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This summer, the Government of Canada launched its National Strategy for an Electrified Canadian Economy, highlighting the need to double Canada’s electricity capacity and accelerate electrification over the next two decades. The Government of...

Reports of human rights and environmental abuses linked to Chinese companies’ overseas investments in the mining and refining of minerals needed for the clean energy transition are on the rise, research by a monitoring group has found.

The number of recorded allegations of harm at projects tied to Chinese firms have increased every year since 2021, rising to 148 in 2025, according to the Business and Human Rights Centre (BHRC). On Wednesday it released new data showing that a total of 434 allegations of abuse were made against Chinese-backed projects over the five-year period in projects across the world.

The world’s top cleantech manufacturer, China is also the leading financier of critical minerals projects worldwide. The country has committed more than $120 billion in foreign direct investment into mineral mining and processing since 2023, Australian think-tank Climate Energy Finance recently found.

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“China plays a central role in global transition mineral supply chains, and as such has a unique opportunity to raise the bar on human rights and community engagement at every stage of mining,” said Michael Clements, BHRC’s executive director.  

“While there have been encouraging developments, from stronger regulations to more company engagement, there remains a gap between human rights commitment and action,” he said.

The report comes as communities affected by Chinese-backed mineral projects have filed the first two cases to a Beijing-based mediation mechanism intended to bring willing Chinese companies to the discussion table with affected communities.

Allegations of harms on the rise

BHRC’s latest analysis – including data for the period 2023-2025 – covered mining, smelting and refining projects for 11 minerals considered key to manufacturing clean energy technologies such as batteries, EVs and solar panels needed to move away from climate-heating fossil fuels.

The highest number of abuses was recorded in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of nickel, which is used to make EV batteries. After the Indonesian government banned exports of raw nickel, Chinese firms invested billions of dollars to develop a large-scale nickel smelting and processing industry in the Southeast Asian country, largely powered by coal.  

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Other countries with a high number of recorded harms include the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Chinese firms dominate cobalt and copper production; Myanmar, where unregulated rare earths mining has caused widespread environmental destruction; Serbia, where Chinese-backed mining of some of Europe’s most significant copper and gold deposits is swallowing land and homes, and Zimbabwe, where Chinese investments have turned the nation into Africa’s top lithium producer.

Growing risks for people and nature

Allegations tracked by BHRC included negative impacts on local livelihoods, health and land rights, workers’ health and safety and work-related deaths, as well as water pollution and environmental contamination. In addition, 18 people were attacked for raising concerns about Chinese transition mineral projects between 2023 and 2025.

The report shows that 10 Chinese companies, including Zijin Mining, Tsingshan Group and Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, accounted for nearly two-thirds of all allegations recorded in the last five years. It found that some Chinese companies “still appear to turn a blind eye to these issues” but noted that several others have been more responsive to allegations of abuse. However, even among companies with human rights policies, implementation remains a challenge, BHRC warned.

• Jul 9, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier India looks to untapped graphite riches for slice of critical minerals boom Clean energy demand for battery-grade graphite is surging, but India faces hurdles as it positions itself to compete with China’s grip on the supply chain Read more
• Feb 9, 2024 Clean Energy Frontier Indonesia turns traditional Indigenous land into nickel industrial zone Indonesia supplies the EV industry with critical battery materials but the sector’s rapid expansion is infringing the rights of Indigenous peoples Read more
• May 27, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Recycling could meet half of Europe’s critical mineral needs by 2050 A new report by an EU-funded research project says the bloc could harness its “urban mines” to reduce its dependence on China for energy transition minerals Read more

Zijin Mining and Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt repeatedly responded to the allegations of harm by saying they take environmental and social risks seriously and adhere to international standards. Tsingshan Group never responded to BHRC’s requests for comment.

Platform for dialogue between communities and Chinese firms

At the same time, Chinese authorities have made “significant progress” on introducing a more specific framework for managing environmental and social risks in overseas investment, BHRC said.

This includes global consultation on a draft Sustainable Mining Code, adherence to UN guiding principles on business and human rights, and greater emphasis on oversight of companies operating overseas.  

The China Chamber of Commerce of Metals, Minerals & Chemicals Importers & Exporters (CCCMC) set up a mediation and consultation mechanism intended to provide a platform for dialogue between affected communities or civil society groups that have raised concerns and Chinese companies.

More than three years since its launch, the mechanism has now received its first two complaints from local communities and many more are considering filing a case, Margaux Day, executive director at the nonprofit Accountability Counsel, told an event hosted by Climate Home News last month.

“This is incredibly exciting in that it fills a governance and accountability gap where often communities who are seeking to protect their rights and the environment can’t reach someone who will respond to them,” she told the panel discussion at London Climate Action Week.

Climate Home News understands that the complaints were filed by communities in Latin America and Southeast Asia over labour rights and resettlement issues. No information about the cases has yet been made public. The mechanism’s secretariat did not respond to Climate Home News’ questions.

The mechanism was set up after the Chinese regulator for banks and insurers called on investor-level institutions to establish complaints bodies to hear from communities outside of China. But whether the new initiative will prove effective in tackling grievances remains an open question.  

“Real potential” for better mining practices

Participation in the mechanism is voluntary for Chinese firms and it doesn’t have a fact-finding function, nor can it impose provisions for compensation or compliance with human rights standards.

But Day told Climate Home News that, if successful, it could bring companies to negotiate an outcome that is better for people and the planet and leads to more sustainable mining practice.

Chen Yu, an independent China advisor for campaign group Global Witness, agreed that the mechanism holds “real potential”.

“There exists nothing else at a similar level to promote dialogue between communities and Chinese mining companies in particular,” she said.

For companies, the mechanism opens “a channel for problem-solving and dialogue with communities”, she added, as “Chinese companies often remain cautious of approaching affected communities directly, afraid of making the problem bigger”.

However, Chen said the mechanism remains at an early stage of development, faces resourcing challenges and is not yet sufficiently understood by communities in mining areas or Chinese firms.

To help it address some of these challenges, the secretariat is currently seeking technical support from a range of organisations, including civil society groups. But, Chen said, “it will take time for the mechanism to show its value”.

The post Allegations of harms at China-backed transition minerals projects rise appeared first on Climate Home News.

The U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce should reject the Heat Workforce Standards Act (H.R. 6123), scheduled to be marked up today, 65 groups said in a letter sent to the committee. The bill would prohibit the Secretary of Labor from finalizing, implementing, or enforcing a federal heat injury and illness prevention standard, or any substantially similar measure.

“Workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods,” the letter reads. “Congress should not respond to an escalating occupational hazard by permanently removing the Department of Labor's authority to address it.”

In the wake of a nationwide heat dome that sent workers to emergency rooms across the country just three weeks ago, the committees should reject any legislation that would permanently prohibit federal workplace heat protections. Data from the Centers for Disease Control’s Heat and Health Tracker show that emergency department visits for heat-related illness rose sharply across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic during the first week of July. Postal carriers, delivery drivers, warehouse workers, and manufacturing employees were hospitalized, and in some tragic cases, lost their lives.

Heat-related deaths in the U.S. have more than doubled since 1999, and extreme heat now claims more lives each year than any other weather-related hazard. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration estimates that its heat standard would protect approximately 36 million workers. Public Citizen has previously estimated that a comprehensive federal heat standard could prevent at least 50,000 heat-related injuries and illnesses each year.

A unanimous decision by three US Court Of Appeals judges in the District Of Columbia to deny an appeal based on the risks of climate change on nuclear reactor safety is a shocking disregard for the ever worsening weather conditions that could put reactor communities at grave risk, said Beyond Nuclear today, one of the groups that brought the appeal.

The petition denied by the court was brought by Beyond Nuclear and the Sierra Club, against the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), et al. The NRC is federally mandated to protect public safety. The NEI is the lobbying arm and trade group representing the nuclear power industry.

