20 indicators tracked have grown more severe. 

As world leaders arrive in Brazil next month, much of the momentum for coordinated worldwide action to reduce emissions appears to be waning. Fossil fuel giants such as BP and ExxonMobil have reneged on their climate commitments. At President Donald Trump’s direction, the United States, the world’s biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, has begun the process of withdrawing from the Paris agreement and the World Health Organization.

“Paradoxically, as the need for decisive health-protective action grows, some world leaders are disregarding the growing body of scientific evidence on health and climate change,” the report’s authors wrote in a thinly veiled critique of Trump. “There is no time left for further delay.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘A devastating global audit’ shows how climate change is undermining the health of millions on Oct 31, 2025.

It may be Halloween, but families have been feeling relentless price frights since Inauguration Day. Inflation remains stubbornly high, and President Trump’s tariffs continue to drive up the prices of everyday essentials even further. Even the candy aisle isn’t safe, as stocking up for trick-or-treaters will run consumers nearly 11% more this spooky season.

While the cobwebs and jack-o’-lanterns will come down tomorrow morning, families will still be haunted by high prices. Health insurance premiums are set to spike as much as 600% tomorrow as open enrollment begins for millions of Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act, while premiums for employer-based plans will face the steepest increase in 15 years. As if that isn’t scary enough, millions of families face a food emergency starting this weekend as the Trump administration refuses to release emergency funding for food assistance (SNAP) benefits.

All while the President gallivants across the world and Republicans in Congress refuse to lift a finger to bring down health care prices for millions of Americans. It's no surprise that consumer confidence continues to sink. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell again in October to 94.6, marking its third straight monthly drop.

Alex Jacquez, Chief of Policy and Advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, shared his reaction:

“While inflation eats through paychecks and House Republicans hide in plain sight, working families are slammed by soaring health care premiums, frozen food assistance and rising bills. From the grocery aisles to the doctor’s office, Trump’s economic circus keeps jacking up costs and squeezing household budgets.”

As Kristen Moreland waited for the livestream to buffer, her thoughts drifted to the years she’d devoted to defending Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the northeastern sweep of Alaska where the mountains give way to the coastal plain. On screen, the chatter of aides stilled as men in dark suits gathered behind a lectern. Then Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced plans to open the area, roughly the size of South Carolina, to drilling. 

It marked another round in the decades-long tug-of-war over developing one of the country’s largest remaining protected areas — an effort that came to a head during President Donald Trump’s first term, and ground to a halt when President Joe Biden took office. Burgum also restored seven oil and gas leases that a state-funded corporation bid on during the final days of the first Trump administration, and that his successor later revoked.

Moreland, a Gwich’in leader and executive director of the tribal committee dedicated to protecting the Nation’s sacred coastal plain, sat stunned as the YouTube stream continued. The place she grew up — where generations have lived on the tundra alongside the caribou, weaving their history into the land — had been reduced to a line item on someone’s balance sheet. When Burgum said opening the refuge would benefit northern communities, “it felt like a slap in the face,” she said. 

“They’ve never reached out to us to listen to how this would affect our livelihood,” she said. Moreland fears development will drive the herd that the Gwich’in rely on out of range and contaminate rivers in a region where hunting and fishing are a matter of survival. For her, it felt like erasure. “It’s another disrespectful action from decision-makers,” she said. “It ignores our voice as Gwich’in and violates our rights as Indigenous people.”

As the fight over development in the Arctic continues, federal officials are racing to fulfill Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. Though the government is shut down and many employees are not getting paid, officials continue approving permits for extractive industries. In a wood-paneled Beltway office, Burgum framed his “sweeping package of actions” as a declaration that “Alaska is open for business.” 

To that end, the administration also signed permits for the controversial 211-mile Ambler Road to mineral deposits, including one owned by Trilogy Metals — which the Trump administration now holds a 10 percent stake in — and authorized a land exchange that will allow for construction of a road through Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, at the tip of the Alaskan Peninsula. “I told the president it’s like Christmas every morning,” Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy said. “I wake up, I go to look at what’s under the proverbial Christmas tree to see what’s happening.”

Last week’s announcement may not end up being the gift the governor is hoping for. 

