News Feeds

Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.

House Agriculture Committee Prepares for Farm Bill Markup

The House Agriculture Committee’s Farm Bill markup will take in the coming days after being delayed due to a winter storm.

But the latest draft of the House Farm Bill has been a source of concern for some anti-hunger and sustainable agriculture advocates. Ty Jones Cox, Vice President for Food Assistance, at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that the latest draft “fails to address the crisis created by cuts to SNAP enacted last summer.” And Abby J. Leibman, President and CEO of MAZON, says that the legislation “is not a viable or reasonable legislative response to the sabotaging of our federal anti-hunger programs, and [House Agriculture Chair Glenn] Thompson knows it.”

This past week more than 100 hunger organizations—worried about cuts to a bipartisan food security program for rural seniors—also sent a letter to House and Senate Agriculture Committee leaders. They urged Congress to preserve the Delivering for Rural Seniors Act in the Farm Bill.

On the agriculture side, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) says that the draft “falls unmistakably short.”  NSAC notes there are some bright spots, such as a greater investment in 1890 land grant universities and updated Agriculture and Food Research Initiative priority areas, which include language around regionally adapted cultivars and breeding for environmental resilience. But they also worry that after significant cuts to the workforce of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the legislation does nothing to stabilize the agency or increase staffing levels to ensure farmers can access the federal programs they rely on. 

U.S. Farmers Reject Bid for Land

The Guardian reports that U.S. farmers are rejecting multi-million dollar bids for their land as tech companies race to build the massive data centers needed to power artificial intelligence. A report from Hines, a real estate investment manager, estimates that 40,000 acres of land for datacenter development will be needed over the next five years to support new projects. That’s double the amount currently in use. 

But companies are facing resistance to their plans. One Kentucky farmer, Ida Huddleston, received an offer on the farmland worth more than US$33 million. But the land has been in her family for centuries, and she told them she wasn’t interested. Huddleston, who’s 82, says that her entire life “is nothing but the land,” which has provided her with “anything and everything” she has needed. When the offer came through, she responded, “You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale.”

And when Timothy Grosser in Kentucky rejected his first offer of US$8 million, developers asked him to name his price. He pushed back again, telling them “There is none.”

Grosser reports that some neighbors are giving in—and he doesn’t blame them, especially when the offers are high and companies are warning they may invoke eminent domain to have the land seized. But around the country, many producers are continuing to hold out. One farmer in Pennsylvania rejected a US$15 million offer on his land last month. Around the same time another, based in Wisconsin, turned down an offer of US$80 million. 

It’s an encouraging story, especially in light of new U.S. Department of Agriculture data, which shows that the number of U.S. farms shrank by 15,000 in 2025.

Brazil Celebrates Drop in Deforestation

Satellite monitoring shows that deforestation has continued to decline in early 2026 and the clearing of trees between August 2025 and January of this year is at the lowest levels for this period since 2014. 

Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva said that the progress is thanks to coordinated government action. Seventy of the 81 municipalities with the most deforestation have joined federal initiatives that are focused on reducing illegal clearing. Authorities are also leveraging resources from the Amazon Fund to further support enforcement and prevention efforts. 

According to Silva, if the current trend is maintained, Brazil could see the lowest deforestation rate in history this year. 

Major Food Brands Voices Support for the Food Date Labeling Act (FDLA)

More than 30 brands and food industry supporters recently signed onto an open letter from the Zero Food Waste Coalition and the Consumer Brands Association, which calls on Congress to pass the bipartisan Food Date Labeling Act. 

Roughly one third of food goes to waste in the United States each year. According to data from ReFED, confusion over date labels leads to 4.3 million tons of food waste in the U.S. each year, which costs households and businesses more than US$22 billion annually. ReFED also reports that more eaters are discarding edible food prematurely due to date label confusion than they did a decade ago.

Now, major companies are backing legislation that can help curb the problem. FMI-The Food Industry Association, Walmart, Amazon, and Unilever are among the businesses that signed onto the letter, which urges policymakers to clarify date-labeling standards.

The Food Date Labeling Act would require that businesses choose from one of two standard date labels. The options are a Best if Used By label, which indicates when a product’s quality begins to decline, and the Use By label, which indicates when a product should be discarded. The Act also requires the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Food and Drug Administration to work together to provide education on the standardized date labels. And it makes donations of food past the Best if Used By date allowable if the products meet safety specifications.

Action on Food Waste Can Help Curb AMR Risks

A new review paper from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization looks at the risks of spreading anti-microbial resistance. According to FAO, food loss and waste can be “a reservoir and even an accelerator” for anti-microbial resistance (AMR) because it’s a good substrate for bacterial growth, especially in landfills and open dumps. The researchers say some studies have actually found a higher abundance of antimicrobial resistant genes in food waste than sewage sludge or swine manure. 

Although animal agriculture is a known contributor to AMR, the researchers say that their work shows that food loss and waste should be integrated into AMR surveillance and management strategies. And when conditions are optimized, composting, anaerobic digestion, and converting surplus food to animal feed can reduce antimicrobial resistance genes and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. 

Junxia [jun-shah] Song, Chief of the One Health and Disease Control Branch at FAO who helped lead the review, says that linking food loss and waste to AMR is “both timely and strategic” because “it creates an opportunity for coordinated action that reduces waste while strengthening global efforts to contain AMR.”

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Photo courtesy of Yogesh Pedamkar, Unsplash

The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: The Next Farm Bill, Producers Stand Their Ground, and the Latest Progress on Deforestation appeared first on Food Tank.

Spring begins. Winter seining is in full swing. During February one of the most significant forests of rewilding programme, Rahekangas, was secured, appearances in US media on rewilding and fisheries and new science papers out. A new database of Indigenous knowledge of bowhead whales is released.

March continues winter seining. Catches have varied and ice conditions are strong but hard. Fishers from Tornio river arrive next week as well as Prof. David Barkin from Mexico, to participate in a workshop devoted to sustainability.

Winter seining.

David Barkin holds a PhD in Economics from Yale University and is Distinguished Professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco Campus in Mexico City. He collaborated in the founding of the Ecodevelopment Center in 1974. He received the National Prize for Political Economy in 1979. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and is an Emeritus member of the National Research Council. He collaborates with indigenous and peasant communities to promote the sustainable management of regional resources. Many of these communities are engaged in activities to develop new institutions, advancing towards the construction of post-capitalist societies by fostering new forms of coexistence and alternatives to development to move towards a world of ‘good living’.

Prof. Barkin

Rahekangas, a 170-hectare boreal forest and peatland complex in Koitajoki joined the Landscape Rewilding Programme in February.  Rahekangas Forest and Peatland Complex is a part of a nationally relevant Kelsimä river valley where very large restoration actions have been carried out, for example on Rahesuo, Kaitoinsuo and Valkeasuo peatlands – together these rewilding sites and conservation sites constitute a valley of peatlands and boreal forests of thousands of hectares and can be considered to be of national relevance. Snowchange has restored Rahesuo and several of the surrounding habitats. Rahekangas contains 47 hectares of intact peatlands, it is directly a part of the Natura site (Valkeajärvi), there are subsurface water sources and a stream – Rahepuro, that runs on the site.

Rahekangas and the stream.

Mongabay reports on the Circumpolar peatland initiative here. Secondly, the History Channel reports on the “oldest ice fishing” in the world, here. Lastly, a new science paper reports on the status of freshwaters in the Arctic. 

Snowchange has also released a new unique Indigenous knowledge database of bowhead whale from Chukotka, Nunavut and Greenland. These consented materials have been collected from open sources and archives. The materials from Chukotka are based on archival and literature sources. The database is here.

This collection of StoryMaps presents knowledge and observations from Indigenous communities in Chukotka, Greenland and Nunavut, as well as scholarly works, concerning the importance, status and trends of the Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus).

Chukotka

The cultural relationship with bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus, Zelensky et al. 1997, Bogoslovskaya et al. 2016, Melnikov and Zdor 2018) and the Chukchi and the Siberian Yupiaq of Chukotka is old and extremely relevant (Bogoslovskaya et al. 2016). 

Greenland

Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus), Arfivik in Greenlandic, have historically held deep cultural and subsistence importance for Inuit communities in Greenland. Once nearly eradicated by commercial Euro-American whaling between the 17th and 19th centuries, bowhead populations have gradually recovered especially in West Greenland after nearly 80 years of protection.

Nunavut

The Inuit from Nunavut, Canada have had a cultural relationship with bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) or arviq for a long time (Bennett and Rowley 2004, Reeves and Lee 2022). Harvesting the bowhead whale is and has been, as all Inuit hunting activities, a part of a large cultural whole in Nunavut.

Finally a new science paper summarizes that Arctic freshwater biodiversity is rapidly changing due to climate warming, resource extraction,infrastructure development, and landscape transformation.To improve understanding, predict future responses, and inform policy formulation, research needs must be clearly identified. Using a horizon scan survey, Arctic freshwater experts from government, international agencies, and Indigenous Peoples identified 77 biodiversity research questions with 17 highlighted as most important for near term assessment.

These questions span nine thematic categories:

• biodiversity and taxonomic challenges
• hydrological change,
• productivity and food webs
• ecosystem connectivity methods
• monitoring andassessment
• permafrost change
• winter ecology
• anthropogenic development
• Indigenous Knowledge

Climate change emerged as the major driver among allcategories and research questions. A key priority identified was the urgent need for long-term, harmonized monitoring programs among Arctic countries. Multiple knowledge gaps detected suggest that circumpolar research collaborations are required to tackle these issues.

The paper is available here.

New posters: fund healthcare, education, and housing — not war! To help fight rising militarism and advocate for strong public services and peace put these posters up in your neighbourhood today!

The post POSTERS: Fund healthcare, education, and housing — not war! first appeared on Spring.

kayla@unbendablemedia.com

Washington, D.C. –  The U.S. military is the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter in the world. At a time when the United Nations has pulled the emergency alarm, warning us that we have entered an era of global water bankruptcy and irreversible long-term consequences are quickly approaching from the rapid rise of global temperatures- one thing is clear. War is not the answer.

We condemn the United States and Israel’s preemptive military strikes on Iran today, that fly in the face of international law, human rights, and democracy. If we want to stop the climate crisis and ensure a safe and healthy future for us all we must oppose war and militarism.  