The petitioners argued that the NRC and industry did not adequately consider how aging components and climate change would affect the risk of severe accidents involving reactor-core damage. Of greatest concern is the extension of operating the licenses of the country’s already aging nuclear power plants well beyond the initial 40-year licensing period and the NRC’s refusal to view the more extreme conditions caused by climate change as risk factors to future safe operation.

“We are stunned by the court’s decision, which let the NRC get away with the generalized claim that large conservatisms in their accident risk analyses can cover the unique and site-specific effects of climate change,” said attorney Diane Curran, who argued the case on behalf of Beyond Nuclear and the Sierra Club. “The NRC has never provided a shred of evidence to show that it has, in fact, evaluated the effects of climate change on accident risk — so how could it know that?”

Paul Gunter, director of the reactor oversight project at Beyond Nuclear said, “This decision allows the NRC to consider future safety challenges to nuclear plants caused by worsening climate conditions by looking in the rear-view mirror. What we are already experiencing today with raging wildfires and extreme flooding, sea-level rise and more frequent violent storms due to climate change, sends a warning that evaluating reactor safety based on the worst climate conditions of the past is not only unrealistic but reckless.

“Just this past week we have seen extreme climate change-driven conditions with raging wildfires in Canada that could equally easily happen in the hotter United States and catastrophic flooding in Texas," Gunter said. "It is shocking that the court accepted the NRC’s argument that under future climate conditions the chances of a severe accident are ‘small.’ Instead of evaluating the real risks, the court decided to adjudicate whether or not the NRC’s environmental review was ‘reasonably explained.’ This does not serve the interests of public safety,” Gunter said.

Beyond Nuclear is carefully evaluating its legal options and will continue to challenge the extreme license extensions at the Oconee (SC), Peach Bottom (PA) and North Anna (VA) nuclear power plants.

“Oconee is of particularly alarming concern because it sits downstream of two earthen rock-filled dams and two million acre feet of water,” Gunter pointed out. “In bringing this case, we were striving to ensure that this community does not become the tragic test case for a failure to guarantee robust safety regulations at our nation’s nuclear plants for the remainder of their operating lives.”

Oil majors are set to report second quarter earnings later this month that analysts expect to be the highest since 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent crude prices soaring. Exxon Mobil is projected to report roughly $15.7 billion in adjusted earnings, and Chevron nearly $10 billion, both close to triple what they posted the previous quarter.

A United Nations Development Programme policy brief released June 29th found the fallout from the conflict is still spreading well beyond the pump, pushing global fossil fuel subsidies past $1 trillion this year and threatening to push tens of millions more people into poverty as governments burn through fiscal buffers trying to keep energy affordable.

As scientists grow more confident than ever that fossil fuel pollution is fueling extreme weather, Congress is moving to shield Big Oil from the fallout by blaming Canada instead. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) introduced legislation yesterday targeting Canada over wildfire smoke drifting into U.S. cities that would freeze assets, revoke visas, and declare the Canadian ambassador "persona non grata" until the smoke clears. Against this backdrop, the Make Polluters Pay campaign released the following statement.

Statement from Cassidy DiPaola, Communications Director for the Make Polluters Pay campaign:

"Once again, war is proving very good for the oil business. While higher energy prices push millions of people closer to poverty and force governments to spend more than $1 trillion cushioning the blow, Exxon, Chevron and Shell are preparing to report their biggest profits in years.

And when the consequences of fossil fuel dependence reach American communities, some lawmakers would rather find a new scapegoat than confront the industry at the center of the crisis. Sanctioning Canada over wildfire smoke will not change the hotter, drier conditions that decades of fossil fuel pollution have helped create.

Congress does not have to accept a system where the public absorbs the risks and oil companies keep the rewards. The Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act would claw back these war profits and put real money back in people's pockets instead of executive bonuses. Every quarter like this is another reminder that the fastest way off this cycle is investing in clean energy that isn't held hostage by the next war."

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters

As climate change bakes forests across North America, dense smoke from dozens of out-of-control wildfires burning in northern Minnesota and adjacent portions of Ontario is blanketing tens of millions of people with hazardous pollution.

The fires are bringing the worst air quality on record to much of the Great Lakes, mid-Atlantic, and Northeast United States. Pollution from small particles called PM2.5 — the fine particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter are the primary air pollution killers — has been far into the “Hazardous” range across five states since Wednesday morning.

The award for worst air in the nation on July 16 went to the city that has in the past billed itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI, for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution. This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA pollution records go back to 1999.

The award for worst air in the nation on July 16 went to the city that has in the past billed itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI, for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution. This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA PM 2.5 pollution records go back to 1999.

Record 24-hr PM 2.5 air quality on July 16, 2026

Duluth, MN: 934 AQI for PM2.5 (Old record: 159, July 20, 2021)
Toledo, OH (5 monitors): 624 (Old record: 190, June 28, 2023)
Chicago. IL (42 monitors): 511 (Old record: 246, June 28, 2023)
Detroit, MI: 490 (Old record: 226, June 28, 2023)
Cleveland, OH: 297 (Old record: 285, June 28, 2023)
Milwaukee, WI: 414 (Old record: 270, June 27, 2023)
Flint, MI: 343 (Old record: 178, June 27, 2023)
Minneapolis, MN (39 monitors): 251 (Old record: 193, July 29, 2021)
Green Bay, WI (5 monitors): 372 (Old record: 179, June 29, 2023)
Grand Rapids, MI (4 monitors): 482 (Old record: 227, June 27, 2023)
Lansing, MI (2 monitors): 408 (Old record: 194, June 29, 2023)
Buffalo, NY (11 monitors): 206 (Old Record: 176, June 7, 2023)

Record 24-hr PM 2.5 air quality on July 17, 2026

Washington D.C. (21 monitors): 246 AQI at Ashburn, VA, and 234 at Springfield, VA (Old record: 222, June 8, 2023, at Franconia Park, VA)
Pittsburg, PA (25 monitors): 261 (Old record: 237, June 29, 2023)
Dover, DE (2 monitors): 223 (Old record: 207, June 8, 2023)
Columbus, OH (8 monitors): 272 (Old record: 210, June 28, 2023)

Because of the huge number of people affected, and since this is occurring at the same time as a severe humid heat wave, this extreme and widespread pollution event — which will be followed by many months of repeated wildfire smoke incursion into the U.S. — will undoubtedly cause hundreds and perhaps thousands of premature deaths. The only comparable wildfire smoke event affecting this portion of North America occurred in 2023; a 2025 study blamed that event for 33,000 premature deaths in the United States, 8,300 in Canada, and 23,000 in Europe. According to the EPA, a premature air pollution death is one that occurs on average 14 years before a person would have otherwise died.

The climate change connection to the wildfires

As the climate warms, fire danger increases, mostly because the atmosphere gets “thirstier” – more water vapor can evaporate into warmer air. This results in more water vapor evaporating from plants, which dries them out and creates an increased risk of large and intense fires that can generate huge smoke plumes. Most of the fires grew out of control under extreme heat conditions made up to five times more likely by climate change (Fig. 1). According to Climate Central, the heat that helped fuel these fires would have been “highly unlikely” to have occurred in a world without climate change.

Figure 1. Climate Shift Index for Monday, July 13, 2026, showing the factor increase in high temperatures because of human-caused climate change. (Image credit: Climate Central)

Five states recorded “Hazardous” air quality on Thursday

On Thursday, July 16, portions of Ontario and five states — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio — experienced 24-hour levels of PM2.5 with an air quality index in the “Hazardous” (brown) range. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, these conditions necessitate health warnings of emergency conditions, with the entire population more likely to be affected. Purple “Very Unhealthy” air was observed in three other states — New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. This level of pollution triggers a health alert, and everyone – not just people with vulnerabilities – may experience more serious health effects.