The fight over drilling in the refuge began almost as soon as President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the site, once called Arctic National Wildlife Range, in 1960. The most recent volley began in 2017, when Trump signed a tax bill requiring two oil and gas lease sales there within seven years. When the first sale was held in 2021, the state corporation Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, was the only major bidder. It hoped to keep drilling prospects in the region alive, despite weak industry interest. The sale ultimately generated less than $12 million — a fraction of the nearly $2 billion projected by the Tax Act for the last decade.

The Biden administration later found the leasing program’s environmental review inadequate. It conducted a new analysis, then canceled the leases in 2023, citing “fundamental legal deficiencies” and its failure to “properly quantify” greenhouse gas emissions. The second mandated sale, in early 2025, received no bidders. Compounding the challenge, major banks and insurers have refused to finance or underwrite projects in the refuge, citing environmental risks. Oil majors have also steered clear: In 2022, Chevron and the company that took over BP’s leases on private land within the refuge paid $10 million to walk away from them. That same year, Exxon Mobil told shareholders it has “no plans for exploration or development” there.

Still, this spring Trump issued an executive order calling for the reinstatement of AIDEA’s leases, and a federal court ruled that their cancellation was handled improperly. The state-funded investment firm remains the sole holder of leases in the refuge. 

The problem is AIDEA doesn’t have the capital or technical expertise to build out these areas on its own. It has authorized spending nearly $54 million to develop them and move permitting for Ambler Road forward. That includes hiring consultants for seismic testing to map oil and gas deposits. But first it must get permission from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to harass polar bears, something that has sparked viral protests in the past. AIDEA authorized another $50 million for Ambler following Burgum’s announcement.

Ultimately, the state corporation is spending public money on infrastructure that private firms would normally fund, while sidestepping oversight, said Suzanne Bostrom, a senior staff attorney at Trustees for Alaska. The watchdog legal organization accused AIDEA of having redirected money toward refuge leases and Ambler from accounts within its Arctic Infrastructure Development Fund, and later its Revolving Fund, to avoid the need for legislative approval. Randy Ruaro, AIDEA’s executive director, wrote in an email that it was not legally required to seek authorization.

All of that aside, AIDEA’s track record is pretty grim. Financial records suggest the corporation lost at least $38 million on its last oil and gas venture, the Mustang field on the North Slope west of the refuge. After oil prices fell in 2020, the corporation foreclosed on the project. The state provided another $22 million in a 2023 bailout before AIDEA sold the field for an undisclosed sum. Bostrom says AIDEA has “no actual plan for seeing a return” on its spending in the refuge. In fact, the people of Alaska often lose money in its deals; one analysis found that almost half of the agency’s investments have been written off as worthless. The economists who crunched those numbers found the state would have come out about $11 billion ahead if that money had been put to work elsewhere.

In an email, Ruaro called the analysis a “hit piece” and said the corporation has  recorded its best financial performance in six decades over the past two years. He said that analysis “failed to account for the billions of dollars generated in economic benefits” by the Red Dog Mine, which produces lead and zinc in northwest Alaska. The corporation poured $160 million — about one-third of the project’s startup costs — into infrastructure to support the operation. At the same time, AIDEA’s own consultants concluded that the mine would be built regardless, and the investment was unnecessary. “AIDEA loves to point to the Red Dog mine as a shining example of their success,” Bostrom said, but even taking those claims at face-value “doesn’t erase that AIDEA still has no viable financial plan in place to cover the cost of building the Ambler Road.”

Ultimately, any plans for the refuge and Ambler Road — which the Bureau of Land Management has said would harm Indigenous and low-income communities — raise questions about who benefits from such development. AIDEA has, for example, proposed financing the private Ambler road through Gates of the Arctic National Park with bonds repaid by tolls, a plan critics call unrealistic, given the cost could hit $2 billion. “It’s hugely problematic for the state to issue bonds with no viable plan for repayment,” Bostrom said. “That’s not a good investment decision.” 

But Ruaro wrote that is only one of several options, and that he is “confident the mines … have billions of dollars in minerals needed by the nation.” He also said AIDEA now estimates the cost at $500 to $850 million, and said the road can be built in phases. 