The military attacks on Iran are not about peace and democracy, but rather about sowing fear, bloodshed, and despair as the U.S. attempts to further destabilize the region and secure access to profitable natural resources that it wants to control. This is not surprising given recent foreign policy actions taken by the Trump administration in Venezuela and Cuba, and our 

ongoing history of engaging in coups, occupations, and endless wars to control resource-rich countries, especially for oil and gas. Just since 2025, the Trump administration has carried out military actions in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. 

We stand with the frontline communities of the world, and the peoples of Iran and the region, who are calling for an immediate end to these airstrikes and all military attacks in the region. War and increased militarization accelerate climate chaos and we oppose them in the strongest of terms. 

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The post Climate Justice Alliance Opposes the War on Iran – War Fuels Climate Change appeared first on Climate Justice Alliance.

It’s our 6th anniversary and we talk about the underlying themes in our shows and some of our favorite moments.

Editor’s Note: During the fire seasons of 1975 and 1976 I was the fire lookout on La Mosca Peak, right next to Mount Taylor, or Tsoodzil, as the Diné refer to this sacred mountain near Grants, New Mexico. What was happening all around me had more to do with the profane than the sacred, however. These were the boom years of uranium exploration, mining, and processing throughout what is called the Grants mineral belt, stretching from Milan to Laguna Pueblo, right through the San Mateo Mountains surrounding Mount Taylor. Below me mining rigs crisscrossed forest roads on their way to exploration sites, sending up dust clouds that I had to learn to distinguish from forest fire smoke. To the west I could see the Ambrosia Lake, Kerrmac, and Homestake mines and mills where the yellow cakes of uranium ore were taken to be processed; to the north, the intense activity centered around the San Mateo underground mine; to the east, the huge scar in the earth that was the open pit Jackpile Mine at Paguate, on Laguna Pueblo. By the early 1980s the boom was over, however. The rigs were gone, all the mines and mills closed down, and the Jackpile mine was left unreclaimed to send radioactive dust into the air and radioactive sediment into the aquifer.

In this boom or bust economy another claim was made in 2008 when the price of uranium rose to approximately $60 a pound and the mining industry began talking big money, anywhere from a potential of $30 to $67 billion to be made in New Mexico, along with 250,000 jobs. Both the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, based in Santa Fe, and the Southwest Research and Information Center (SRIC), based in Albuquerque,  “debunked” the claims of this new “boom” in published reports. The Law Center commissioned Dr. Thomas M. Powers, a preeminent natural resource economist (Professor Emeritus of the University of Montana) to evaluate the true meaning of the economic impacts of uranium mining in New Mexico. His report is called An Economic Evaluation of a Renewed Uranium Mining Boom in New Mexico. SRIC compiled an overview called “Debunking the Uranium ‘Bonanza'” in its fall newsletter, Voices From the Earth.

Now, in 2026, the mining industry is raising its ugly head once again. Below, reprinted with permission, is Source New Mexico’s report on the latest attempt to reopen a uranium mine near Mount Taylor.

New Mexico state agency to hold public hearing on proposed uranium mine State received hundreds of letters opposing the La Jara Mesa mine near Mount Taylor By:Patrick Lohmann–February 26, 20262:43 pm

 A drawing of the Jara Mesa uranium mine project that Laramide Resources, Inc. hopes to build north of Grants, New Mexico. The state Mining and Minerals Division has agreed to hold a public hearing regarding the proposal after receiving hundreds of public comments in opposition.  (Courtesy New Mexico Mining and Minerals Division)

The New Mexico office charged with permitting what would be the state’s first new uranium mine in decades has agreed to hold a public hearing after receiving more than 200 letters in opposition.  

Laramide Resources, Inc. announced a major milestone in mid-January for its years-long effort to build La Jara Mesa uranium mine about 10 miles north of Grants. After the state’s Mining and Minerals Division deemed the company’s 72-page mining plan “administratively complete,” officials opened a public comment period that ended last week.

The division received more than 200 letters, all of which expressed opposition to the mine, according to a Source NM review of the letters the division published online Thursday.

According to the plan, the mine, once built, will produce 12 to 15 truckloads a day of uranium ore to be processed at an unspecified offsite mill. The operation could run in New Mexico for up to 20 years, the company says.

Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department Public Information Officer Sidney Hill said the department received “dozens” of hearing requests in addition to the comments, and has committed to holding a hearing.

But the hearing won’t happen until Laramide responds to questions the division has regarding the company’s mining plan. The division expects to send questions to the company before June, Hill said, though he said he couldn’t estimate when a hearing would be scheduled.

The proposed site is near Mount Taylor, which is one of four mountains sacred to the Navajo people and other local pueblos. Tribes and pueblos in the early 2000s successfully convinced the state to designate the mountain and outlying areas a “traditional cultural property” in an effort to protect it from mining.

Dozens of the letters also recounted harms uranium mining has caused Indigenous communities. Alicia Gallegos, an organizer for the Pueblo Action Alliance, told Source that in addition to running an online campaign, she collected several dozen hand-written letters.

“I think it’s important to have these public hearings, so that the folks who would be pushing this project forward are seeing the faces of the people who are impacted,” she said.

Leona Morgan, a Diné anti-nuclear advocate, wrote in her letter that the state should hold multiple public hearings along a potential uranium transport route in the Navajo Nation, because the only operating uranium mill is in Southeast Utah.

“This means the transport may go through Navajo Nation,” she wrote. “As such, the Navajo public must be informed and afforded the opportunity to give public comments.”

Josh Leftwich, vice president of operations and strategic development for Laramide, told Source NM in an email Thursday that the company “respects” the division’s decision to hold a hearing. He also said that the company “recognizes that mining projects can generate strong viewpoints.”

“However, regulatory decisions are ultimately based on technical standards, environmental protections, and compliance with established law,” he said. “Our focus remains on following the science, complying with the rules, and working constructively within the regulatory framework established by the State of New Mexico and federal agencies.”

Both the state and the federal government have to approve the mine through parallel permitting applications, though the federal government has signaled it intends to fast track approvals. Still, the division previously promised a “robust permitting process” that can diverge from the federal process if needed.

 

Over two years since Northern Maine Medical Center first formed their union and began bargaining in good faith for a first contract, nurses remain committed to the patients they serve, and to making their hospital the best place it can be for everyone. Union nurses at NMMC signed a letter they released today.

This article Elders are a powerhouse of the US pro-democracy movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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As a senior, I’m trying to do my part to push back against the daily dismantling of the nation by the Trump administration. And I’m not alone.

Around 25 percent of adults in the United States are seniors. We are a powerful demographic for reclaiming and restoring democracy in this country. We want to build upon the 250 years of its existence and support its return to a position of international leadership.

In my 85 years as a citizen of the U.S., I’ve done my best to be a good one. Never shy to engage with worthwhile causes, I have been involved with disability rights, vocational rehabilitation, special education, domestic violence prevention and rehabbing offenders, senior services, youth services, food and water security, and immigrant and minority rights. I have tried to advance justice in the U.S., and some 16 plus other nations in which I have worked. Yet, since 2016, my pride in my own government has waned precipitously.

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I now live in a senior independent living facility with some 50 other seniors. We are often willing to overlook our increasing infirmities and dwindling resources to engage with passion and determination. We take great pride in having a positive influence on our children — both biological and otherwise — by teaching them our values and how to uphold them.

I have scores of senior friends and family members — some are more physically capable, but many have limited mobility or are even homebound. However, all of them are engaging in civil resistance in meaningful ways. I’ve learned from them that there are many opportunities for peaceful engagement in the resistance.

Those with limited mobility are posting and commenting on social media. Those with economic means are donating to progressive candidates. Many are phone banking and writing postcards to voters and potential voters with groups like Seniors Taking Action. Others boycott businesses that support the current administration, write letters to the editor and call in to radio talk shows.

I’ve seen many seniors (and non-seniors) with canes, walkers and wheelchairs at all of the protest events I have attended. At one demonstration, an elderly, disabled fellow showed up in a wheelchair equipped with hydraulic lifts that put him at eye level with the other protesters. He was not only able to see what others saw, but others saw him, his sign and his strength as a demonstrator with the same passion and potency.

Jeanne, who turns 100 later this year, at a protest on Aug. 31. (WNV/Bill Winkley)

I have a friend who turns 100 later this year and uses a walker to travel any distance from our communal residence. She is one of my role models, and has taught me how to maximize my presence and impact at large demonstrations. Last summer, she made careful preparations for the No Kings protest, which was planned at the federal building located roughly a mile from our home. Before the event, she made two round-trip trial runs to build stamina and reassure herself it was doable.

When I arrived at the protest, she had already strategically placed herself where her homemade sign could be seen and she could see, hear and engage fully with the activities. At a subsequent event, with yet another sign, she was one of several League of Women Voters who sported a banner extolling their values. My friend is a firebrand who never misses an opportunity to participate.

Another friend in her mid-70s has been totally blind since early childhood. She marches in most if not all demonstrations in her area. She religiously contacts her elected officials at both the federal and state levels, expressing her appreciation for deeds well done, dismay for bad moves, and suggestions or demands for more effective action. As a Latina woman who grew up in a poor neighborhood in El Paso, the child of a single mother and sister to four younger siblings, her life experience and upbringing has taught her the importance of advocating for herself and for others. With ICE violating the rights of so many minority folks right now, she is standing up in both English and Spanish, and making sure she is heard loud and clear.

My spouse, Stan Coleman, a director, actor, vocalist and pianist, directed a local theater production of the 1936 play “It Can’t Happen Here,” based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author, Sinclair Lewis. The performances opened the audience’s eyes to the existential threat Trump and his followers pose to our way of life.

John-Roy Wilson, a fellow resident at our senior independent living facility, at the MLK/NAACP march in Eugene, in 28 degree weather on Jan. 19. He is 80 years old and a Vietnam War veteran. (WNV/Bill Winkley)

Other seniors have engaged in the boycotts of Target, Disney and ABC, as well as Tesla Takedown. Other elders are leaning on their alma maters to support critical issues like student organizing and protesting, avoiding campus repression, standing up for immigrant student rights, and refusing to buy into the authoritarianism of Trump’s campus compact. Since schools depend on alumni for financial support, especially through legacies, seniors are leveraging their position as potential donors to shore up their colleges’ willingness to defy Trump’s efforts at coercion and control.