Figure 2. Observed 24-hour air quality index (AQI) for PM2.5 pollution for Jul. 16, 2026. Fifty monitors in five states had “Hazardous” air, plus an additional nine monitors in Ontario. (Image credit: EPA)

According to air pollution scientist Ryan Stauffer, yesterday’s air pollution event blows away the previous most extreme wildfire smoke event in this region — in June 2023 — for extremity. During the 2023 event, only about three EPA monitors, all in Pennsylvania, recorded a 24-hour AQI in the hazardous range. But on Thursday, 50 official EPA monitors recorded a 24-hour AQI in the “Hazardous” range (Fig. 2), plus an additional nine monitors in Ontario. According to rankings at iqair.com, Detroit was the most polluted major city worldwide for most of Thursday, with Chicago bumping Detroit out on Thursday night. On Friday morning, the top five most polluted cities in the world were all in North America: Detroit, Chicago, Washington D.C., Toronto, and New York City.

On an hourly scale, some truly extreme AQI readings above 1,000 were recorded Thursday in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The “Hazardous” (brown) range is for an AQI in above 300, so these readings were more than three times beyond the “Hazardous” threshold. The most extreme readings occurred in northern Minnesota downwind of the fires burning in the Boundary Waters park, where an AQI of 3,567 was measured by a purpleair.com sensor.

How the trouble started: record heat and a record-strong high-pressure system

The wildfire event began on Monday, when the strongest upper-level ridge of high pressure ever observed in the north-central U.S. baked the region. All-time record heat exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8°C) was observed, worsening existing moderate to severe drought conditions. Thunder Bay, Ontario, on the north shore of frigid Lake Superior, hit 39.5 degrees Celsius (103.1°F), smashing its all-time heat record by over 2°C. To the north, Armstrong hit 40.7°C (105.3°F), the hottest temperature observed in all of Ontario since the great Dust Bowl heat wave of July 1936.

Strong winds moved in with the heat, fanning multiple wildfires that feasted on the dry fuels, which featured plenty of dead trees from a spruce budworm infestation and a 1999 derecho event that felled thousands of trees. Extreme fires with a rapid rate of spread resulted and created at least two massive pyrocumulus clouds — giant thunderstorms spawned by the heat of intense fires that reached the stratosphere. Tomer Burg has an excellent thread explaining the meteorology that led up to the wildfire event:

How to interpret PM 2.5 readings at airnow.gov and purpleair.com

You can access EPA’s real-time PM2.5 NowCast AQI numbers at https://www.airnow.gov (note that you can’t just type in “airnow.gov” to get to the website, since they haven’t configured it to allow that). The AQI numbers are updated once per hour (shortly after the top of the hour). Because the EPA standard is based on a 24-hour average, the raw hourly data is not reported. Instead, EPA’s NowCast AQI numbers are computed using a 12-hour weighted average from the past 12 hours of data.

When air quality is highly variable (e.g., during a wildfire or a sudden wind shift), the algorithm heavily weights the past 1-3 hours. Otherwise, the past 12 hours are weighted nearly equally, and the AQI number is a 12-hour average. At the end of a day, the official daily AQI is calculated using a true arithmetic 24-hour average.

Don’t miss out: If you sign up by August 1 to support our extreme weather coverage with a monthly donation, you’ll be invited to an exclusive conversation with our meteorologists later this season. Become a monthly supporter of Jeff Masters, Bob Henson, and Irene Sans’s extreme weather coverage today.  Donate

In contrast, the AQI numbers at purpleair.com update every few seconds, so you get a much better idea of rapid changes in air quality. Clicking on a dot will bring up a graph of the past few days of data; the default averaging time for this graph is 10 minutes, but you can change this to a longer time span. Important: you need to choose “US EPA” in the “Apply Conversion” setting, or else the PM 2.5 readings will be too high.

The current situation: over 20 large fires out of control

As of Friday, there were 193 active fires covering 1.7 million acres (673,000 ha) in Ontario, with the vast majority of these considered to be “out of control,” according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Of the 22 large fires in over 2,000 acres burning nearest the U.S. border, 18 were receiving a full fire-fighting response, and four were not being fought. In the U.S., the National Interagency Fire Center reported six large fires in northern Minnesota, all 0% contained, covering 60,000 acres.

Figure 3. Monthly fire assessment for North America for July 2026 (left) and August 2026 (right). Red shading indicates areas where conditions would favor increased fire activity. Green shading indicates areas where conditions would favor decreased fire activity. (image credit: National Interagency Fire Center).

The forecast: relief coming by Saturday for the worst-affected states

Thunderstorms moved over the Minnesota/Ontario fire area Friday morning, bringing up to two inches of rain. This water will help firefighting efforts, but the fire danger index in Ontario is still high to very high, and the thunderstorms may have sparked additional fires.

The cold front accompanying this storm will bring westerly winds that should flush the worst of the smoke out of Chicago and Wisconsin by Friday afternoon, and out of Michigan by early Saturday morning. However, a renewed invasion of smoke is predicted for Michigan and Wisconsin Saturday night into Sunday, bringing more “Hazardous” AQI conditions. Another pulse of smoke is predicted to move deep into the central U.S. on Wednesday, perhaps reaching Arkansas and Missouri.

We can anticipate that some of the major smoke-emitting fires in Minnesota/Ontario will continue to burn for an extended period, with some lasting until the first snows come in October. The long-range fire assessment (Fig. 3) calls for above-average fire risk over much of the forested areas of northern Canada and the western U.S. this summer, and we should anticipate frequent bouts of poor air quality from wildfire smoke across much of North America. July and August are usually the peak months of fire season, which typically extends well into September. A potent North American Monsoon is now bringing heavy rains to parts of the southwest U.S., so the overall fire risk in that region may decrease to average levels by August.

Many lightning-caused fires occurred in the Pacific Northwest yesterday. With hot, windy weather expected to move in during the coming week, some of these fires may well become significant smoke producers.

Climate change predicted to further worsen wildfires

The number of people in the U.S. who experienced at least one day each year with smoke-related fine particle pollution levels at three times over the EPA standard has increased 27-fold over the last decade, and we can expect climate change to significantly worsen wildfire smoke problems in North America in the coming years.

For example, the frequency and magnitude of extreme wildfires around the globe have doubled in the past 21 years because of climate change, according to a study published last year in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Rising temperatures have ushered in an era of hotter and drier weather, lending the right conditions for wildfires to erupt, the researchers found.

Here are some additional resources on climate change and wildfires:

• Explore how climate change has worsened wildfire smoke.
• Explore how fire weather has changed in your area on Climate Central’s interactive map.
• Visit their More U.S. Fire Weather analysis for science background and methodology.
• Explore our guide to staying safe from wildfires and smoke.

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The politics of struggles in which the people of Ukraine and Iran are engaged have been hotly debated by people who consider themselves to be socialists and/or anti-imperialists. This brief paper discusses the histories of imperialism and nationalism in terms of the diffusion of capitalism across the world and the struggles against it. In the process, it explains why socialists and anti-imperialists should support the struggles of the Iranian and Ukrainian peoples against imperial attacks by the United States and Russia and against attacks by their own governments and ruling classes.

As a preface: I have spent many years as an AIDS researcher and activist. In that connection, I have conducted research with Russian, Ukrainian and Iranian researchers and activists. I have very good friends in both Russia and Ukraine. All of the people I worked with in Iran have had to leave the country. Two of them were incarcerated for some years before they could leave.

Much of the discussion around the Ukrainian and Iranian struggles revolves around questions of national existence and the rights of nations to self-determination. So to begin with, I will present a VERY brief discussion of nationalism and nations.

