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At the foot of Njeza Mountain in Zimbabwe’s Mutare district, newly discovered lithium deposits have turned a quiet, small-scale farming enclave into the next frontier of the country’s mineral rush.

But more than a year after residents learned of the project, it remains shrouded in secrecy and has become a source of constant anxiety for farmers living in villages surrounding the proposed mine.

“We don’t know much about this project,” says Kwadzanai Nicholas Mukundidza, a farmer in the area. “We were not consulted, and there is a lot of fear among farmers. These projects are linked to powerful people in [Zimbabwe’s ruling party] ZANU PF. We are afraid we might lose our land, our pastures, our rivers, and our water.”

Farmers were resettled in this part of the country in the early 1980s, during the first phase of Zimbabwe’s land reform program after independence from Britain.

The farmers have every reason to fear the new lithium mining project: Similar mining ventures elsewhere in the country have displaced communities from their lands, polluted water and air, and disrupted livelihoods.

Coveted Minerals, Poisoned Communities

As the world races to secure lithium for the clean energy transition, Zimbabwe has emerged as one of Africa’s largest suppliers, attracting billions of dollars in foreign investment. Chinese companies — many with close ties to Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s ruthless regime — have acquired much of the country’s lithium sector.

Although President Mnangagwa promised sweeping sociopolitical and economic reforms after seizing power from long-time dictator Robert Mugabe in a 2017 military coup, civic space continues to shrink. Activists, journalists, and community and political leaders have faced intimidation and arrests when challenging powerful political or commercial interests.

In lithium-mining communities this climate of fear has profound environmental consequences.

In Zimbabwe’s Buhera district, for example, Sabi Star Mine’s lithium project has already upended the lives of many local people. James Mupfumi, director of the investigative NGO the Centre for Research and Development, says drinking water around the lithium mine has been contaminated by chemical disposal.

Mupfumi says Zimbabwe’s Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Environment, Climate and Wildlife carried out a fact-finding mission on July 12, when community-based organizations such as Buhera Residents Network Trust gave oral evidence, including testimonies from affected villagers on the dust and water pollution and resulting health problems.

“Latest information from Tagarira [in Buhera] community leaders indicates stomach-related challenges from drinking contaminated water. The Tagarira community is the worst affected,” he says.

He adds that at least 120 30-ton trucks use the dust road daily in the area to transport lithium from Sabi Star to Beira through either Beira or Durban ports. Six villages spread along the 30-kilometer (18-mile) dusty stretch from Tagarira to Gaza in Buhera are the worst affected.

A truck carrying lithium from Sabi Star Mine in Buhera, Zimbabwe- Photo: Leonard Mabasa

“These villages have five schools, and an average of 5 to 7 pupils visit the clinic every day seeking treatment for various illnesses caused by dust pollution,” Mupfumi says.

He says there have been very few efforts at dust suppression by the mining company to alleviate the suffering of communities.

“Villages in Tagarira and Mukwasi are also affected by dust from blasting and crushing, and as soon as the dust is cleaned, it soon settles again,” he says.

Official Threats

Buhera Residents Network Trust — an organization representing the interests of local people —presented oral evidence before the Parliament Portfolio Committee on Environment, Climate and Wildlife raising concerns over environmental pollution, water insecurity, worker injuries, community displacement and mining operations at Sabi Star Mine.

The Trust’s leader, Leonard Mabasa, told legislators that the community was not opposed to mining itself and acknowledged that Zimbabwe’s mining sector remained a cornerstone of the national economy, with lithium among the country’s most valuable mineral exports.

 

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But the residents want to ensure that mining is carried out responsibly and that affected communities receive adequate protection. However, after the presentation President Mnangagwa’s spokesperson George Charamba came out swinging, warning the residents to be “very careful” and not “wreck a good thing for a dime.”

Chengxin Lithium, the company that operates Sabi Star Mine, has maintained that it undertook extensive community engagement before developing the project and provided adequate water, electricity, and sanitation facilities. The company says it compensated villagers who suffered from the mine’s activities.