As part of our resistance, my spouse and I have chosen to be active founders and members of the local chapter of States Win, formerly known as Sister District Project. This national effort works to support key state-level candidates for office through marches, bar trivia fundraisers and direct donations. Seniors make up more than 50 percent of our chapter. Additionally, our queer, senior walking group (called the “Talkie-Walkies” because we do more talking than walking) frequently sits for hours in front of our main library here in Eugene, Oregon, inviting passersby to register to vote.

Two of the founders of our States Win chapter, both women in their mid-to-late 70s, regularly travel to the home area of the candidates we are supporting and spend days knocking on doors to promote them. They report few negative reactions to their presentations. Could their age or the fact that they are seniors — and have expended considerable effort and expense to do what they are doing — be a factor in this positive reception? SDP’s impact nationally has been formidable: We helped flip both Virginia and Washington State from red to blue trifectas, where all three branches of the state government are now dominated by Democrats.

Making donations is one advocacy activity many seniors can do with little effort. Almost every person I know participates as a donor, in small or large amounts, often as just one way they engage in political activism. My spouse and I have developed a profile for those we support: We look at their platform and what in their history informs it; how they have performed in other political positions, in advocacy groups and in movements; how they have overcome difficulties to be successful; their support for minority rights; and their passion for all of the above.

Phone banking has been shown to be effective in swaying non-voters and regular voters to vote for progressive candidates. It is an activity one can do from home with proven impact. Many, many of my elderly friends participate. Writing postcards can be a solo act from the comfort of one’s kitchen table or a social event with a group of like-minded activists. Seniors might be the largest demographic engaged with postcard writing. One friend, in particular, has handwritten over 1,000 postcards in the past two years.

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Signing petitions, joining and supporting advocacy groups such as Southern Poverty Law Center, Amnesty International and the ACLU, door-to-door canvassing, writing letters and emailing, are all methods of civil, peaceful resistance that countless seniors are involved in.

Additionally, with isolation being associated with dementia, the social value of many of these activities can be meaningful. Being with others builds awareness and commitment, both of which foster mental health, along with civil resistance. In Eugene, many of us gather at a store called Materials Exchange Center for Community Arts, or MECCA, where people make signs using both new and used materials, and share ideas with others of similar persuasion. My 84-year-old supper tablemate never fails to show up at a demonstration with a new and clever sign she created at MECCA. Folks often photograph her with her sign.

Importantly, all of these resistance efforts are nonviolent, which has been shown to be the most effective way of waging struggle. Trust us on this. Not only have seniors lived long enough to know what works, the book “Civil Resistance: What Everybody Needs to Know”proves it. Erica Chenoweth demonstrates that nonviolent movements have succeeded twice as often as violent ones over the last century. Along with my fellow senior activists, I often attend Chenoweth’s webinars with the Ash Center at Harvard University.

The activism carried out by our nation’s elders is laudable and extensive. Attend any rally, march, protest and look at the amount of white hair in the rising sea of protesters. Today’s seniors are not sitting at home knitting sweaters for our grandkids or pasting memory photos in albums. Nope, we are out there pushing back and fighting for a far better gift for them: We are assuring a future where we have a fully restored and improved democracy.

Don’t mess with seniors!

This article Elders are a powerhouse of the US pro-democracy movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

At 26, Isaiah Taylor had accomplished more than most people do by the time they’re twice his age. The founder of Valar Atomics, a Southern California-based company that aims to make small-scale nuclear reactors, Taylor, a father of four, has government contracts, invitations to Mar-a-Lago, and investments from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley venture capital. His goal is nothing less than to usher the United States into an era of nuclear power domination — becoming the next Elon Musk while he’s at it. “We do not appreciate SpaceX enough,” he tweeted last year. “If it were not for a single highly motivated American startup, China would be preparing to simply own outer space. Now they’re playing catch-up. I plan to make Valar Atomics the equivalent for energy.”

The political winds appear to be at his back. “Unleashing nuclear energy is how we will power American artificial intelligence,” posted U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on X last year. “Nuclear energy provides the constant energy needed to power data centers and release the full potential of American innovation.” Last September, the DOE named Valar as one of four companies to participate in a pilot program to build nuclear fuel lines; two months later, the company became the first-ever venture-backed startup to reach the nuclear milestone of splitting atoms using its own reactor. “This moment marks the dawn of a new era in American nuclear engineering — one defined by speed, scale, and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership,” Taylor said of the achievement in a press release. Max Ukropina, Valar Atomics’ Head of Projects, added, “America should be thrilled but wanting more.”

Taylor’s trajectory has been as unconventional as it is meteoric. The high-school dropout’s path to success included a controversial Christian nationalist church and an assist from a Russian-American power broker with ties to both the Kremlin and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — but practically no experience with nuclear energy. Nuclear experts have raised red flags about both the feasibility of Valar’s goals and its safety claims — but those concerns do not appear to faze Taylor, who went on the offense last year, entering Valar into a lawsuit against the U.S. government over what it considers a prohibitively restrictive interpretation of U.S. nuclear safety rules. As Taylor put it in a tweet last November, “Civilization is an inconceivably precious thing. But the way to keep it alive is by continually treating it as a frontier, not covering everything in bubble wrap.”

But those rules have not stopped the Trump administration from working with Valar — earlier this month, the U.S. government announced a partnership with the company to test its reactor for government use. “President Trump promised the American people that he would unleash American energy dominance,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright enthused about the partnership with Valar on X. “This is the next chapter for U.S. energy.”

Read Next The Trump administration says it wants a ‘nuclear renaissance.’ These actions suggest otherwise. Gautama Mehta & Katie Myers

Since the advent of nuclear energy in 1942, the field has been controversial, largely because of high-profile accidents such as the disasters at Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. Tight safety regulations make large-scale reactors expensive and cumbersome to build, and people don’t exactly jump at the chance to host one in their neighborhood.

Taylor founded Valar to address these barriers — smaller, more nimble reactors, he reasoned, would be both safer and more convenient. While the larger, traditional reactors typically produce enough power to fuel up to a million homes continuously, Taylor’s units are much more modest, big enough to power only about 5,000 homes.

Small-scale nuclear reactors like the ones that Taylor aims to build are not new — in fact, during the Cold War, both the United States and Russia used them to power satellites. Building them on land, however, has always proved prohibitively expensive; it’s much more cost-efficient to build one big reactor than a series of small ones, explains Nick Touran, a nuclear engineer who runs the informational site whatisnuclear.com. But that thinking is beginning to change: Small reactors could come in handy for AI data centers and also on remote military bases, where shipping fuel is both expensive and dangerous. In theory, small, portable reactors could act like batteries, powering a data center or a base for years without the need for more fuel.

The handful of nuclear experts I spoke with all acknowledged that small reactors would be desirable, but they weren’t sure Valar could manage to make them both cost-effective and scalable. “It’s not a new technology, but nobody’s been able to make it successful in electricity markets,” said Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission who currently heads the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. She referred to Taylor and other nuclear startup founders as “nuke bros” who “don’t know what they don’t know.” Touran said he thought it was possible for Valar to make good progress on small reactors, but he had his doubts that they would succeed in making them profitable. “I think high risk, high reward,” he said. “It’s unlikely to be economically competitive, in my opinion.”

The long odds don’t seem to bother Taylor, who sees himself as fitting in the grand tradition of an old-fashioned rags-to-riches American story. In a 2024 post on X, Taylor described growing up poor in Kentucky and teaching himself to code on the family computer before he was even in high school. When he was 12, he wrote, his father promised to buy him a laptop if he would agree to pay his own way through college. Taylor took him up on the offer and proceeded to drop out of high school. By 16, he claimed that he was “making six figures.” By 17, he had moved with his family to Moscow, Idaho, where he started an auto-repair shop while living on his friend’s couch. “The business was deep in the red and barely hanging on,” he recalled in the post on X. But he persevered, and eventually the shop succeeded. “My software career did well too,” he wrote. “Life is more comfortable now, monetarily. I still work like a dog, but I don’t think about the next rent payment as much as I did.”

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Small-town Idaho may seem like a strange place for an ambitious young coder, but he stayed there for a compelling reason. As Taylor explained on X in 2023, he lived in Moscow “in order to be part of a medium-sized church community.” That community was the fiefdom founded by Doug Wilson, the self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor of Moscow’s Christ Church. In a 2023 tweet, Taylor described Wilson as “a huge influence on me regarding wealth.” In an email to Mother Jones, Wilson said he first met a teenage Taylor when his family relocated to Moscow; Wilson described Taylor as “a go-getter.” Taylor didn’t respond to our request for comment on his relationship with Wilson and other details of this story.

Wilson has attracted widespread media attention for his controversial statements, including his remark to CNN last year that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.” As I wrote in 2024:

He has argued that the master-slave dynamic was “a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence,” called the trope of the dominant man and a submissive woman “an erotic necessity,” and opined that women never should have been given the right to vote. When I asked him about his most provocative statements, he compared himself to a chef who cooks with jalapeño peppers: “Some of my enemies online have combed through my writings, have gathered up all the jalapeños, and put them on one Ritz cracker,” he told me.

While running the auto repair shop, coding, attending Wilson’s church, and starting a family, Taylor spent the next six years on “nights and weekends of research,” he told the tech publication Infinite Frontiers in 2024, he decided to tackle the problem of making nuclear power profitable — large reactors often scare off investors because they can cost billions to build and can take more than a decade to come online. Taylor says his interest in nuclear power runs in the family; his great-grandfather, Ward Schaap, worked on the Manhattan Project as a nuclear physicist. In 2023, Taylor founded Valar Atomics in the Southern California defense tech hub of El Segundo. Although Taylor hasn’t explained publicly why he chose the name, in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, the Valar are angelic guardians who helped create the world and control nature.

In El Segundo’s macho scene of young, conservative Christian founders, Taylor fit right in. With his friend Augustus Doricko, founder of another buzzy El Segundo startup, the cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, he began attending a nearby church in the denomination Wilson founded. On social media, Taylor sometimes posts scripture — for Christmas last year, a bible verse about the birth of Jesus appeared on the Valar house account, accompanied by a photo of its nuclear reactor prototypes wearing Santa hats.

In El Segundo, Taylor quickly scored connections to an exclusive network of high-powered tech investors. He secured a pre-seed round of $1.5 million from the firm Riot Ventures, and just over a year later, in 2025, he announced a seed round of $19 million, with funding from Silicon Valley power players such as investor and author Balaji Srinivasan. Later that year, he obtained a $130 million funding round.