Nations have been described as “imagined communities” to capture a key aspect of nationalism—that the people in a nation feel themselves to be “one people” in some sense and to share many values and histories with other members of their nation. Thus, many people without a nation-state of their own—such as many Kurds or Chechens today, or Jews before the creation of Israel, conceive of themselves as one people and often frame this as a form of nationalism.

Nation-states, on the other hand, are countries that have governments of some sort and have dominant belief systems that see some or all of their inhabitants as part of “one people,” their nation. In reality, as we will discuss, many nations now and in the past, have included oppressed groups of people (who may or may not feel themselves to be members of that or another nation). Clear examples include African Americans in pre-Civil War America, Ukrainians in Czarist Russia, Kurds in modern Turkey or Iran, and Palestinians in modern Israel.

Historically, I think it is accurate to claim that in 1200 A.D., there were no nations on Earth. There were kingdoms, empires, tribes, and other formations, but no nations. Many of the places we think of as nations were at most loose confederations of contending smaller entities with many different languages; in some cases, one of these smaller entities was nominally dominant. The United Kingdom (Britain) for example had Anglo Saxons, Normans, Welsh, Scots, and Irish, each with their own language or languages. France was similarly divided, as was Germany. Germany remained that way into the 1860s. Although Spain was ostensibly unified in the late 1400s, linguistic differences remained present for centuries, and indeed groups like the Basques and Catalonians continue to express non-Spanish national identities and seek to withdraw from Spain on various occasions. Similarly, India, China, and Iran were mixes of empires and smaller jurisdictions, and multi-lingual. Africa was a mix of empires and tribes, as were the Americas.

The development of capitalism sparked the creation of nationalisms, and of nations, when emerging capitalists began to see the advantages of unified territories with a single language and no tariffs between sub-units like dukedoms or counties. To some extent, these ideas emerged from the lawyers, religious schools, literary figures, and other intellectuals who were part of the development of mercantile trade and capitalism. The prior existence of printing presses and other modes of one-to-many communication over long distances facilitated this.

One typical aspect of this nationalism has been the formation of national myths that claim that the nation has a history that can be traced back centuries or millennia. Vladimir Putin and other Russian nationalists hark back to a mythical Russian people in Kyiv in the 900s; Zionists claim that Biblical Israel was the birthplace of a Jewish nation; the Nazis traced the roots of the German people back centuries to the age of mythical heroes.

Nationalism led to nation-states through a variety of pathways. Some nations came together as a relatively straightforward effect of capitalism and its culture leading to national feelings. This is what happened with England and France, for example, although in each case the process involved a lot of warfare and social struggle. Other areas, such as Italy and Germany, developed elite groupings within them who saw commonalities of language and culture, and wanted the advantages that being a unified nation-state would bring them and, they believed, other members of the nation. In these cases, a combination of conquest by one of the competing sub-units (such as Prussia) and insurgency led to the formation of a nation-state. A third pathway has been for oppressed people within an empire or other formation to rebel and win their freedom to establish their own nation-state. As we shall see, this is what happened with Ukraine, and it is also what happened with the anti-colonial formation of nations in Africa and Asia in the 20th Century. A related pathway has been nationalism created as the people of a geographical area fend off attempts by imperialism to conquer them. Examples include Chinese nationalism in the face of defeats and impositions by Britain in the Opium Wars and then by other European forces, and finally in the 1930s against a Japanese invasion; and Palestinian nationalism emerging in the early part of the 20th Century.

Colonialism and imperialism grew up with capitalism and the emergence of nations. This happened in Western Europe when several European states became kingdoms and organized navies and armies and private armed forces (e.g., the Dutch and English East India Companies) to conquer other lands and force their people into mining and agriculture on behalf of their national ruling class. First, Spain and Portugal conquered parts of Africa and Latin America. They used these as sources of forced labor by the people whom they had conquered, and gold, silver and farm products became the basis of royal fortunes and mercenary armies. Dutch, French, and British imperialism followed, and seized new lands and people in the southern cape of Africa, Indonesia, and elsewhere, as well as taking some territories away from each other and from the Spanish and Portuguese. The British and French profited enormously from the enslavement of kidnapped Africans. Sugar grown by slave labor was for many decades the mainstay of international trade, and the island of Haiti (under French rule) the most profitable place on Earth. The United States formed as a nation through rebellion against the British government. This meant they were free to continue to trade in slaves, to employ slave labor, and to conquer lands held by American Indians (often with genocidal intent and/or consequences). (British governments had been considering restricting slavery, and had enacted prohibitions against American colonists moving into the Northwest Territories of Ohio and west.)

Far less known in the United States and many other countries is the growth of the Russian empire. Starting in the 1600s, the areas around Moscow organized as Russia under the Czars and started a campaign of territorial expansion that mixed conquest and subjugation of some areas (such as much of what is now Poland, Ukraine and Belarus) with outright genocidal settler colonialism in other areas such as much of Northern and Central Asia in which Yakuts, Buryats, and many other groups of people suffered massive population declines. In areas like Ukraine and Belarus, it tried to suppress the local religions and languages and other elements of culture.

In the 1800s and ever since, both the Russian and British Empires established economic dominance and at times military take-overs of Iran. In World War II, they divided Iran between them before reluctantly withdrawing later in the 1940s and leaving the old Shah’s son in control of a constitutional monarchy. (Iran itself is somewhat imperial and dominates and exploits several subordinate peoples, including Kurds, Baloch, Azeris, Arabs, and Turkmens).

Beginning in the 1800s, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements and ideas began to develop and spread more widely. As mentioned earlier, this took the form of “re-unification” in Germany and Italy. In much of the rest of the world, it took the form of rebellion against colonial overlords.

Many social democrats in imperial countries opposed the anti-colonial nationalism in the Global South. It is notable that Marx shared some of these views when young, but by the 1850s was clearly becoming anti-imperialist. Books by Kevin Anderson provide wonderful analysis of this. 7Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2015); Kevin B. Anderson, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025).

Key figures of the next generation of socialists, including Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, James Connolly, and Trotsky, were fierce opponents of colonialism, although they disagreed about the political implications of this for European socialist movements.

World War II broke the power of all of the major imperial powers except the United States and Russia (USSR). Both the U.S. and Russia supported anti-colonial movements in the former colonies of Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Russia and the United States vied for influence in the newly-emerging countries, which is one reason these new nations became neocolonial corporate capitalist or state capitalist developmental regimes dependent upon the U.S. or Russia for investment and trade—and in many cases autocratic. Frantz Fanon wrote about this reality from within the movements for independence and freedom as the depressing reality of neocolonial independence was becoming visible. Neither Russia nor the United States tolerated anti-colonial movements within their empires. (They were extremely repressive against such movements in Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Hungary, and Poland, for example.)

So what does this mean for Ukraine and Iran?

Ukraine developed a powerful nationalist movement in the 1800s. Ukrainian socialists were often leading nationalists as well. In the Revolution in the Russian Empire of 1917, this led at times to cooperation and at other times fighting between revolutionary socialists who were allied with the Russian Soviets and revolutionary socialists (some of whom called themselves Bolsheviks) who wanted Ukraine to be a separate nation. Both fought Ukrainian and Russian pro-capitalist forces. Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, was torn between:

1. This general support of the right of nations—particularly including Ukraine—to self-determination (including his hatred of Great Russian Chauvinism, his term for that form of racism).
2. The specifics of the struggle in Ukraine, including the fact that many Bolsheviks in his party opposed Ukrainian nationalism.

In any case, the strength of the national movement in Ukraine and some other parts of the Russian Empire is why the end of the civil war led to the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR, as a union of independent nation-states (including Russia and Ukraine) with the right of secession from the Union (albeit only on paper). To begin with, this led to considerable Ukrainian cultural and other freedom, but as the Stalinist counter-revolution proceeded and Russia became an autocratic form of State Capitalism, Russia increasingly suppressed Ukrainian language, religion, and most of its culture. By the 1930s, when the USSR faced a severe economic crisis that it dealt with by exporting food that its inhabitants needed, Ukraine was singled out for the harshest police tactics and starvations. This took the form of the Holodomor genocide, in which 4 million or more Ukrainians starved to death or were murdered by the police or army. Ukrainian politics is still shaped by the memory of this.