Even with prudent financial strategies, the economics of extraction remain precarious — especially as domestic oil prices dropped below $60 a barrel this summer. Given the average breakeven price of $62, new Arctic production may not be profitable — though it would extend the life of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that carries crude from the North Slope. The U.S. is already the world’s top producer, and more output won’t necessarily lower consumer fuel prices, says Boston University’s Robert K. Kaufmann, because OPEC and other nations still influence global markets. (As to the “energy emergency” that Trump declared, Kaufmann said, “I want what he’s smoking.”) Instead, the leases will bring more production online when “any rational scientist is calling for reducing carbon emissions.

Despite the risks, some communities in the region support new oil and gas projects. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sits within North Slope Borough, which is larger than 39 states. Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat — a nonprofit funded by the regional Alaska Native Corporation — notes that 95 percent of the borough’s tax revenue comes from the industry, funding things like schools and clinics. Fossil fuel royalties directly benefit Indigenous communities like Kaktovik, funding essential services. “When Uncle Doug [Burgum] calls, I answer,” Josiah Patkotak, the borough’s mayor, said in a statement praising the Interior secretary’s announcement.

Indigenous communities and scientists fear that development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will drive away the caribou central to Gwich’in and Iñupiat culture.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / Getty Images

It can be difficult to disentangle genuine local support from efforts quietly backed — or directly compensated — by the industry itself. During a legislative hearing earlier this year, state Representative Ashley Carrick said one person who testified as a community advocate was paid by AIDEA, something Ruaro confirmed to her that it routinely does. This can create the impression these projects are widely embraced.

“There’s this wide consensus that [Iñupiat] people all want the oil and gas projects. It’s not true,” said Nauri Simmonds, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic. Many of those adversely impacted by drilling stay silent for fear of losing work or social standing, she said — and some who have spoken out have faced threats and violence.

Simmonds says what might be lost by developing the refuge can’t be counted in dollars. AIDEA now holds leases in a part of the refuge where the Porcupine caribou herd gathers to bear its young. The Gwich’in name for the region, where cool coastal winds protect the newborns from insects and heat, translates to “the sacred place where life begins.” Beyond its shelter, calves are 19 percent more likely to die. Scientists and Indigenous peoples fear the clamor of development will drive the herd away, severing a bond that has sustained people and animals alike for millenia. Even as climate change reshapes one of the country’s last undisturbed ecosystems, it is political forces that now endanger it most.

“One of the most wounding pieces is that this wouldn’t be something that the companies would have gone after on their own,” Simmonds said. “It is the enticements from Alaska, from the corporations, from the political landscape, that creates the appeal.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump officials say Alaska is ‘open for business.’ So far, no one’s buying. on Oct 31, 2025.

By Jeremy Brecher,
Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

Listen to the audio version >>

Mass “people power” uprisings, general strikes, and other forms of withdrawal of popular acquiescence in tyranny have established or restored democracy in many countries. As we saw in the previous commentary, while the conditions for such “social strikes” are far from mature in the US at present, a time may come when they are both necessary and possible. How can that eventuality be prepared for? 

No Kings protest at Washington Street/Clark Street in Chicago, June 14, 2025. Photo credit: AlphaBeta135, Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0 Universal.

The terrain in which social strikes might occur in the US is mostly unknowable. So preparation can’t be for a specific type of event or action. We must be prepared for a wide range of possibilities. For example, a union-led general strike is unlikely but possible. A challenge to authorities led by the movement-based opposition might swell into a social strike. Or unbearable conditions might generate a sudden and unexpected uprising from below.

Similarly, there is no predicting how those in power would respond to a social strike. Repression is almost certain, but its forms, extent, and success are not. Under sufficient pressure regimes often negotiate, as happened for example in the roundtable discussions between the Polish government and the Solidarity union that ended authoritarian rule in Poland in 1989. Challenges to authoritarian regimes can end in their surrender, often in the form of resignation, flight, or arrest of top officials. They can also end in collapse, for example in the melting away of Serbian police and military forces on which the regime depended.