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And here is where the story departs from the more familiar tech entrepreneur-scores-a-big-win narrative, with an unusual Venn diagram of Taylor’s professional, religious, and personal interests converging on an unexpected protagonist. A co-leader of that round was Day One Ventures, a firm that says it aims to “back early-stage companies with customer obsession in their DNA.” Day One’s founder, visionary leader, and sole general partner is Masha Bucher, a one-time pro-Putin Russian political activist-turned Jeffery Epstein publicist-turned Silicon Valley kingmaker.

Before Bucher came to the United States in 2014, she still lived in Russia and was an enthusiastic supporter of Putin. There is a well-circulated 2009 photo of her as a teenager kissing Putin on the cheek; it became the subject of the 2011 documentary Putin’s Kiss. It’s unclear how she landed a gig doing publicity for convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in 2017, but her name comes up several times in the recently released batch of files of Epstein’s communications. On one occasion in 2017, when she still had her original last name, Drokova, she asked Epstein to connect her with “adequate Russian oligarchs.” In 2018 Epstein wrote in an email to Bucher that her friend had “told me about the project she is doing researching a really bad guy that gets children for sex sent to his island … she almost fainted when I told her that person is me.” He asked her for nude photos of herself 11 days before he was arrested for the second time in 2019. Bucher, who did not respond to our request for comment, has claimed that she was never paid by Epstein for the work she did.

Bucher apparently already had some of those connections to wealthy Russians that she had asked Epstein to arrange — and in fact, she introduced Epstein to one of them. Her first boss in the world of tech venture capitalism was Serguei Beloussov, who later changed his name to Serg Bell. “Connecting you here,” she wrote to Epstein and Bell in 2018. “You both are one [sic] of the most intelligent and fun people I met in my life. Super smart and special.”

Bucher worked for Bell at two firms Bell had cofounded: Runa Capital and Acronis. In 2022, Bell was one of a handful of Russian expats living in the U.S. who were tracked by the U.S. government for allegedly attempting to export U.S. tech developments to Russia. The government did not find evidence of a security breach, but it did bar Acronis from sensitive government contracts last year. (Bell recently told the Washington Post that he never worked for Epstein, and that he advised others against doing business with him; he has also disavowed his Russian connections.)

According to reporting by the Washington Post, early fundraising materials for Day One Ventures show Bucher boasting of her connections to Russian billionaires Alexander Mamut and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, though she later denied writing the fundraising materials and has said she never took money from Russian oligarchs. She has said she left the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi in 2010, and she recently posted on X that was branded a traitor by Russian state media in 2017. “I gave up my Russian passport years ago, can’t return without risking my freedom, and have publicly opposed the Putin regime,” she wrote. Yet sleuths on X have found evidence that those statements may not be true. Reporting by Russian-British investigative journalist Maria Pevchikh shows Bucher speaking at a pro-Putin event in 2019, years after she claimed to have disavowed him. According to records obtained by Pevchikh, she still holds a valid Russian passport, though she told the Washington Post in 2022, “I deeply regret ever joining Nashi and supporting Putin and his government.”

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Bucher, who has also invested in Taylor’s friend Doricko’s company, seems to be more than just a funder for the companies she supports. A Day One pitch deck boasts that the firm is “actively involved in its portfolio companies and play a real, tangible role in helping them grow.” In an interview last year with TechCrunch, Bucher said her goal in founding the firm was to provide not only funding but also PR help to the companies she invested in. She also appears to enjoy a close relationship with Valar executives, posting photos of herself on social media attending parties with them. While Doricko cut ties with Bucher after the most recent Epstein disclosures, Taylor has done no such thing.

Bucher said that Taylor himself drew her to Valar. “I can’t think of a better founder,” she told TechCrunch. The decisions she would trust him with, she added, are “literally life-and-death.”

Not everyone is as bullish as Bucher about Valar’s prospects—nuclear experts have raised serious questions about the safety of the company’s technology and the qualifications of its leadership. In April 2025, Taylor boasted in a post on the Valar website that the company’s spent fuel was so safe that holding it in one’s bare hands for five minutes would result in a dose equivalent only to that of a CT scan. On X, Tuoran, the nuclear engineer, challenged the claim. “This statement cannot possibly be true,” he wrote. “Any nuclear reactor of the power you’re referring to makes spent fuel [that] would give a person a fatal dose within a few seconds if they were to hold a handful of spent fuel.” Another nuclear engineer, Gavin Ridley, chimed in with his own calculation: He found that Valar’s spent fuel would deliver a lethal dose in 85 milliseconds of direct contact. Taylor posted in response, “I will follow up with a detailed writeup tonight or tomorrow, back to back today. Should be fun …” He never did.

Although there are now some seasoned nuclear engineers in the company’s leadership, some of the top brass appear to have as little nuclear experience as Taylor. Kip Mock, a fellow member of Wilson’s Idaho church and a co-founder of Taylor’s auto repair shop, is now Valar’s head of operations. Another church member, Elijah Froh, serves as Valar’s director of business operations. (A story last year by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project revealed that Mock accidentally set Froh on fire in 2021 when he poured old diesel into a wood-burning stove and caused an explosion.)

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Questions about safety apparently have not deterred Taylor, who appears to be as determined as ever to forge ahead. Last April, Valar announced it was joining several other companies and a handful of states in filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission over what they claim is an overly broad interpretation of safety regulations around testing nuclear reactors. In a post about the lawsuit, Taylor argued that the rules should allow Valar to test its reactor prototype, the Ward One. “Operating Ward One in a remote testing area within the United States would not pose a threat to the health and safety of the public or impact national security based on any reasonable accident scenario,” wrote Taylor. “However, because the NRC has failed to implement rules which would exempt this small test reactor from full NRC regulations, we are building and testing this reactor in the Philippines instead.” Mock, Taylor’s employee who accidentally set his buddy on fire in Idaho is heading the Philippines project. Taylor told Business Insider that the company planned to move “really fast” on it. Separately, last May, the state of Utah, a fellow plaintiff in the lawsuit, announced that it had won a “tight race” — through its Operation Gigawatt program aimed at attracting nuclear companies — with other states to host Valar’s first test reactor for the DOE.

The Trump administration is on board with nuclear, too. In an executive order last May, Trump vowed to have three test reactors up and running by July 4th of this year. In a recent interview with podcaster Shawn Ryan, Taylor called that goal “unbelievably exciting.” Last fall, the Trump administration quietly pushed through a suite of major changes to the laws that govern U.S. nuclear facilities. The new rules, which weren’t made public but were only shared with companies with government contracts, dramatically loosened requirements around safety, accidents, and environmental protections, according to reporting by NPR.

In his interview with Ryan, Taylor lavished praise on Trump and his administration. “You have to give President Trump credit for that in bringing this unbelievably talented, motivated group of people together,” he said. “Listen, I think this Trump administration is going to usher in the nuclear golden age.”

His enthusiasm turned out to be warranted. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that it had chosen Valar’s reactor for a contract with the Department of War and the Department of Energy. On February 15, the reactor was transported on a special flight from March Air Reserve in Riverside County, California, to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. “The successful delivery and installation of this reactor will unlock significant possibilities for the future of energy resilience and strategic independence for our nation’s defense,” a DOW press release stated. “This event is a testament to the ingenuity of the American spirit and a critical advancement in securing our nation’s freedom and strength for generations to come.”

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump administration’s favorite nuclear startup has ties to Russia and Epstein on Feb 28, 2026.

A version of this piece was featured in Food Tank’s newsletter, typically released weekly on Thursdays. To make sure it lands straight in your inbox and to be among the first to receive it, subscribe now by clicking here.

Around the globe, 36 percent of working women are employed within agriculture and food systems—around the same percentage as men. But sadly, that’s about where the similarities end.

Women working in agriculture make about 82 cents for every dollar men earn, and much of the work women do, more than 4 hours a day, goes unpaid altogether. Women are often more economically vulnerable than men, who tend to have greater ownership or management rights over their land and more stable employment in off-farm food jobs, according to data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

But from major cities to rural communities, women are at the forefront of leading sustainable and equitable food system transformations!

Over the past year or so, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with some amazing women on the front lines of building a better food system. I’ve been reflecting on these inspiring conversations, especially now during International Year of the Woman Farmer and with International Women’s Day coming up on March 8.

From St. Lucia across the Caribbean, Keithlin Caroo-Afrifa is transforming women’s food and farm leadership through the organization Helen’s Daughters, which she founded and directs.

“We try to take a very holistic approach,” she told me on Food Talk. “So we’re not just building the capacity of a farm worker or farmer, we’re building the capacity of somebody who could essentially be a leader in their family, in the community, even in the region.”

In Philadelphia, Christa Barfield’s Farmer Jawn is a 128-acre working farm, building a model that enables regenerative organic food production by and for underserved communities. As she reminded us, “How you eat now isn’t just about you. Food is about lineage. It’s about everyone in your bloodline before you and the ones that are coming after you.”

And in the Philippines, men and women farmers both experience challenges accessing land, markets, and training—but these are much more severe for women, says Esther Penunia, Secretary General of the Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA). The organization works across Asia to increase resilience and well-being for small-scale family farmers.

“When we unleash their potential to contribute to food security, to health and nutrition, when we help them to be able to fulfill these roles…[there will be a] dramatic increase in terms of the availability of healthy food,” she told me on Food Talk. “It is very important for women farmers that they are able to see that their work is valuable…and their work is supported.”

The data also backs this up: Empowering women means strengthening the food system! If even half of producers were able to benefit from development programs that focus on uplifting women, some 58 million people would see higher incomes; closing that wage and productivity gap would lift 45 million people out of food insecurity, per the FAO.

“Particularly for women, the inequalities are deeply entrenched in the food system,” Ismahane Elouafi, the Executive Managing Director of CGIAR, told me on Food Talk. “As we are talking about women, adaptation to climate change is very important, and nutrition is super important because they are the custodians of nutrition when we talk about the household, particularly for small kids.

As entrepreneurs and leaders at major companies, women are helping transform the private sector, too. As the Vice President of Sustainability at Whole Foods Market, Caitlin Leibert told us at Climate Week NYC last year that her goal is “to strip out the elitism of regenerative agriculture and get back to the joy, beauty, and importance of farming.”