In World War II, the German invasion inflected hardship and mass murders on millions of Ukrainians, including Jewish Ukrainians. Ukrainians suffered the worst (more than the Russians or Belarusians, for example) and made major contributions to defeating the Germans. Russia tries to portray the defeat of the Nazis as a Russian victory and to disregard the contributions of Ukrainians and its other oppressed nations.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, Ukraine, Russia, and other countries seceded and formed separate countries. The next five or ten years were unbearable in all of them. The economy collapsed. Productive assets were sold off by the governments (run by their top bureaucrats) to coteries of allied top bureaucrats and top leaders of the criminal underground. Joblessness, alcoholism, and tuberculosis became epidemic. Use of opioids became relatively widespread among the young, as did trading sex for money or goods—and, as a result, HIV/AIDS, particularly among people who began injecting drugs. Oligarchs contended for wealth and power, at times violently, or by using government police power to attack their rivals.

Coming out of the 1990s, both the Russian and Ukrainian governments were dominated by viciously contending oligarchs who ran corrupt autocratic nominally-democratic regimes that held periodic elections to determine which group of oligarchs would rule and benefit most from the corruption. Starting with the Orange Revolution against a stolen election in 2004, their paths diverged, with Russia becoming more autocratic but Ukraine seeing the power of the oligarchs challenged by popular rebellions. The Maidan Revolution of 2013-2014 showed again that oligarchic regimes could be overthrown, and made inroads upon police corruption and, to some degree, corruption by other officials. This did NOT happen in Russia, but Putin and other Russian oligarchs feared it could spread. Thus, in 2014 Russia seized Crimea and tried to seize the Donbas (Donets Coal Basin) and Odessa as a way to make sure the Maidan Revolution did not turn left and, even more importantly, to delegitimize efforts to overthrow his own oligarchic regime. 2Hanna Perekhoda, “How to Understand Russia’s Imperialist Attitude Toward Ukraine,” New Politics, Winter 2024, ; Ilya Matveev, “Political imperialism, Putin’s Russia, and the need for a global left alternative,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, September 28, 2024,; Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev, Russia’s New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology (Stanford University Press, 2026).

The Left was an important component of the Maidan Revolution, though far less visible than the extreme right. Most of the movement, and its dominant beliefs, was a pro-European vaguely social democratic yearning for clean government and European living standards. Nonetheless, there was a socialist and anarchist Left, it acquitted itself well during the Maidan struggles across Ukraine, and it continues as a (relatively weak, but respected) force in Ukraine today. 3Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev (Harvill Press, 2015); Marci Shore, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2018); Emily Channell-Justice, Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine (University of Toronto Press, 2022); Sam Friedman, “What Happened in Ukraine in 2013– 2014? Maidan and After,” New Politics, May 13, 2023, ; Sophia Willson, Maidan: Ukraine’s Democratic Revolution (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026).

Later, after the near-revolution in Belarus that started in late 2020, Russia’s leaders decided to take over Ukraine and to erase Ukrainian culture and political freedoms. They were motivated both by the desire to eradicate the Russian peoples’ hope for freedom and by their own desires to restore what they see as the glories of the Russian empire. It tried this in early 2022 and has so far failed spectacularly due to a people’s movement in Ukraine. In my opinion, socialists in the U.S. should support this movement without reservations.

However, it should be clear—this current people’s movement in Ukraine is not socialist, though it has socialist threads within it. 4Commons: Journal of Social Criticism; Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement), democratic socialist organization; Solidarity Collectives, anti-authoritarian network supporting the resistance to the Russian invasion; Green Party of Ukraine; Social Democratic Platform; Pryama Diya (Direct Action), leftwing student trade union; Federation of Trade Unions of Ukraine (FPU); Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine (KVPU); Razom We Stand, campaign for fossil fuel sanctions on Russia and rebuilding Ukraine around renewables, ; Rozviy, feminist youth campaign for fossil fuel sanctions on Russia and rebuilding Ukraine around renewables. Moreover, under the neoliberal demands of West European and US capital and their support by the Zelensky government, the Ukrainian government has adopted a lot of anti-working class and anti-union policies and has gone into massive debt to Western capital to pay the costs of the war. If the war ended tomorrow, the existing debt that capital has imposed on Ukraine means that both Ukrainian and Western capital (and governments) will wage war on Ukraine’s workers to pay it back. One job of US socialists is to oppose this and to support the Ukrainian working class in its current and future struggles to survive and, hopefully, to overthrow capital.

Iran

In an election in 1953 (after the new Shah took office when Britain and Russia occupation troops left Iran following the end of World War II), Mossadegh became Prime Minister and took steps to curb British control over Iran’s oil production. He was overthrown by a coup backed by US oil interests and the CIA, including those Iranians who benefited from the private oil industry.

The Shah then set up a dictatorship friendly to U.S. capital. This dictatorship was friendly to using its oil revenues to “modernize” Iranian society to resemble secular corporate America to a degree, including making jobs and other aspects of Western life available to women. He set up a vicious and powerful secret police to suppress all opposition brutally and often fatally.
By 1978, the Iranian people had had enough, and revolted. In 1979, the revolution succeeded in driving the Shah and his regime out. This revolution had important socialist and worker components, and it was the oil workers’ actions that were decisive in ousting the Shah. Hard-line Islamists, quite anti-American, also had massive support, and won out in the ensuing struggles over the direction of the revolution. They were backed in this by the pro-Russian Iranian Communist Party which saw the Revolution as an anti-imperialist one that should stop short at putting the bourgeoisie into power.

With U.S. backing, Iraq then started a war with Iran, which raged through the 1980s. This was a long and vicious war, with huge loss of life. One of my friends tells me it led to a lot of drug use by soldiers, and eventually to a lot of AIDS.

The Iranian people have mounted a number of mass movements in the years since the Millionaire Mullahs came to power. The 2009 Green Movement protested massive fraud in presidential elections; the 2019 uprising opposed rising gasoline prices and included a variety of efforts by workers to improve their lives; the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement of 2022-23, which was viciously repressed, involved Kurds and other oppressed minorities as well as Persians, and men as well as women; and the recent uprising of 2026 based around economic and environmental collapse that was suppressed after tens of thousands of people were killed.

U.S. and Israel decided to attack Iran at the end of February 2026. As of this writing, this attack seems to be an utter failure, and has left the Iranian government in a much stronger position against its own people as well as against Israel and the United States than it had before the war.

What about socialists and anti-imperialists in the United States and much of the world?

People in the United States and elsewhere who call themselves socialists and/or anti-imperialists are divided into two sharply divided groups. One group are called “campists” because they see the world geopolitically as divided into Western imperialism, as one camp, and nations that oppose Western imperialism, as the other camp—which they then support.

Campists support the Iranian government as anti-imperialist and usually see the peoples’ movements as “objectively pro-imperialist” or even as U.S.-Israeli instigated counter-revolutionaries. They support Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine because they see Ukraine as a part of the Western, imperialist, camp. Many of them believe Russian claims that it invaded Ukraine because the Maidan revolution was an imperialist coup and that it threatened to attack Russia. Many of them also support Russian claims that Ukraine is run by, and is a hotbed of, Nazis and other fascists. (As someone who has spent a lot of time in Ukraine both before and after the Maidans, and as someone who understands that there are serious fascist forces helping to direct both Russia and the United States, I will attest to the fact that these claims are utter rot.)