Although social strikes often seem to emerge suddenly and unexpectedly, they are often preceded by less visible organizing and smaller-scale actions. With the Democratic Party currently failing to effectively play the role of an opposition party, there is a need for a “non-electoral opposition” that can mobilize those harmed by MAGA, identify common interests, unify their programs and actions, and articulate alternatives. A movement-based opposition has developed since Trump’s election, exemplified by the participation of millions in protest days of action like Hands Off!, MayDayStrong, and No Kings Day, and the mass civil resistance to ICE raids and National Guard occupation in Los Angeles and around the country. That movement-based opposition is part of a developmental process that could, depending on circumstances, culminate in social strikes. Indivisible’s One Million Rising, which it describes as “a national effort to train one million people in the strategic logic and practice of non-cooperation,” could be a step in preparing the participants in mass protests for social strikes.

What I have elsewhere characterized as “social self-defense” can progressively incorporate elements of noncooperation and disruption that can evolve toward social strikes and serve as living representations of their potential power. They can combine strikes with non-workplace actions like boycotts, commercial shutdowns, mass picketing, blockades, occupations, and civil disobedience. Such actions will need to constantly seek the “sweet spot” between effective disruption of MAGA oppression and alienation of forces that might otherwise be won over.

Successful social strikes generally depend on support from sources of power that go far beyond established social movements. They require – and often acquire – support from sectors like educational, medical, and legal professionals; civil society institutions like universities, hospitals, and religious denominations; and political forces including local and state governments, legislators, judges, jurors, sectors of government agencies and security forces, and segments of political parties. Such forces often join social strikes not out of fondness for social movements, but from a growing understanding that eliminating an autocracy may be necessary for their own self-preservation and the preservation of society itself – for social self-defense.

A “general strike” is often advocated as a means to resist MAGA tyranny; calls for a general strike abound in anti-MAGA web meetings and a “general strike” website has received tens of thousands of pledges to join a general strike if one occurs. A general strike has conventionally been defined as a coordinated work stoppage by trade unions in many different sectors. In a variety of countries general strikes are relatively common, but as indicated in a previous commentary in this series, “Social Strikes in American History,” they have been a rarity in the US. Any proposal for a general strike must also take into account the fact that fewer than 10 percent of US workers are currently members of unions.

While an effective social strike will certainly require wide participation by union members, US unions are unlikely to join as a bloc — for example through the AFL-CIO — in a social strike. (The reasons for this, such as no-strike agreements in union contracts, legal restrictions on strikes about non-workplace issues, and union leadership opposition to unauthorized “wildcat strikes” are explained in a previous commentary.) Union participation can, however, be promoted in advance by resolutions and educational campaigns. For example, in the midst of the 2011 “Wisconsin Uprising,” the 90 unions belonging to the Madison region’s South Central Federation of Labor voted to set up a mechanism to promote discussion and education about general strikes.

Can unions plan for a general strike in the future that may not violate the terms of their contracts? The UAW has called to align all union contract terminations for May First, 2028 as a way to promote united action and perhaps even a general strike by circumventing the prohibition on striking during a union contract. That call has already promoted wider discussion of general strikes in labor and social movement circles.

Of course, different unions striking at the same time does not guarantee a united front around issues of common concern: The first half of 1946 saw nearly 3 million workers simultaneously on strike, including auto, steel, coal, railroad, and many other industries, but unions pursued separate demands, made little effort to pool their strength, and settled with little consideration of the impact on those remaining on strike. To avoid such a fate, simultaneous strikes by different unions will need common demands and a solidarity that keeps them united through the course of the struggle.

Self-organization at the grassroots will be a crucial ingredient for any social strike. This will be especially so under conditions of serious repression, when unions and other large-scale organizations are likely to be under immobilizing attack.

WTO protests in Seattle, November 30, 1999 Pepper spray is applied to the crowd. Photo credit: Steve Kaiser, Nov. 30, 1999, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Historically, self-organization for social strikes in the absence of large-scale union participation has taken a variety of forms. One form is small “affinity groups” that send representatives to “spokes councils” — highly effective in the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” that shut down the city of Seattle and the founding convention of the World Trade Organization. Another form is “workers councils” where workgroups elect delegates to a representative body. This is particularly important where unions don’t exist or are unwilling to act. A third is general assemblies like those that played a central role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, open to anyone and often moderated by trained facilitators.

There are many potential seeds for such self-organization. Pro-democracy, anti-MAGA days of action have been organized in more than two thousand locations. These are generally sponsored and organized by local coordinating groups that may or may not be affiliated with one or another national organization. In many cases they have developed activities far more continuous than the periodic national days of action. And many are pursuing more disruptive forms of non-cooperation. They can begin to define one of their roles as building support and preparation for social strikes.