And as the Founder and CEO of Matriark, Anna Hammond is showing how farm surplus and fresh-cut items can be upcycled into nutritious food service and retail products that are climate-smart while supporting farmers’ incomes. Down in Australia, Ronni Kahn is also transforming food rescue through OzHarvest, for which she’s the Founder and Visionary in Residence.

“Innovation is in our DNA,” Ronni told me on Food Talk. “I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur, but clearly what I care about most is innovation, creating, and recreating. … We really have to redesign society. Some people probably think I’m completely mad—they probably always have, and that’s okay—but I have set a goal that we need to end hunger because we’ve created it, so we can uncreate it.”

We’ve been able to feature so many more amazing changemakers on the Food Talk podcast and at our events, too. Ndidi Nwuneli, the President and CEO of the ONE Campaign, talked about how important women are not just on farms but as chefs and storytellers and business leaders, too. Mariangela Hungria, the 2025 World Food Prize Laureate, explained why “the science of the future will be a female science.”

And as we’ve turned the stage over to farmers for evenings of authentic storytelling, we’ve heard heartwarming and motivating stories—like at Climate Week NYC last year, when we heard personal tales from folks like Karen Washington and Sea Matías.

When we talk about a sustainable, resilient, nourishing future for the food system, we need to be talking about gender equity! And trust me, I could go on forever sharing stories from women who are leading the way. For now, I hope you’ll take time to dive deeper into the conversations I’ve linked throughout this newsletter, and find even more over on our Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg podcast feed and on our YouTube channel.

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

Photo courtesy of Gatete Pacifique, Wikimedia Commons

The post These Stories Prove How Inspiring Women Are Leading Food System Transformation appeared first on Food Tank.

Most memorable about this week's longest, basest, game-show SOTU, a toxic, lying, us-and-them hate fest: The rowdy multitude of responses from a populace "defying the lie that we are powerless." Bigly upstaging a goalie's Medal of Freedom was "a marathon of truth-telling," from a cogent Dem response to the Portland Frogs leading a restive, joyful, shaggy defense of "this thing we call democracy" by We the People, insisting, "Don't be afraid to call it fascism - we got to meet this fuckin' moment."

The State of the Union speech, already a stale ritual of forced national unity, felt more farcical than ever in these rancorous times, a tawdry, surreal piece of performance art whose only true believers may be those MAGA morons who, when challenged, frantically, mindlessly yell "USA!! USA!!," their version of, "Oh yeah?!" They resorted to it several times Tuesday at a tacky event that over 70 deeply fed up Democrats skipped. "The President has shown no respect for the principles upon which this country is based," argued Maine's Sen. Angus King. "I cannot in good conscience participate in (a) function that would require me to ignore all that has gone before, and to pay him a measure of respect he has not earned." Other apt SOTU responses: Turner Classic Movies showed Gaslight, and Jeff Tiedrich proclaimed, "The State of the Union is - oh, who gives a fuck, really?"

The "18-year-long," "excruciatingly tedious," "most openly racist State of the Union in modern history" came as its perpetrator faces record-low 36% approval ratings, trailing by double digits in swing states and bleeding support among independents as he babbles about "fake polls," "silent support" and "made-up numbers" by "professional cheaters." His deplorable flunkies aren't faring any better. In a civil trial where investors are suing Elon Musk, his lawyers can't find jurors because so many Americans "hate him." They also hate ICE Barbie and her stormtroopers, and Kash Patel for his $75K, not-at-all-personal trip to Milan to chug beer with hockey players that so infuriated his own work force they sent 8 videos of it to media. There's also Rep. Tony Gonzales with another sex scandal MAGA doesn't need (though they need his seat), and perennial losers Kegseth and Pirro.

Still, given he "continues to live in a fantasyland where stuff becomes true just because he says it is," his SOTU was awesome, like his glittering State of Denial. Likely invisible were the Suffragette white outfits of Dem women, the photos of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Rep. Al Green's sign, "Black People Aren't Apes" (he was escorted from the chamber), the "Release the Epstein Files" pins, and the stalwart, near-dozen Epstein survivors themselves invited by Dem lawmakers, reminders of ghastly new evidence and allegations and cover-ups lurking behind one key question from survivor Jess Michaels: “Does our government belong to the American people, or to those who prey on them?” There was, of course, no answer. In fact, there was no mention of Epstein. Or of the reviled ICE, stalled DHS, on-the-brink Iran, or long-suffering Ukraine on the 4th anniversary of its invasion.

There was, instead, a hate-lie-and-grievance-filled shit show, a Klan rally of "white-supremacist wolf whistles," a "fascist rally peppered with flop-sweat one-liners," a slurred, venomous, fact-free barrage of boasts, insults, puffery met with faithful Kim Jong Un-esque applause from co-conspirators filling up empty seats for an old man who endlessly burbled, lurched and clung to a podium as he hid a gross bruised hand behind him. It was, wrote Ana Marie Cox, a speech "simultaneously banal and unsettling (by) a greasy fleshhole of hate...rancid and powerful." Her trenchant analysis: "I fucking hate this guy." And no, full disclosure, we did not watch it. We just...couldn't. But sincere thanks to those strong souls who chronicled the debacle, most notably Mehdi Hassan and the folks of Zeteo here and here. Also to Jimmy Kimmel, for his fine, no-diapers introduction.

The musty lies and bombast unspooled. We were a dead country but now we're "the hottest." Dems are "suddenly using the word 'affordability' - somebody gave it to them," but high prices are all their fault. Countries hit by tariffs are "happy." Most foul were lurid tales about the "scourge of illegal immigration," like "Somali pirates who have ransacked Minnesota" and "pillaged $19 billion from the American taxpayer," though it was 80 Somali-Americans, led by a white American woman, who committed some fraud while over 100,000, 95% of them U.S. citizens, pay nearly $70 million in taxes and contribute $8 billion to the community but sure let's go with a collective ethnic smear. The crude, dumb, divisive finale: Stand if you agree your first duty is "to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens" - and don't forget the Seig Heil. Cheap Theatrics 'R Us.

Dems sat. Trump raged, "You should be ashamed." Ilhan Omar fought back: "You should be ashamed. You're killing Americans." MAGA yelled "USA!" Goebbels Miller shrieked “0 democrats stood for the (principle) leaders must serve citizens before invaders. Never has there been a more stunning moment in Congress." True, but not how he thinks. In a final, Oprah moment, the "merit vampire" who thrives on stolen glory bragged, "We’re winning so much we don’t know what to do about it" and to prove it here's the carefully choreographed USA Olympic hockey team who jeered with him in the locker room about their women cohorts who won bigger: "Come on in!" The MAGA frat party dregs cheered, hooted, fist-pumped more "USA!" Then he gave out medals, and fed the athletes Big Macs. Press Barbie: "He knows how to celebrate champions. No one does it like him!"

Ugh. The flip side: Kudos to the five hockey players, and the moms who likely largely raised them, who declined the non- invite; four of five came from Minnesota. And kudos to Public Enemy Hall of Fame rapper Flavor Flav, a longtime supporter of women's sports, who invited the women's team to party in Las Vegas and "celebrate for real for real" in July on a She Got Game weekend funded by him and area resorts. And gracious thanks to actor, gourmand and all-round mensch Stanley Tucci, who hosted the women on the patio of his favorite Milan restaurant, the Michelin-starred Ristorante Ratanà, where they happily feasted on pumpkin risotto and just desserts. Meanwhile, in the wake of the mad king's claptrap, Democrats won three local elections in swing states: two in Pennsylvania for a majority in the state house, one in Maine, further cementing Democrats’ hold.

Finally, there were myriad, heartening alternative events where lawmakers, advocates, Epstein survivors and whistleblowers vowed to, "Lean in, stand up and show up" in defense of democracy and fierce resistance - and stark contrast - to the small, mean narcissist down the road making up "facts" and boasting about stripping 2.4 million people of food stamps. The official Democratic response, from Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, was succinct and forceful. Citing the pernicious rhetoric, cruelty, cover-ups, scams, ballrooms, she asked who benefits: "Is the president working for you? We all know the answer is no." Sen. Alex Padilla pointedly gave a follow-up in Spanish. Famously last seen getting tackled by DHS thugs for daring to ask ICE Barbie about her brownshirts' violent abuses, he asserted, "I am still here. Still standing. Still fighting."

His sense of resolve was echoed at a "People’s State of the Union” rally on the National Mall held by MoveOn and Meidas Touch, where speakers lambasted Trump's imaginary "Golden Age of America" in a country that in fact offers "one reality for everyday people and another for the rich and well-protected." Citing vast unmet needs on healthcare, housing, jobs, Pennsylvania Rep. Summer Lee of the Working Families Party vowed to "elevate the voices of (those) angry, scared and fed up with an administration that’s done nothing to help and a lot to hurt everyday people." Sen. Chris Murphy decried a speech ignoring ICE "tear-gassing schools, murdering citizens, and disappearing legal immigrants." The Progressive Caucus' Greg Casar reviled a $4-billion grifter "lecturing you, the American people, about how good you have it (when) everyone but Trump’s rich friends knows it’s a disaster,."

Meanwhile, at the National Press Club a few blocks away, a dozen members of the illustrious Portland Frog Brigade headlined a giddy, heartfelt, sold-out State of the Swamp, a SOTU "ribbital" hosted by DEFIANCE.org and advocacy media network Courier where attendees were encouraged to gather, preferably in frog caps, in "peaceful defiance and civic participation." M.C.'ed by Defiance head and former Trump staffer Miles Taylor, the event drew dozens of speakers, and a few frogs, who over several hours gave resolute, kinetic, briskly-3-minute speeches focused on the vital need to remember that, "Democracy is something we do, not just something we have." The most substantial time went to the last three speakers - the combative mayors of Minneapolis and Chicago, and an enraged Robert DeNiro - and they were all electrifying.

The mood was chill, festive, occasionally profane, but the message was consistent: In the face of unprecedented threats to our democracy by "a rapist vulgarian named Donald Trump," we must, "Refuse to shut up, sit down, or even stop ribbiting. Stay LOUD." Between speakers, video clips showed historic figures of defiance: MLK Jr, Muhammad Ali, Black Panthers, James Baldwin, John Lewis, lunch-counter sit-ins, Jesse Jackson rousing Sesame Street kids to say, "I am somebody." Next to the stage, about 20 inflatable frogs, "the jesters of this movement," stood and often danced in a "frog pond" with signs: "Damn Straight," "Amphifa," "Frogs Not Fascists." Earlier, they'd hit the Capitol to hand out pocket Constitutions to members of Congress and toured D.C. for proud green selfies. Taylor: "Who better to help navigate the swamp than a creature born in the swamp?"