Historically, many campist leaders have had ties to the former state capitalist Russia or other state capitalist regimes, or accepted the worldviews of their leaders who saw the world as divided into an anti-imperialist camp (which they, but not the people of Eastern Europe, Taiwan, or Tibet, among others, considered themselves to be). Fundamental to campist views is a disbelief in the power of working class or other movements of “the people” to take power and build a new society that is better than the one we live in. As a result, they see States as the only important actors in the world, and they choose to side with one camp within those states.

The other group, who are sometimes called internationalists (and I am one), support the working class and other oppressed people in their struggles against both their country’s ruling class and State and also against imperialist countries who threaten their national independence. One of our slogans which forms part of the title of this essay, is “solidarity without exception.” When imperial invaders attack a people, we support that people to the best of our ability. When governments or employers attack workers’ lives and conditions and freedoms, we support the workers. And we urge the movements of oppressed peoples and of workers in every country to support each other in a solidarity without exception.

When the United States or its allies attack or oppress a nation such as Palestine or Venezuela, campists and internationalists can sometimes work together, although even then campists tend to offer uncritical support for their governments or other top-down leadership bodies like Hamas whereas internationalists support the people against both their attackers and governments like that of Maduro or leaders like Hamas. Another frequent area of tension-within-cooperation is that campists support top-down and often secretive leadership bodies within solidarity movements (as happened in many of the campus encampments that supported Palestine in 2024) whereas internationalists support open discussion and democratic control by the participants in the movement.

Finally, there are many other nations that are being attacked or oppressed. Campists decide on whether of not to support the Kurds, Rohingyas, Uyghurs and others based on whether they judge the attackers or oppressors as allies of U.S. imperialism or part of their imagined “axes of resistance,” whereas we internationalists offer solidarity without exception.

We see this as the only way to live and build a socialism from below in which workers and other have democratic power to build a sustainable world of peace, friendship, self-fulfillment and fun. And we view it as humanity’s best hope of surviving the environmental crisis, and specifically the climate crisis, and eventually thriving once this is done.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: ARTIST NAME; modified by Tempest.

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”Maybe we should acknowledge the invisible. It’s not somewhere else. It’s in the visible, right here. If this elemental air were not invisible, I wouldn’t see anything else, wouldn’t see you. And that’s the place of the spirits and the place of the ancestors—oh man, just right here! They’re right next to you, whispering in […]

Alert! This Thursday’s double-header: show up against Zenith & for Climate Justice

Zenith Energy is currently trying to quietly sneak out of town by selling its dangerous facility to I Squared Capital, an international private equity firm worth $60 billion in worldwide assets. Given the history of City officials breaking laws, straying from established processes to protect Zenith, and the immense dangers the Zenith facility poses to our region, Portlanders deserve more information, transparency, and a thorough investigation of this business deal–specifically the transfer of Zenith’s “franchise agreement” to I Squared (a legal contract that would grant I Squared a license to operate in a public right of way). City Council must conduct a thorough review of this franchise agreement transfer with substantial community involvement.

I Squared Capital has no previous connection to Portland. There is no reason to expect it would operate any differently than Zenith Energy. The last thing our community needs is another faceless, out-of-town fossil fuel company operating a dangerous, polluting facility in our City. Let City Council know you’re concerned about this process and demand public input, transparency, and accountability.

How to take action:

1. Send a quick message right now to City Councilors using this form

2. Sign up to testify this Thursday 7/23 at ~10:45 AM (in person or virtually) to the Committee of the Whole meeting at City Hall. Testimonies will only be 1.5 minutes long, and we have talking points you can use.

   • If you can come in person, please do. We need to pack City Hall. Wear Red.

   • If you’re unavailable to testify in-person or virtually, please submit written testimony, and feel free to use some of these talking points.

Multnomah County Climate Justice Plan – The Final Adoption!

County Commissioners are due to adopt the Multnomah County Climate Justice Plan, an innovative roadmap to guide community and County toward climate justice, equity and resilience for years to come. But some Commissioners are on the fence! Join us in flooding County leaders with written comments before Thursday. Let them know why you support clean air, affordable clean energy, parks, transportation, and more.

350PDX community members have actively participated during the plan’s comment periods, and now it’s time to show deep support and enthusiasm for its adoption and implementation with our County Commissioners. Here’s a guide to help craft your testimony, and here’s a great article to learn more about this innovative plan.

Send your written comment to the following email addresses: boardclerk@multco.us, sustainability@multco.us, district1@multco.us, district2@multco.us, district3@multco.us, district4@multco.us, mult.chair@multco.us

Thursday, July 23rd at 9:30 AM
Multnomah County Boardroom, 501 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR 97214 (street parking is limited. TriMet bus lines are 2, 10, and 14)

Public Testimony: Sign up to testify in person or virtually HERE (testimony spots are limited and pre-registration is required). Wear Red.

Livestream: You can watch a livestream of the meeting HERE.

The good news is—you can attend both of these important events! 

• The 1-hour County hearing begins at 9:30 AM at the County building (501 SE Hawthorne Blvd).
• Once that’s over, head across the river on bus #6 or #14 to attend the 10:45 AM Zenith item at City Hall.

The post This Thursday’s double-header: show up against Zenith & for Climate Justice appeared first on 350PDX: Climate Justice.

Looking for the perfect way to spend a summer evening? Join us at Rowe Sanctuary for Pickin' on the Platte, where live music, river views, and family-friendly activities come together for a...

Op-ed by: Anne Hedges and Tamara Kennedy, Seattle Times For decades the Northwest has enjoyed affordable, abundant and clean electricity. We enjoy some of the lowest electric rates in the country because of our hydropower resources and now, with vast wind and solar resources at hand, we can meet future challenges, too. Because of rising …

The post New BPA leader must find balance between modernization, conservation appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.

Maine Medical Center registered nurses and community allies will hold a press conference and rally on Thursday, July 23 in Portland to highlight their demand that MaineHealth cancel its contract with Palantir Technologies, a company that has helped enable increasingly deadly encounters with immigration officers, including, most recently, the murders of Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas.

Currently, on the South End of Wrightsville Beach, tiny gray and white downy Black Skimmer chicks with long legs and thick beaks have just hatched. With temperatures soaring, it’s more...

The Marigold Energy Center, about 45 miles south of Phoenix, would include 400 MW of battery storage, 600 MW of solar generation, up to 675 MW of gas generation and a new substation.

Residents of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” have defeated plans for what could have been the largest carbon sequestration and storage project in the world, adding to a long list of carbon dioxide facilities and pipelines across the state that communities have fought and defeated.

Hundreds of residents packed public hearings to share their opinions about the Air Products carbon capture pipeline.

On July 30, Air Products announced they abandoned their so-called Louisiana “Clean” Energy  Project, citing “expected financial returns not meeting stringent return criteria.” But we know the truth. Ever since the multi-billion-dollar project was announced more than four years ago, River Parish residents have demonstrated strong opposition to the project because of the considerable risks it would bring to communities, including: 

• Building an ammonia plant and carbon dioxide pipeline right next door to a primary school, putting children and teachers at risk of pollution and leaks.
• Industrializing Lake Maurepas, turning a beloved lake and important ecosystem into a toxic wasteland.
• Being built on the site of the former Orange Grove sugar plantation, where local communities raised the alarm regarding the presence of unmarked graves of people who had been enslaved on the property. 
• Using an unproven technology to bury carbon dioxide deep underground, turning communities and environment into testing grounds for something not guaranteed to work. 

The project would have injected carbon dioxide under Lake Maurepas for “permanent storage,” risking the livelihoods of residents nearby and people who trap, hunt, and fish as a living. 

Kaitlyn Joshua and Logan Wolf, Earthworks’ organizers who both live in River Parishes, have helped build opposition to the project since it was first proposed with many partners, building common ground across a diverse group of stakeholders. All the town halls, door knocking, public hearings and comment writing workshops eventually led to this win, further demonstrating to the petrochemical and carbon capture industry that their era of unchecked expansion in communities is over.