We can hope that social strikes will not be necessary to limit and ultimately end MAGA tyranny. Accomplishing that goal by less drastic forms of social self-defense inside and outside the electoral system would likely require less risk and less pain. But if other means are unavailing, experience around the world indicates that social strikes may provide a way for people facing authoritarian takeover to establish or reestablish democracy.

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The post Laying the Groundwork for Social Strikes first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

John is an Administrative Analyst for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and an award-winning shop steward in his Local, CWA 1036.

“I’ve had the honor of working for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) for seven years. I consider it one of the luckiest things to ever happen in my life.

People are often surprised when I say this, but working in the public sector has been a goal of mine since I was a teenager. I’ve always been drawn to work that exists beyond profit, and the public sector has allowed me to do exactly that.

It’s been an immense privilege to work in the environmental field, surrounded by some of the most talented and passionate environmentalists my state has ever seen. There is a shared goal here—not just among the incredible people I work with, but I believe among all the people of New Jersey: our natural resources, our air, our land, our water, every animal and plant, big and small, are worth protecting—and worth fighting for.

I’m fighting for the health of communities across the state, for ecosystems to thrive, and for parks to be enjoyed for generations to come. Being in the public sector means I’m not fighting for profit margins or earnings calls.

I’m a public sector worker, working for the public good. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The post November LNS Spotlight: John Gehr first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Photo credit: Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

In the largest demonstration in American history, an estimated seven million people demonstrated in 2,700 locations October 18 in opposition the Trump and MAGA attacks on workers, on other ordinary Americans, and on democracy itself.

Union partners included:

• AAUP
• AFGE
• AFT
• Arts Workers United
• Central Oklahoma Labor Federation, AFL-CIO
• CFPB Union
• CFT
• CWA
• CCCTU
• IAM District W24
• IFPTE
• SEIU
• Union of Southern Service Workers
• UE

Climate and Environmental partners included:

• Center for Biological Diversity
• Center for International Environmental Law
• Climate Action Now
• Climate Defenders
• Climate First
• Climate Museum
• Food and Water Watch
• Friends of the Earth
• Greenpeace
• LCV
• Sierra Club
• Third Act

The post Labor and Climate Movements Join for Historic “No Kings” Day first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Join Labor Network for Sustainability, Building Power Resource, Public Schools Strong, We Build Progress, and Bargaining for the Common Good on November 19 at 3:00 ET / 2:00 CT for a webinar about bargaining for green schools and clean energy.

REGISTER HERE.

Across the country, union educators are joining with parents, students, and neighbors to win the climate-safe, fully-funded, community schools we deserve. Our new report, Bargaining for Green Schools, Good Jobs, and Bright Futures, co-authored by LNS Network Organizer Oren Kadosh, shares case studies and best practices for union members organizing to win “common good” climate demands in their contracts.

On the first day of school this year, districts from Chicago to Selma, CA sent students home or to the ER due to extreme heat. In the U.S., far too many public schools are defunded, dilapidated, and vulnerable to climate disasters. Collective bargaining agreements are a key mechanism to protect student health and well-being, lower energy costs, and create good-paying job opportunities and apprenticeships.

Labor Network for Sustainability and Building Power Resource Center wrote this new resource to illustrate what is possible when educator unions and community coalitions build power to win climate and environmental justice victories through common good bargaining.

Want to hear more from people who’ve done the work on the ground to secure these wins? Celebrate the launch of the report with LNS and BPRC at our webinar!

JOIN OUR WEBINAR ON NOVEMBER 19, 3:00pm ET/12:00pm PT!

Many people are standing up to meet the moment and fight for our public schools. Movements for green schools and good jobs are coalitions to build even greater grassroots power. We hope this new piece can help you get started in your own community.

Read the full report here.