Despite the focus on matters of substance - housing, healthcare, climate crisis, ICE abuses, democracy itself - the tone of many speakers was light-hearted and self-deprecating. Delaware Gov. Matt Meyers: "There are more frogs in this room than people in my state." New York Rep. Dan Goldman: "It's great to be here and not in Congress tonight." Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden on his political low profile: "I'm barely a household name in my own household." Oregon Rep. Maxine Dexter: "Thank you to the frogs who hopped across the country." The array of speakers was admirably broad - from a panel of First Amendment legal defenders to former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham - and outspoken on "the weak, dumb, small, sad man" and "pathetic whiny loser who knocked down the East Wing and thinks he can knock down our democracy."

Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, one of the six veterans along with Mark Kelly under attack by Kegseth for re-iterating that the military should follow the law, began with, "Well, President Trump keeps trying to put me in prison. But I've never been very good at sitting in my foxhole and letting them send grenades my way. I fight back." Motormouth Joe Walsh, former "rock-ribbed" conservative and Illinois GOP rep with serious buyer's remorse, and author of the 2020 book Fuck Silence: Calling Trump Out for the Cultish, Moronic, Authoritarian Con Man He Is, was resolute on the "cruel bastard" who gave us Jan. 6 and "don't you for one moment think he's not gonna try" to mess with coming elections: "This moment calls for all of us to be courageous - we ain't never been here before. Our job is to blow him outta the water. Fuck Trump. The mid-terms are happening."

Over hours, their messages aligned: Fascists come after everyone in the end, even fellow fascists. MAGA is waiting its turn in the trashbin of history. Help put it there. Courage is more contagious than cowardice. An old story is dying. The elites have never been the ones to save us - it's always the people. Cruelty isn't strength, nor is defying the rule of law. Strength is the moral courage to say this is not right, to see other people as fully human. When empathy disappears, authoritarianism is next. Gutsy Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey: "We are not spectators in this moment. We are stewards of our democracy. Hold strong." DeNiro, on feeling "betrayed" by today's America, "like an abused spouse professing love for their abuser." "You have to lift people up," he said, his voice cracking. "If you've ever loved your country, this is the time to show it."

The aftermath of a grotesque SOTU tells us everything we need to know about the historic moment. Trump raged about "the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people" who declined to stand with his fascism: "We should send them back (on) a boat with Robert DeNiro, another sick and demented person....saying (things) seriously CRIMINAL!" News surfaced that, during the speech, Ilhan Omar guest Aliya Rahman, a disabled Minneapolis woman dragged from her car by ICE who later gave searing testimony to Congress, was forcibly removed by Capitol Police and charged with "Unlawful Conduct" after she silently stood up in the gallery, like many others. On Friday, Trump held a million-dollar-a-plate, "Billionaires first, Americans last" fundraiser. And the day before, NYC Mayor Mamdani, with the help of AOC, released an adorbs video about his new free child care program. Which side are you on? Tough call.

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American electricity customers and their advocates have good cause to be worried. Since 2020, residential electricity prices for urban Americans have risen by 40 percent, and current trends suggest prices will continue to increase. Natural gas, which supplies ~40 percent of America’s electricity, is projected to grow in price in the coming years. Gas turbine shortages and growing obstacles for wind and solar development are limiting new supply. And utilities are upgrading aging infrastructure to better withstand natural disasters, passing costs onto customers.

At the same time, utilities are scrambling to meet ballooning electricity demand. Data center proliferation, along with industrial growth and electrification, could increase annual electricity usage by 32 percent by 2030. This combination of surging demand and constrained supply will further increase prices. And homeowners and renters may suffer the most, as these groups have experienced the largest price increases in recent years compared to commercial and industrial users.

These affordability concerns and rising demand are pressuring legislators, regulators, and utilities to act — and many are turning to traditional approaches. Utilities like the Tennessee Valley Authority are proposing large, new natural gas facilities. Large-scale projects can benefit from economies of scale, but they also create financial and reliability risks that, all too often, end up hurting consumers in the long run. Just as investors balance risk and reward by building portfolios of stocks, we should pursue diverse energy strategies.

Portfolios of small, local investments — such as energy efficiency, batteries, renewable energy, and flexible resources such as virtual power plants — offer an alternative means to meet growing electricity demand without compounding risk. By leveraging these technologies, we can create an energy system that is more diverse, more resilient to financial and operational shocks, more affordable, and cleaner.

Putting all your eggs in one basket is risky

A utility’s typical response to serving new load is to build centralized, fossil-fuel generation, including natural gas turbines. Utilities like these facilities because they are familiar and can be turned on when you need them (i.e., they are “dispatchable”). Further, many utilities are allowed to bill ratepayers more when they invest in new capital assets, which incentivizes them to build centralized generation.

However, building large, homogenous generation fleets places several risks on consumers:

• Overbuilding: When a utility builds a large plant, it is making a big, long-term bet. The utility spends lots of money in the hopes that there will be sufficient future electricity demand to justify the expense. Yet utilities routinely overestimate demand growth, on average by 17 percent. Customers and investors are then left footing the bill for underutilized plants. For example, during the Dot Com bubble, utilities built a fleet of gas plants to meet expected future demand. However, electricity usage fizzled after the bubble burst, leaving customers paying for plants they didn’t need. The same issue can occur for renewables projects. The City of Georgetown, TX, contracted for significant volumes of wind energy, expecting future growth that never arrived. As a result, the city was left with excess electricity that it had to sell at a loss.
• Market shifts: Another challenge with large, long-term bets is that energy markets can change dramatically over decades. For example, when communities in Illinois committed to building a new coal plant at Prairie State Campus in 2007, the project looked like a decent investment. However, by the time the plant was finished, innovations in fracking technology had made natural gas far cheaper. As a result, RMI analysis found that these communities paid at least $390 million extra for their electricity over four years.
• Fuel price risk: Reliance on fossil fuels can expose customers to more volatile prices. Between 2020 and 2023, electricity customers in Florida saw their monthly fuel charge double from ~$20 to $40. Today, natural gas prices are again rising and increasing costs for consumers around the country.
• Shared disruptions: Non-diverse energy systems are also less resilient because they share common points of failure. In 2021, many communities in Texas lost power during Winter Storm Uri when natural gas generators and pipelines across the state froze. Other regions, such as New England, are also vulnerable to polar vortexes due to their reliance on natural gas. In fact, the North American Reliability Corporation (NERC) flagged the United States’s growing usage of natural gas as a national reliability risk.

Many of these risks are becoming more acute as surging electricity demand, increasingly volatile weather, a dynamic policy landscape, growing geopolitical risk (which can impact fuel prices), and rapid technological innovation increase future uncertainty.

Diversification is a powerful risk reduction strategy

Investing in a diverse set of energy solutions can mitigate these risks and create a more financially and operationally resilient system. This diversity can take several forms:

• Diverse types of generation limit common points of failure and fuel price risk: Generating electricity from a variety of types of facilities increases resilience to extreme weather by reducing common points of failure. For example, it was the City of Springfield’s “balanced portfolio” of renewables and traditional resources that allowed it to successfully weather a severe winter storm. A diverse generation fleet also reduces fuel price risk by dampening the impact of market shifts in any one commodity (e.g., increases in natural gas prices).
• Diverse generation locations protect against localized disruptions: Varying the geographic location of generators can limit the risk that all of them will be impacted by a single event (e.g., a wildfire).
• Staggering contract timing protects against buying when prices are high: Just as investors use techniques such as dollar cost averaging to manage market volatility, building an energy system incrementally over time limits the risk of any one transaction losing a lot of money. Further, staggering purchases provides more regular opportunities to adjust over time as electricity needs and market prices fluctuate.
• Diversifying technology size balances economies of scale with nimbleness: Leveraging smaller, fast-to-deploy solutions can limit the risks of overbuilding to meet anticipated demand. Investments in energy efficiency, batteries, demand response, and flexible resources such as virtual power plants have the potential to be deployed in months rather than years. As a result, instead of making bets years in advance, we can deploy these solutions over time as demand evolves. These local solutions can also significantly reduce costs for consumers. For example, in 2024, ComEd provided residents and businesses with $277 million to reduce electricity waste. As a result, customers will save an estimated $3.2 billion, a more than tenfold return. Similarly, virtual power plants (VPPs), which leverage large numbers of devices to reduce demand at critical times, can provide the same services as a new gas plant at 40-60 percent of the cost.

Case Study: Burlington, VT

These ideas are not just nice theories — communities are putting them into action. Consider the case of Burlington, Vermont. Over the years, Burlington has:

• Reduced residential electricity usage and peaks: Through a dedicated energy efficiency utility, Burlington has consistently made investments to slash waste and reduce homeowner bills. Since the program’s inception, the City’s investments have reduced annual residential energy use by 59,204 MWh — enough to power over 5500 typical Northeastern homes or a bit less than one-third of Burlington’s households. These waste reduction efforts not only reduce homeowner energy costs but also help minimize the utility’s maximum load on any individual day (particularly when combined with the recently launched flexibility programs). Since the electric grid must be sized to meet a community’s highest demand throughout the year, these efforts provide an elegant means to delay or even avoid costly new infrastructure investments.
• Kept bills low and stable: Burlington generates its power from a variety of sources, including biomass facilities, hydro, wind, solar, and oil. This diversity has protected its customers from price volatility and enabled it to retain lower rates. In contrast, Eversource customers in neighboring New Hampshire have been exposed to fluctuating natural gas prices, and experienced higher, more volatile bills. (See Exhibit 1). Importantly, this analysis assumes comparable electricity usage across households, but in reality, Burlington residential users consume 34 percent less than the average in New England, at least in part due to the city’s long-standing energy efficiency efforts. As a result, a typical Burlington homeowner’s actual bills would likely be even lower than what is represented here.

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Exhibit 1: Burlington Electric Department’s and Eversource’s average monthly residential bills over time. 

We can have a less risky, more reliable system

A more diverse, distributed, resilient energy system is possible — but it won’t happen on its own. While state policy makers and regulators can play a critical role in passing policies and regulations to support this adjustment, local governments and communities can adopt policies that help streamline local installations (e.g., permitting reforms).