Earthworks’ organizers coordinated hundreds of door knocking events to educate residents on the project, its harms, and opportunities to engage with decision makers about their concerns for the project. 

We sat down with Kaitlyn to hear more about this win, the carbon capture scheme, and how community voices shaped this outcome. 

“So what I’m really noticing in this moment, and I think a lot of people can agree with this, is that it’s not a white, Black, Democrat, Republican issue,” Joshua says. “It is literally everybody’s issue at this point when it comes to CO2 build out across the state of Louisiana.”

Q: What does the blue hydrogen project being cancelled mean to the River Parishes and you personally?

A: Essentially, this particular halt of this project means that the work that we’ve been doing for years has merit, it has value, the grassroots organizing that we’ve been doing in these communities really does work. And most importantly it does mean that these industries are hearing our plea and understanding that folks are concerned about the impacts of carbon capture and storage and what CO2 pipelines could mean for the communities that they love, for the people that they love, for the kids that attend the schools, and for the neighborhoods that exist near these proposed pipelines.

Q: Why should people care about blue hydrogen and carbon capture?

A: I think that the reason why I’m so just committed to helping people understand why they should care about this particular technology is because it’s something that doesn’t work. It’s something that is kind of taking the focus off of something that could work and essentially put a place like Louisiana in a position to be able to address the climate crisis as we are seeing more aggressive hurricanes every single year, we’re seeing higher temperatures, more extreme weather. We used to not get tornado watches nearly as much as uh as much as we do now, and that’s something that’s extremely alarming and we need to be sounding the alarm — for lack of a better term — and helping industry understand that they play a major role in these climate crisis pieces and if we want to kinda make any type of change in this particular arena, then we’re definitely gonna have to work together to try and solve it instead of constantly coming up with fake solutions or false solutions.

Q: What’s the real impact on frontline communities?

A: Frontline communities stand to gain the least when it comes to carbon capture and storage. I know that the communities that I organize enjoy beautiful waterways and bodies of water across the state of Louisiana where we fish in, that we boat in. A lot of people have beautiful residential homes and retirement homes situated on these lakes and waterways and those would be completely dilapidated as a result of carbon capture storage. Literally — pipelines being constructed in the middle of these different bodies of water across the state.

We literally couldn’t have both anymore and I think what’s so sad about that is we’ve really done the work in south Louisiana to try to revitalize a lot of these different lakes and rivers so that people can enjoy them, so fishermen can continue their livelihoods, and that would be jeopardized as a result of CO2 pipelines being constructed, wells being drilled miles and miles underneath the lake and to what end? Right. And I think the moment that you allow one facility to take this on you’re allowing hundreds of facilities to take this on as Louisiana has already been coined as a breeding ground for CO2 pipelines. And that’s not just in south Louisiana unfortunately. We’re seeing that happen in central and making its way up to north Louisiana as well.

So what I’m really noticing in this moment, and I think a lot of people can agree with this, is that it’s not a white, Black, Democrat, Republican issue. It is literally everybody’s issue at this point when it comes to CO2 build out across the state of Louisiana. At this point everyone is becoming a frontline community. And I think that’s kind of in a weird way the beauty of us kind of coming together around this one particular issue that we have in common and being able to come up with creative ways to push back on it. 

Q: You’ve been organizing on the ground for years—can you describe what that looks like and how community voices shaped this moment?

A: I’ve been organizing on the ground for a few years now and can describe a little bit what that looks like and how community voices have shaped this moment. And it’s been a delicate dance, if you will.

First, I’ll start by saying Earthworks supported on the lake side, so in particular around the Air Products blue hydrogen facility. That fight started on the Lake Mareupas side which is situated in Tangipahoa and Livingston Parish which is southeast Louisiana and essentially a very affluent part of the district, if you will, and typically very conservative, if you will, and a lot of time a lot of these folks don’t necessarily have to deal with an industrial build out or petrochemical build out as it is, and this was their first time ever fighting industry. You wouldn’t necessarily find them as — they’re definitely unsuspecting allies for sure.

Lake Maurepas to be exact, to be specific, was the main kind of common denominator if you will around organizing on the lake side and we had a um term or like a campaign, if you will, that was “Save the Lake” that Earthworks was really instrumental on helping with and really excited to support the folks within Lake Maurepas Preservation Society, which started out about three years ago.

The momentum kind of built two years ago around legislative session but also at the local level where the lake side folks were able to pass resolutions on the local level in Livingston Parish, Tangipahoa, and I believe one more. Where basically, local governing bodies, we have city councils and Parish councils, who pass resolutions saying they did not want Air Products to come into Lake Maurepas, destroy it.

As I already alluded to earlier, Lake Maurepas took years or advocates took years to revitalize and constantly try to advocate on behalf of the lake which led it to becoming a wildlife management center officially. And so that fight was very interesting.

It was very much like, if it can be quite candid, a lot of white folks just, you know, advocating on behalf of the lake and, you know, us, you know, people of color, we have a very diverse group of folks organizing with Earthworks, supporting that work and we had to, you know, be very cautious in the way that we were organizing as we didn’t wanna kinda overlay the plan that we’ve used in the agenda and the lens of which we’ve organized is what I’m trying to say for the last few years. In certain other parts of the state we couldn’t just kind of, you know, use that same blueprint right over to Livingston and Tangipahoa, we had to kind of take the lead of the folks in that area, so that was a very unique thing.

All in all, it worked out. We’re still in community, still building with the folks on the lake side, and now that we’re on the Ascension Parish side, also organizing in St. James and St. John. 

And to be clear, St. James and St. John are the parishes that would bear the brunt of the CO2 pipeline construction. Ascension Parish is where the facility is situated, where the official announcement has happened from Air Products, where they have decided to halt construction of the CO2 carbon capture facility in Sorrento-Darrow area.

And so now that we are organizing this side, it’s also very interesting because it’s a mix of Black and Brown, white folks that are also pretty well off that typically enjoy, you know, a very luxurious lifestyle for the most part. Their kids go to really good schools, a great deal of them are already a part of industry but don’t necessarily buy into carbon caption storage and what that is and what that means and a lot of them are very well aware, very educated on the fact that carbon capture and sequestration has not worked anywhere in the world and they’re not bought into it right and Air Products has not sold them on the technology.

And so for them, it is the pushback on; I don’t want CO2 pipelines constructed near my home, what does this do to my property values, what does this technology potentially do, or what does a pipeline rupture or leak look like near the school that my kids attend. Right

So the conversations are a little different, but no matter what, those different narratives have certainly shaped the feedback and the responses and the public comments that we’ve dispersed throughout the different public hearings that we’ve been able to participate in in the last few years, whether in Baton Rouge at the primacy hearings or in Ascension Parish, or in St. John, St. James, or Livingston on the lakeside. And it’s been very interesting and really exciting to see people’s different world views on how they take on this CO2 pipeline facility.

The post Victory! Louisiana Residents Defeat Air Products’ Carbon Capture Project appeared first on Earthworks.

Andreas Sieber is head of political strategy at 350.org. Cat Abreu is director of the International Climate Politics Hub.

From the US abduction of Venezuela’s president at the start of this year to the Iran war which rumbles on, disruption is the new normal for global geopolitics, more often than not linked to conflict over supplies of oil and gas. 

Events so far in 2026 – driven largely by the desire of the Trump administration to grab control of fossil fuels around the world – show that the climate community’s approach to energy diplomacy will have to evolve if we are to operate effectively and push for climate action in such a volatile landscape. 

Today’s climate and energy governance must be able to cope with trade wars, genocide, fascism, spiralling inequality and challenges to multilateralism. The increasingly dominant paradigms of economic competitiveness, energy security and green industrialisation can help drive the transition but they also challenge our collective mission to deliver an equitable green shift. 