The post New LNS Resource: How Union Educators Bargain for Green Schools and Bright Futures first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Photo credit: Ben Alexander from United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

In an op ed recently published in the Alpine Sun, LA Progressive, Counterpunch, and elsewhere, LNS co-founder and senior strategic advisor Jeremy Brecher wrote:

“You don’t have to be a radical leftist to be concerned about the way Donald Trump and his MAGAs are threatening the well-being of ordinary Americans— and government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

In a recent Washington Post poll, those polled disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy by 59% to 40%. Some 70% said tariffs are increasing the prices they pay for basic necessities.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that, in the face of President Trump’s threat to send troops into American cities, 58% of Americans said the president should only send armed troops to face external threats.

Some 62% of Americans say the federal government has too much power, up from 51% a year ago.

Fortunately, there is an effective opposition developing in America. It is being created by grassroots social movements and by ordinary people who have decided they have to take responsibility for their own future. This “movement-based opposition” doesn’t run campaigns for politicians, but it is having a powerful if little recognized impact on American politics.

How can we protect ourselves and others who are under attack?

• • We can organize in our own communities and constituencies to fight for our needs. Parents can organize through their PTAs; the elderly can organize through their senior centers; veterans can organize through their networks of fellow veterans; workers can organize through their unions; all of us can organize through our community organizations and local governments.
  • We can participate in actions like No Kings Day that bring together all of us who refuse to be turned into impoverished peons by the Trump offensive.”

For full op ed: Defending Ordinary Working People Against Trump and MAGA

For full LNS report: A Movement-Based Opposition to Trump and MAGA

The post Who Will Defend Ordinary Working People Against Trump and MAGA? first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Photo credit: G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The Federal Unionists Network (FUN) and 35 national, state and local unions have written a letter to the Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House, urging them to hold out against Republicans in the budget negotiations, even if it means a continuing government shutdown and halted paychecks. The signers represent tens of thousands of federal workers.

“Federal unions and workers stand with members of Congress who oppose damaging cuts, unconstitutional executive overreach, attacks on science and data itself, and attempts to undercut organized labor,” the letter says. “We join together with you in the fight to save and strengthen the many important government programs and services that have been created throughout our country’s history to raise standards of living, provide safety, and ensure the continued growth of science, industry, and American prosperity.”

For more: Unions and Government Shutdown

The post Unions Join the Shutdown Battle first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Photo Credit: AFGE, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

According to the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, 33% of staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency when President Trump took office will be gone by the end of 2025. A July 18, 2025, press release from the EPA said the agency had already cut 23% of its personnel, terminating the employment of 3,707 of 16,155 employees.

For more: The Conversation

The post Trump Administration to Cut 1 in 3 EPA staffers in First Year first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Pedro Szekely from Los Angeles, USA, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

As the number of oil refinery closures added up this spring in California, debates over affordability topped headlines and legislative agendas over the summer. Refinery closures are hitting workers and communities hard as the state transitions away from fossil-fuel dependence–without a comprehensive plan. When stopgap legislation was signed by the governor in September, many voiced concerns of backsliding from earlier efforts to hold companies accountable for price hikes.

Then on October 2nd an explosion at a Chevron refinery rocked Los Angeles’s South Bay community of El Segundo. The blast shook nearby residents who prepared to evacuate as they watched a tower of flames light up heavy clouds over beach cities and the busiest international airport on the west coast. Thick black smoke blew east into the next morning, and four contract workers are now suing the company for injuries. Joe Uehlein, board president of the Labor Network for Sustainability told the Los Angeles Times:

“Companies are making billions in profits and still are making it nearly impossible to make sure we’re safe from terrible disasters. In California, we’ve seen horrific injuries to workers and tens of thousands of residents have had to seek medical attention in refinery accidents.”

The Western States Petroleum Association has lobbied against process safety management regulations, while unions have pushed over and over again for stronger protections, advocating not only for themselves but for the residents, businesses, schools, commuters on freeways, softball teams and many others who live, study, and work near refineries on a daily basis.

For more on this story:

• Grist: “California is sunsetting oil refineries without a plan for what’s next”
• LA Times: Chevron’s El Segundo refinery has a history of safety and environmental violations
• CalMatters: “Oil refinery closures leave workers searching for a job that ‘just doesn’t exist’”

The post Oil Refinery Workers Fight for Safety first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Earlier this month, scientists announced that humanity has kicked off the first major “tipping point” — in which an Earth system dramatically transforms, often permanently — as warm-water corals die en masse due to relentlessly rising temperatures. Think of such events like driving off a cliff: There’s no reversing back up to the edge, and the impact will be terrible.