We also need to collectively rethink how we evaluate investments. Too often today, individual energy projects are evaluated in isolation, where perceived risks about cost effectiveness can delay or cancel projects. This narrow lens too often causes us to overlook the risks we are already exposed to and undervalue the benefits of diversification. To be fair, there will be times when the cost savings from distributed energy resources may be uncertain or, at the end of the day, not realized. Yet communities that take a holistic lens to their investment decisions will be rewarded with a more financially and operationally resilient system.

In today’s uncertain environment, customers need affordable, reliable electricity — without more risk. Portfolios that leverage distributed, local solutions to complement centralized approaches might be just what they need.

The post Why Communities Can and Must Consider Electricity Affordability and Risk Together appeared first on RMI.

Since the Cold War ended, Western governments treated industrial capacity as an economic byproduct rather than a foundation of national power. Efficiency governed supply chains. That era is over. Great power competition, supply chain weaponization, and defense industrial base production shortfalls have forced policymakers to confront an uncomfortable reality: Markets do not automatically sustain resilience.

Despite historically high defense budgets and repeated military commitments across multiple theaters, the United States and its European allies lack the production capacity in munitions, ships, advanced components, and critical materials to sustain a prolonged high intensity conflict against a near peer adversary.

As noted by Dennis Laich, the US military cannot replace material losses or surge production at the pace required for major war without dramatically expanding industrial throughput. The structural constraint isn’t even a budgetary issue either.

The 2026 National Defense Strategy acknowledges this emerging dynamic, making industrial base capacity crucial for deterrence. The response has been dramatic. The Trump administration has expanded executive orders and used Defense Production Act authorities to support domestic critical minerals development and accelerated permitting for strategic mining and processing projects.

That is on top of the US CHIPS and Science Act commitment of $53 billion to semiconductor manufacturing and research and Inflation Reduction Act directing $370 billion toward energy and industrial transformation. The European Union has mobilized over €43 billion through its European Chips Act, launched a European Defence Industrial Strategy to encourage joint procurement and consolidation, and enacted a Critical Raw Materials Act to rebuild extraction and processing capacity. Japan has passed its Economic Security Promotion Act to secure sensitive supply chains.

What was once politically taboo is now normalized – just like President Trump ordering the Pentagon to buy coal. Across the West, governments are embracing heavy state intervention that, by capitalist standards, marks a structural shift toward a ‘China-light’ model. The state is back in the economy as Western capitals borrow selectively from Beijing’s playbook through subsidies, local content requirements, export controls, and state backed financing.

Yet Brussels and Washington are not building the sort of long-term governance structures and centralized coordination systems need to counter Beijing’s cartel control of minerals and manufacturing markets.

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza exposed munitions shortfalls and the fragility of Western defense industrial bases. US-China competition has further identified industrial capacity as a sort of strategic infrastructure that determines endurance, military capabilities, and economic growth. China-light policies by Western governments signals seriousness, but it may not be enough to build the structural depth that real industrial power requires. Without that, state involvement in the economy risks becoming episodic and reactive, when it needs to be transformative instead.

Integration is the difference

China’s industrial advantage is often reduced to subsidies or low labor costs. Integration, however, has been the most important variable, as Beijing spent decades linking upstream resource extraction to midstream processing and downstream manufacturing. This reinforced the system with state finance, protected demand, and long-time horizons. Western apathy that led to these industrial ecosystems to die as China began to control the entire global market.

Chinese dominance is most evident in critical minerals and rare earths. China’s dominance includes mining and the technically complex and capital-intensive midstream aspect of making ore useable.

China refines 68% of the world’s nickel, 73% of its cobalt, 95% of its manganese, and 100% of the spherical graphite for battery anodes. For rare earths, China controls over 90% of processing and magnet production. When Beijing announced 2023 export controls on gallium and germanium, two minerals vital for advanced semiconductors, it was leveraging control over 98% of global production.

Western economies followed a different path, hollowing out these midstream layers in a search for efficiency. The case of the Mountain Pass mine in California is illustrative. As the biggest rare earth deposit outside China, it can produce substantial ore. Yet for years, that concentrate was shipped to China for processing because America lacked capacity to cheaply do it at scale.

While MP Materials is now building out its own processing, the case highlights a structural dependency built over decades. This is the gap China-light policies are trying to close. Meanwhile, the Europeans have set clear benchmarks for domestic extraction, processing, and recycling of critical raw materials by 2030. But energy prices, regulatory fragmentation, and limited investment have slowed tangible progress. Setting targets is easy, constructing industrial ecosystems is harder.

This is the strategic asymmetry China has set by building a system; Western governments are just funding projects.

Production rates are strategy

China’s industrial strategy also has strategic adaptability. As the US and its allies impose tariffs and “de-risking” measures, China’s industrial depth allows it to reroute supply chains and absorb shocks. Its dominance in solar panel manufacturing, where China controls over 80% of all stages of production, allows the weathering of trade disputes by shifting exports to non-Western markets. Chinse industrial power is now like the force of gravity: difficult to escape even when alternatives exist.

The United States has struggled to raise monthly artillery shell production to levels need to support Ukraine’s military, and Europe faces similar constraints. Expanding output means even more money to retool facilities, qualify new suppliers, and fix bottlenecks in energetics and sub-tier manufacturing. Shipbuilding is a similar problem. For every ship the United States makes, China can build 232 more. China’s government controls steel supply, finance, and workforce continuity. While America has advanced naval design expertise, commercial shipbuilding capacity has shrunk to a fraction of global output. Rebuilding it would require years of capital investment, labor development, and predictable demand.

Semiconductors follow the same industrial logic. Fabrication plants cost almost $20 billion to construct and qualify, while the supply chains for specialty chemicals, lithography equipment, and precision tooling remain globally dispersed. China’s semiconductor system is structured around redundancy, scale, and coordinated finance – as the west is optimized for efficiency.

China-light policies emphasize stockpiles and incentives, but stockpiles deplete; production rates determine depend on industrial depth.

Moving beyond China-light theater

None of this implies that the West should replicate China’s political economy. If strategic autonomy is the goal, policy must match the scale and duration of the challenge.

Three Western policies are needed.

First, prioritize the midstream. While mines matter, processing and component fabrication determine dependence. Investments should focus on conversion capacity and throughput.

Second, align incentives with output. Defense contractors can expand revenue without expanding production if incentives reward complexity and compliance over volume. Long-term procurement contracts, predictable demand signals, and conditional public financing tied to capacity metrics can shift industrial base behavior.

Third, coordinate minerals and materials across allies structurally. Friendshoring requires shared standards, integrated stockpiles, and joint investment vehicles. Fragmented national subsidy races raise costs and dilute impact. Collective capacity equals more allied industrial resilience.

Industrial strategy is not ideology. It is the management of material chokepoints that shape national power. The West has crossed the Rubicon into state intervention, yet its China-light approach still avoids deep structural reform. Without durable governance, industrial base investments will be more theater without capacity. Industrial competition is measured in production and we have to wonder if doing China-light policies will actually deliver it.

Lt. Col. Jahara “Franky” Matisek (PhD) is a US Air Force command pilot, nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College, Senior Research Fellow at the Payne Institute for Public Policy, and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University. He is the most published active-duty officer currently serving, with 2 books and over 160 articles on industrial base issues, strategy, and warfare.

Claiming passivity while financing fossil fuel expansion puts its customers’ futures at risk

February 27, 2026

Contact: Eve Gutman, Communications and Research Manager, Earth Quaker Action Team, eve@eqat.org, 973-747-5644

In response to Thursday’s settlement in the case between Vanguard and a group of Republican state attorneys general, Earth Quaker Action Team has released the following statement: 

“No matter where we’re from, what we look like, or how we pray, we all want to build a life in a safe climate and trust that we will be able to support our loved ones. But, a small group of state attorneys general are playing with our futures by attacking investors doing any crumb of sustainable investing, just to score political points in their next elections. And the recent settlement in their lawsuit against Vanguard is just one in a series of examples of how Vanguard is succumbing to their political ploys.  

However, no matter what some politicians say, they cannot change the reality that climate change is a profound and systemic economic risk. And by funneling billions of dollars into fossil fuel expansion projects, Vanguard is directly threatening its customers’ savings – not to mention all of our wellbeing. As concerned citizens inspired by our Quaker values, we cannot accept this blatant throwing away of our futures. 

Vanguard’s claims that what matters most is “giving our investors the best chance for investment success” will ring hollow until it actually invests for a stable and prosperous future. As a start, Vanguard should offer a fossil fuel-free target date fund, give its sustainable investment products more competitive and accessible expense ratios, and meet with representatives of the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign. CEO Salim Ramji, CIO Greg Davis, and other corporate leaders have the responsibility to rise to the moment and steer the asset manager towards investing for a safe and healthy future.

For all Vanguard customers, Thursday’s settlement underscores Vanguard’s huge chasm between what it says about investing for their best interests and what it actually does. More and more customers are seeing that Vanguard is on a reckless course and moving their money out of the asset manager. Former customers concerned about Vanguard’s inaction on climate change have moved more than $57 million out of the asset manager and that number will keep growing. Customers can join money moving efforts at eqat.org/never-vanguard.

We will continue to push back with spirit-led direct action and highlight how Vanguard needs to change, alongside partners including American Friends Service Committee and Stop the Money Pipeline, among others.”

Nancy Treviño, Investors Campaign Manager at Stop the Money Pipeline, adds “In a moment when we need the largest investors and funders of fossil fuels to take climate action, this news shows us once again how Vanguard will cave to political pressure. Vanguard could choose to be a leader in providing their customers with more sustainable investment options, but instead chooses to settle politically motivated lawsuits that seek to protect fossil fuel interests over our planet’s wellbeing.” 

For more of the economic argument for why investors must treat fossil-fueled climate change as an economy-wide threat, see The Long Term Will Be Decided Now, published by the Sierra Club. 

EQAT was founded in 2010 by Delaware Valley Quakers who felt a moral imperative to address the climate crisis through nonviolent direct action, including tactics like civil disobedience. It now includes people of diverse beliefs, united in a commitment to creating a just and sustainable economy for all. For over four years, EQAT has been an active member of the international Vanguard S.O.S. campaign, calling on the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels to invest sustainably.

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The post Press Release: Recent Vanguard Settlement Underscores Chasm Between Asset Manager’s Values and Actions appeared first on Stop the Money Pipeline.