US-China rivalry dominates

Longer-term geopolitical trends that are seeing power move from West to East and North to South have fuelled a US–China “superpower rivalry”, which is pulling the global economy apart and reining in trade. 

A key question will be how the fracture “lines” are drawn: by the US and China, or also by other countries or blocs? Many governments will try to remain “in the middle” between the two giants to capture economic gains from both sides. Yet despite the language of “strategic autonomy”, Washington and Beijing may be in a position to force choices via market access, export controls and sanctions.

• Jun 24, 2026 News EU, UK lead push for electrification as “powerful weapon” against fossil fuels A group of dozens of countries seeks to build momentum for a COP31 pledge to electrify 35% of global energy use by 2035 as an alternative to fossil fuels Read more
• Jul 20, 2026 News Top maritime court rejects bid to halt UN deep-sea mining inquiry Two subsidiaries of The Metals Company sought to block the probe into potential contract breaches launched after the firm’s application for US-sponsored permits Read more

At first glance, this may not seem particularly relevant for climate and energy politics. But Huawei’s exclusion from 5G operations across the political West and India following the so-called Clean Network Campaign by the US government serves as a warning of what could happen to climate green tech. 

And the recent debate to cut out Chinese inverters from European markets follows the same pattern – US security forces perceive a risk and start encouraging their allies to drop Chinese technology.

The new drivers: competition and security

Despite this fracturing geopolitical and economic context, energy transition is still happening. To ensure it is effective and equitable, we need to understand what is driving it and how to adapt climate politics so that it better responds to these drivers.

Put simply, China is supplying the world with low-cost renewables (roughly 60% of critical wind and 80% of solar components), batteries, EVs and other key elements. Other countries now also want their piece of the green tech pie and are forming industrial policies to get it.

It is this new competitiveness-driven logic that will shape the quest for decarbonisation, which has shifted from cooperating around the cost of tackling climate change to rivalry for the benefits of climate action. 

Over 90% of new renewables projects are now cheaper than fossil alternatives. Gas-fired power is 3–4 times more expensive than solar and wind. In 2015, most decarbonisation policies were “traditional” emissions-cutting strategies like carbon pricing or net zero dates, whereas green industrial policies now underpin the majority.

Iran war could boost fossil fuel phase-out push, says Colombian minister

Meanwhile, security has become a central driver of energy politics. We are living through the second major fossil fuel crisis in just four years. Elevated oil and gas prices will impose up to $1 trillion in additional costs on the global economy by the end of the year if disruption continues in the Strait of Hormuz. Fossil fuel supply chains have exposed countries to conflict, coercion and brutal price shocks.

Fossil fuel volatility destabilises whole economies – higher fuel costs drive up food prices, increase political instability, and push millions into poverty and hunger. This incentivises governments to shield themselves from global shocks, especially in countries that are net fossil fuel importers and home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s population. 

Yet security fears can cut both ways. The same instability that makes fossil fuel dependence untenable is also sharpening concern over China’s dominance of critical clean technologies and supply chains.

Equity, cooperation and the opportunity for change

Developing countries benefit from the rapid uptake of renewables enabled by low-cost Chinese technologies. But significant fiscal space and public investment is needed for the electricity grids and infrastructure required to fully unleash the energy transition, as well as for green industrialisation to diversify revenue streams.

Despite this, industrial-scale domestic production and ownership often remain out of reach for too many countries that lack the fiscal space to allow green supply chains to flourish and compete with their traditional industrial base. But more just and diversified green tech supply chains could be achieved with concomitant support.

Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future?

For the first time in decades, the international order is being substantially reshaped. If within this context, decarbonisation is increasingly driven by green industrial policy, energy security and competitiveness, the climate policy community must better anticipate where these debates are moving. We must speak the same language, and enter the forums where decisions are made,  including security, trade and bilateral or trilateral spaces. 

We should build on an enlightened self interest recognising that cooperation remains essential and beneficial. This includes using the UN climate process differently: less as an ever-expanding negotiation machine, and more as a space for norm-setting, political alignment and deal-making. In an age of fragmentation, effective cooperation must not only be framed as necessary but thought of as a strategically compelling source of resilience and shared advantage. 

The post Energy transition policymaking must evolve to fit an age of rupture appeared first on Climate Home News.

Friends of the Earth map of areas where a form of fracking could be carried out. Link to interactive version of map

On the first full day of the Burnham government, campaigners have warned that people in 79 English constituencies could face a form of fracking unless a legal loophole is closed.

The previous Starmer administration promised to ban fracking for good. But it did not define which operations would be included in legislation.

The current moratorium, introduced in 2019, did not prevent lower volume fracking, also called proppant squeeze, reservoir stimulation or acid fracking.

These operations use a smaller volume of fluid than the statutory limit set out in the moratorium. They can be used on various rock types, not just shale.

It is unclear whether the Energy Independence Bill, which proposes to ban fracking, would outlaw these lower-volume operations.

Lower-volume fracking has already been approved for a site at West Newton in East Yorkshire and was recently rejected at Burniston in North Yorkshire. The Wressle oil site in North Lincolnshire is currently seeking permission for proppant squeeze.

The government also promised to ban new oil and gas licences. But this would not prevent lower-volume fracking in existing licences.

Friends of the Earth said its new analysis, published today, reveals constituencies in England with at least 1km where oil and gas developments are licenced.

The organisation identified the location of the affected constituencies:

20 in Yorkshire & Humber
17 in the south east
15 in the north west
14 in the east midlands
6 in the south west
5 in the west midlands
2 in the north east

More than half (46) the constituencies currently have a Labour MP, the analysis found. They include four members of Andy Burnham’s new cabinet:

• Chancellor John Healey (Rawmarsh & Conisbrough)
• Foreign secretary Ed Miliband (Doncaster North)
• Health secretary Yvette Cooper (Pontefract, Castleford & Knottingley)
• Culture secretary Lisa Nandy (Wigan)

Friends of the Earth campaigner Tony Bosworth said:

“Fracking blights our countryside, won’t cut energy bills, fuels the climate crisis and remains deeply unpopular.

“If ministers are serious about banning it, they must close the loophole that allows planning applications for lower-volume fracking, such as proppant squeeze, and turn the current moratorium into a comprehensive legal ban.

“Anything less would leave communities in 79 constituencies, over half of which have Labour MPs, still potentially at risk from fracking. Failing to act would reduce the government’s promise to little more than empty words.”

Frack Free Coastal Communities (FFCC) is campaigning against plans by Europa Oil & Gas to carry out lower-volume fracking at Burniston, just north of Scarborough. Earlier this year, a parliamentary petition secured more than 10,000 signatures against the Burniston operation.

Professor Chris Garforth, chair of FFCC’s steering group, said:

“It took almost 1,600 objections, hundreds of people lobbying outside the Town Hall, and a planning committee willing to overrule its own officers to win a planning refusal at Burniston.

“Most communities won’t have those resources, and they shouldn’t have to spend their free time battling companies that put profit above health, climate and the environment. The solution is obvious. We need a comprehensive ban.”

Earlier this year, Friends of the Earth published analysis by Stuart Haszeldine, professor of geology at University of Edinburgh, which warned that lower-volume fracking could trigger earthquakes that are as large and as unpredictable as high-volume fracking.

Tejido Global de Alternativas: Declaración Popular de Bandung [ English ] [ Español ] [ Français ] [ Português] [ Kurdish] Emitida en la segunda Asamblea presencial celebrada en Bandung, Indonesia, del 11 al 17 de abril de 2026. A los pueblos del mundo y a quienes luchan contra todas y cada una de las formas de opresión e injusticia. A toda la vida, incluidas todas las especies no humanas. A los gobiernos de los Estados-nación del mundo y a las instituciones internacionales.