For all the attention these disastrous milestones get from scientists and the media — and rightfully so — less discussed is the fact that they also work the other direction. Positive tipping points can unfold on a wide range of scales, from a community garden helping a neighborhood eat healthier, all the way up to the global energy system switching from fossil fuels to renewables. An individual person can even reach one, like if they decide to do more and more walking instead of driving. 

People can influence communities, communities can influence cities, and cities can influence nations. These critical junctures, then, can spread like a contagion — in a good way. “It’s rather a mirror opposite of the damaging Earth system tipping points that we want to desperately prevent,” said Steve Smith, a researcher at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, who studies how to encourage the phenomenon. “Because the positive tipping points are changes that we really need to promote.”

What makes environmental tipping points so insidious is that they self-perpetuate as threats amplify other threats — in the case of corals, high temperatures combining with ocean acidification and marine pollution. Luckily, their happier counterparts also accelerate under their own momentum and feedback loops, as benefits beget other benefits. There are many ways that cities, for instance, can encourage the adoption of green technologies like electric vehicles, according to a new report from C40, a global network of mayors tackling the climate crisis. “It is possible to move pretty quickly, at the moment, because of the wide availability of these technologies,” said Cassie Sutherland, managing director of climate solutions and networks at C40. “You can actually get — with a kind of dedicated intervention — quite a significant and ramped-up change.”

By wielding both carrots and sticks, policymakers can juice these social and technological systems to get things rolling. In the parlance, a “pull” policy makes a sustainable technology more affordable, accessible, or attractive using incentives like tax rebates, drawing people toward it. It’s carrots made of money, basically, that can create unstoppable market momentum. The stick, by contrast, is the “push” policy that, say, makes fossil fuel technologies more expensive, less convenient, or unavailable, like banning new natural gas hookups in buildings. Push and pull policies are not mutually exclusive, and indeed policymakers can use them in concert for maximum effect.

Cities are uniquely positioned to do this kind of work, Sutherland says. Globally, they’re home to more than half the human population — and rapidly growing — yet are responsible for 70 percent of carbon emissions. But they’re also much more nimble than national governments because they set building energy efficiency codes, manage public transportation systems, and pursue their own targets for reducing emissions overall. By contrast, the U.S. government is now actively hostile to climate action, so it’s up to cities to increase their ambition. “They’re the crucibles, the test beds, the ones that have the ability to go further, faster, and particularly go first,” Sutherland said.

Municipalities, for example, have the power to embrace — and ideally push to a tipping point — one of the more powerful climate solutions: the e-bike. Pedaling instead of driving slashes greenhouse gas emissions, alleviates urban congestion, and improves public health, both because of the additional exercise and reduced air pollution. (E-bikes also require less exertion for people who might struggle on a traditional two-wheeler.) In a given city, a vocal group of dedicated bicyclists might start out advocating for basic infrastructure, like dedicated lanes. “Bike commuting has a big positive feedback effect,” said Cameron Roberts, a social scientist at Carleton University in Canada, who studies active mobility. “Once they start winning victories, this leads to better road regulations, better infrastructure, which brings out more cyclists, which then snowballs.” The data backs this up: Bike commuting in Washington, D.C., and New York City doubled in four years, in part because of improved infrastructure.

Which is not to say that cities can’t also encourage the switch from gas to electric vehicles, like Oslo, Norway, has done with extraordinary speed: In just the past decade, the market share there for new EV sales grew from 13.6 percent to 95.8 percent, C40’s report notes. (Ironically, Norway is one of the world’s biggest exporters of fossil fuels.) That was thanks to the government providing financial incentives, thus making EVs more affordable, then mandating that all new car sales be zero-emission by 2025. (Cities can do this with public transportation, too: Mexico City, for instance, gave operators of gas-powered buses an eight-year heads up that starting in 2025, it would only procure electric versions.) Oslo then layered on top of that sweetener by expanding charging infrastructure, thus making it more convenient to own an EV. “It’s cities that have a lot of the control over the bits that make it accessible and attractive,” Sutherland said.