Your lawmaker needs to hear from you – it’s time polluters were held accountable Claire Prihoda Fri, 02/27/2026 - 2:31 pm

National Nurses United today condemned the Trump administration’s blockade on Cuba, which has created a humanitarian crisis on the island. The nurses called on the administration and Congress to end the blockade and allow full delivery of oil resources and other aid for the Cuban people.

Absolute rejection of the United States-Mexico Action Plan on Critical Minerals in our territories

 

On 4 February, it was announced that the governments of the United States and Mexico had agreed to work on a joint action plan on ‘critical’ minerals. Through this instrument, the Mexican government commits to taking action to ‘develop a new paradigm for preferential trade in critical minerals, backed by minimum prices and other measures’.

At REMA, we believe that this Plan deepens Mexico’s subordination to the geostrategic policy of the United States. This agreement is part of a long-standing asymmetrical relationship between the two countries and, as various analysts have pointed out, is an example of the interventionist diplomatic agreements that the United States imposes on Mexico and other countries it considers within its sphere of influence. The official document itself explains that the agreement responds to the US government’s concern to maintain its global hegemony in the face of competition from China, ensuring access to and control of strategic resources such as minerals, gas and oil.

 

This Plan is an example of the interventionist diplomatic agreements that the United States imposes on Mexico and other countries it considers within its sphere of influence, such as Australia and Canada. These agreements occur in a context of explicit threats of military interventionism, which has already been carried out recently in Iran, Venezuela and Ukraine, and has escalated in other cases such as Greenland, in addition to the United States’ active efforts to suffocate the peoples of Cuba and Gaza.

One of the central themes of our analysis in this plan is our criticism of the concept of “critical minerals”. We argue that this is a political and discursive construct that legitimises a supposed collective urgency to promote mining extractivism. The definition of these minerals is based on political rather than technical criteria: in the United States, the most recent list includes 60 minerals, while in Mexico there is not even a defined list. This ambiguity allows for the creation of an exceptional scenario that justifies the streamlining of procedures, the relaxation of regulations and the prioritisation of projects considered strategic.

The Plan establishes that both governments will identify specific mining and manufacturing projects “of mutual interest” to prioritise their financing and public policy support. We consider this point to be particularly worrying, as it may involve the deployment of the economic and political apparatus to impose priority projects over the affected communities. This will undoubtedly lead to increased dispossession, forced displacement and militarisation, formalising US interference (disguised as binational cooperation) and increasing criminalisation and violence in disputed territories.

Another important aspect is what is known as “geological transparency,” which involves the sharing of technical information between the United States Geological Survey and the Mexican Geological Survey. This would mean greater financial and technical capabilities for mining prospecting and exploration in Mexico, allowing for the expansion of the extractive model into new territories and encouraging speculative processes associated with these activities. In addition, the mention of “coordinated stockpiling of reserves” heralds the advancement of exploration work throughout the national territory.

The Plan also mentions “regulatory cooperation,” which implies greater harmonisation of the regulatory framework between Mexico and the United States to facilitate trade. It should be clear that regulatory cooperation means greater collaboration between regulators for the sole purpose of promoting trade, a demand that has been pushed for many years by transnational companies with supply chains located in two or more countries, as highlighted by researcher Stuart Trew of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The concept of “regulatory cooperation” already exists in Chapter 28 of the USMCA, but now, by applying this concept specifically to “critical minerals,” this plan jeopardises the application of the precautionary principle to protect watersheds, forests, health, and social property in the face of this extractivist onslaught.

 

In the context of the announcement of the Action Plan, it is essential to question the statements made by President C. Sheinbaum during the morning conference on 9 February, where she stated that “nothing has been signed” and that “no new mines will be opened”. The data shows a different reality: in 2025, 16 Environmental Impact Statements for mining exploration work were approved and only three were denied. At the same time, the annual report of the Mexican Mining Chamber (CAMIMEX) reports expansions and new projects in gold, silver and copper, while more than 22,000 mining concessions remain in force. These elements show that the extractive framework continues to operate with broad institutional support.

We reiterate that minerals are neither critical nor strategic in themselves. They are inputs to sustain a deeply unequal energy and industrial model that reproduces colonial structures and capital accumulation. What is truly critical is the country’s water situation, the increase in systemic violence linked to macro-criminal networks, and the strengthening of anti-rights policies.

For all these reasons, we affirm that this Plan deepens Mexico’s dependence on and expansion of extractivism, with direct consequences for the territories, common goods, and the peoples who inhabit them. Faced with this scenario, we reaffirm our defence of the hills, subsoil, rivers, and territories as an integral part of life and the exercise of our rights to self-determination.

 

REMA declara:

El 4 de febrero se anunció que los gobiernos de Estados Unidos y México acordaron
trabajar en un Plan de acción conjunta sobre minerales “críticos”. A través de este
instrumento, el gobierno mexicano se compromete a realizar acciones para “desarrollar un
nuevo paradigma para el comercio preferencial de minerales críticos, respaldado por
precios mínimos y otras medidas”.

Desde la REMA consideramos que este Plan profundiza la subordinación de México a la
política geoestratégica de Estados Unidos. Este acuerdo se inserta en una relación
asimétrica de larga data entre ambos países y, como han señalado distintos analistas, es
un ejemplo de los acuerdos diplomáticos intervencionistas que impone Estados Unidos a
México y a otros países que considera dentro de su órbita de poder. El propio documento
oficial explica que el acuerdo responde a la preocupación del gobierno estadounidense
por mantener su hegemonía global frente a la competencia con China, asegurando el
acceso y control de recursos estratégicos como minerales, gas y petróleo.

Este Plan es un ejemplo de los acuerdos diplomáticos intervencionistas que impone
Estados Unidos a México y a otros países que considera dentro de su órbita de poder,
como Australia o Canadá. Estos acuerdos ocurren en un contexto de amenaza explícita
de intervencionismo bélico, que ya ha sido llevado adelante recientemente en Irán,
Venezuela y Ucrania, y que ha llegado a escalar en otros casos como Groenlandia,
además de en medio de los esfuerzos activos de Estados Unidos para ahogar a los
pueblos de Cuba y Gaza.

Uno de los ejes centrales de nuestro análisis en este plan es la crítica al concepto de
“minerales críticos”. Sostenemos que se trata de una construcción política y discursiva
que legitima una supuesta urgencia colectiva para potenciar el extractivismo minero. La
definición de estos minerales responde a criterios políticos y no técnicos: en Estados
Unidos la lista más reciente abarca 60 minerales, mientras que en México ni siquiera
existe una lista definida. Esta ambigüedad permite construir un escenario de excepción
que justifica la agilización de trámites, la flexibilización normativa y la priorización de
proyectos considerados estratégicos.

El Plan establece que ambos gobiernos identificarán proyectos específicos de minería y
manufactura “de interés mutuo” para priorizar su financiamiento y apoyo de política
pública. Consideramos que este punto es particularmente preocupante, ya que puede
implicar el despliegue del aparato económico y político para imponer proyectos prioritarios
por encima de los pueblos afectados. Esto, con toda seguridad, se traduce en una
profundización del despojo, el desplazamiento forzado y de la militarización, formalizando
la injerencia estadounidense (disfrazada de cooperación binacional) y aumentando así
como la criminalización y la violencia en territorios en disputa.

Otro eje relevante es la llamada “transparencia geológica”, que contempla la compartición
de información técnica entre el Servicio Geológico de Estados Unidos y el Servicio
Geológico Mexicano. Esto significaría mayores capacidades financieras y técnicas para la

prospección y exploración minera en México, permitiendo la expansión del modelo
extractivo hacia nuevos territorios y fomentando procesos especulativos asociados a
estas actividades. Además, la mención de un “acopio coordinado de reservas” anuncia el
avance de trabajos de exploración a lo largo del territorio nacional.

El Plan también menciona la “cooperación regulatoria”, lo que implica una mayor
homogeneización del marco normativo entre México y Estados Unidos para facilitar el
comercio. Hay que tener claro que la cooperación regulatoria significa una mayor
colaboración entre reguladores con el único propósito de favorecer el comercio una
demanda que, desde hace muchos años, han impulsado empresas transnacionales con
cadenas de suministro emplazadas en dos o más países, tal como destaca el investigador
Stuart Trew del Centro Canadiense para Políticas Alternativas. El concepto de
“cooperación regulatoria” ya existe en el Capítulo 28 del T-MEC pero ahora, al aplicar este
concepto específicamente a los “minerales críticos”, este plan pone en riesgo la aplicación
del principio precautorio para proteger cuencas hidrográficas, bosques, la salud, y la
propiedad social ante esta embestida extractivista.

En el marco del anuncio del Plan de Acción resulta indispensable cuestionar las
declaraciones realizadas por la presidenta C. Sheinbaum durante la conferencia matutina
el 9 de febrero, en donde señaló: “no hay nada firmado” y que “no se abrirán nuevas
minas”, los datos muestran otra realidad: en 2025 se aprobaron 16 Manifestaciones de
Impacto Ambiental para trabajos de exploración minera y sólo se negaron tres.
Paralelamente, el informe anual de la Cámara Minera de México (CAMIMEX) reporta
expansiones y nuevos proyectos en oro, plata y cobre, mientras siguen vigentes más de
22 mil concesiones mineras. Estos elementos evidencian que el marco extractivo continúa
operando con amplio respaldo institucional.

Reiteramos que los minerales no son ni críticos ni estratégicos en sí mismos. Son
insumos para sostener un modelo energético e industrial profundamente desigual, que
reproduce estructuras coloniales y de acumulación de capital. Lo verdaderamente crítico
es la situación hídrica del país, el aumento de la violencia sistémica vinculada a redes de
macrocriminalidad y el fortalecimiento de políticas anti derechos.

Por todo ello afirmamos que este Plan profundiza la dependencia y la expansión del
extractivismo en México, con consecuencias directas para los territorios, los bienes
comunes y los pueblos que los habitan. Frente a este escenario, reafirmamos nuestra
defensa de los cerros, subsuelos, ríos y territorios como parte integral de la vida y del
ejercicio de nuestros derechos de autodeterminación.

 

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Nurses at Northern Maine Medical Center in Fort Kent, Maine, will hold a press event on Saturday, Feb. 28 with gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson, U.S. senatorial candidate Graham Platner, and Maine State Senate President Mattie Daughtry, who will speak out in support of nurses seeking to secure a strong first contract that puts patient safety before profits.