Oslo did much the same for heat pumps, which are now in 63 percent of Norwegian households. Instead of burning fossil fuels, these electric appliances extract heat from even frigid air and pump it indoors, then reverse in the summer to cool a space by expelling indoor heat to the outside. To encourage their adoption, Norway slapped a carbon tax on heating fuel, making it increasingly expensive not to go fully electric, and provided financial incentives to make the switch. Oslo, once again, layered on its own subsidies, streamlined the permitting process for installing the devices, and implemented stricter energy efficiency standards for buildings. (In the U.S., market share has been growing too, as heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces. States have also formed a coalition to accelerate adoption.) 

Read Next Heat pumps are expensive. What if billionaires bought them for everyone? Matt Simon

Policymakers can push emerging technologies to tipping points, too. For instance, last year in Framingham, Massachusetts, Eversource Energy commissioned the nation’s first networked geothermal neighborhood operated by a utility. This technology also exploits heat pumps, which use liquid coursing through a network of underground pipes to cool and heat homes. Other states and cities could encourage more projects like this with the stick approach, like by banning natural gas in new buildings and continuing to pressure utilities to switch from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies. With the carrot, they could provide financial incentives for communities to transition to networked geothermal, which remains expensive. 

Thinking bigger, the various parts of the global energy system must tip from fossil fuels to renewables. Whereas oil and gas are a stagnant technology, renewables benefit from “economies of scale” and “learning by doing,” meaning the more you make something, the cheaper and better it gets. Accordingly, the price of solar panels has plunged more than 99 percent since the 1970s. The explosion of wind power, too, enabled the United Kingdom to pass a tipping point as it rapidly retreated from coal, helped along by the country putting a price on carbon. “The price of coal just became quite quickly uncompetitive and uneconomical, to the point where last year the final coal-fired electricity generator was shut down,” Smith said.

The rapid development and adoption of renewables, Smith added, is due in large part to a “positive tipping cascade” made possible by batteries, which get better and cheaper year after year. That’s created a domino effect that is boosting all kinds of sectors: electric vehicles and trains, home energy storage, and the grid, which uses huge packs to store solar and wind power for when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing. Utilities are also experimenting with “vehicle-to-grid” technology, in which EVs both draw power and send it back to the system, providing a vast network of backup energy to further accelerate decarbonization. These intertwining market forces behind renewables and batteries are so powerful that the Trump administration can only hope to slow the green energy revolution in the U.S., not stop it. 

But cities and nations can’t just encourage positive tipping points and call it a day — that needs to happen alongside the urgent mitigation of the pollutants that are causing warming in the first place, said Kiff Gallagher, a climate strategist and founding executive director of the Global Heat Reduction Initiative. Carbon dioxide gets all the attention, but humanity can dramatically and quickly reduce warming by tackling “superpollutants,” greenhouse gases that are dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times more powerful than CO2. 

Food waste rotting in landfills, for instance, as well as fossil fuel infrastructure, produce clouds of methane, which is 80 times more potent, yet disappears much faster from the atmosphere. (Agricultural waste, like corn stalks, is often left to rot too, so increasingly farmers are turning it into biochar, which instead captures carbon from the atmosphere and improves yields when applied to fields.) Ironically enough, heat pumps are essential for weaning off of fossil fuels, yet a common refrigerant that lets them work their magic is 2,000 times more powerful than CO2. So the industry is transitioning to more sustainable alternatives, even using CO2 itself as a refrigerant because it doesn’t cause as much harm in the unlikely event of a leak. “These short-lived climate pollutants cause almost 50 percent of the warming, but they’re only receiving 5 percent of climate finance right now going to directly address them,” Gallagher said. “So that could be an amazing high leverage point for the world.”

Tipping points, then, are both an environmental curse that we desperately need to avoid, and an essential phenomenon we need to exploit to keep more of Earth’s systems from tipping. Individual sectors can positively tip, and in turn influence other aspects of the clean energy economy — momentum building upon momentum. “Once those tipping points have then been reached,” Sutherland said, “and there’s the positive feedback loop, you’ll start to see the other elements of the solutions of the system clicking into place a bit more easily.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips6','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Good news! These ‘positive tipping points’ will help save the world. on Oct 31, 2025.

Food security is food justice (and a climate solution) Emily Pinckney Thu, 10/30/2025 - 2:00 pm