Charamba’s threatening X post prompted a consortium of Zimbabwe NGOs to issue a statement condemning the intimidation and publicly rallying behind the Buhera residents.

“Communities living alongside mining operations are not enemies of development. They are constitutional rights holders entitled to safe environments, meaningful participation in decisions affecting their lives, and access to effective remedies where harm has occurred. Responsible mining cannot exist without transparency, accountability and respect for human rights,” the NGOs said in the statement.

I asked Mabasa whether he still feels safe after his presentation to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee. He says Zimbabwe Parliamentary privileges — special rights and powers granted to lawmakers so they can do their jobs safely and independently — should protect him from any threats during and after the submissions before Portfolio Committee on Environment Climate and Wildlife, “[But] what happens after that usually becomes too personal and uncontrollable. Smear campaign can make you feel insecure. Certain actions are shrewdly done to psychologically wean you off from the struggle. Safety is delicate. Physical and digital security can be issues of great concern which need not to be breached.”

Community Rights

Mabasa says the community needs to be aware of their economic social cultural rights — which include housing, health, education, and fair work — so compensation on relocation is anchored on “Free Prior Informed Consent.”

“I also think that legal support ecosystem is key for communities to be able to understand the terms and conditions of voluminous documents produced during the … Environmental Social Impact Assessment,” he says. This legal requirement, previously known as an Environmental Impact Assessment, evaluates how major projects affect ecosystems, health, and communities before they start.

Donald Nyarota, communications and advocacy officer for the Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG), a Zimbabwe-based NGO, says they have observed a degree of fear and reluctance among community members in lithium producing areas to speak openly about their concerns.

“These concerns include environmental pollution, loss of agricultural lands, loss of livelihoods, water and security, particularly displacement,” Nyarota says. “These are issues that communities are afraid to speak about because [they’re linked to] very powerful government officials. Sometimes they just say ‘government officials’ — they don’t even want to name them because of the fear that they could be victimized and conflict with these powerful interests associated with mining operations.”

At CNRG, Nyarota says, they’re addressing these issues through creating spaces where communities can raise their concerns collectively and safely under their “do no harm principle,” where they protect the identity and maintain anonymity of the communities.

Nyarota says they place a lot of emphasis on community-led evidence gathering, where communities send evidence anonymously through their safe and secure social networks.

A Just Transition

Mupfumi says Zimbabwe requires a just energy transition for its green minerals such as lithium.

“There is a need to secure the supply chain from corruption and criminality that are negatively impacting the rights of host communities. These negative impacts also pose a direct threat to climate action,” he says.

Political elites’ participation in the industry, like what is happening in Buhera, Mupfumi says, seeks to mask these violations and shield extraction from accountability.

“It is therefore important that global measures, such as supply-chain exclusion under clean energy laws, are applied to companies operating in Zimbabwe,” he says.

He adds that the processed lithium from these companies enters the global electric vehicle and green-energy battery supply chains, so markets and laws must prevent automotive companies from receiving green subsidies or selling vehicles where their raw materials are linked to human-rights abuses or toxic pollution.

“For communities to fully benefit from lithium resources, extraction must be linked to human rights protection, environmental accountability, transparent supply chains and meaningful community benefits, rather than allowing communities to bear the environmental and social costs of extraction while global markets benefit from the resource,” Mupfumi says.

He says Buhera demonstrates that communities must recognize lithium as a critical mineral whose extraction should contribute to transforming host communities in line with a just energy transition, rather than leaving them to bear the social and environmental costs.

“This makes community unity, transparency and accountability critical, particularly in securing fair benefits, protecting rights and ensuring responsible extraction. Communities must also recognize their vulnerability under Zimbabwe’s insecure land regime, where state power and corporate interests can weaken their bargaining position,” he says.

At the same time, communities should organize early and seek independent legal support on compensation and relocation, ensuring that displacement only occurs when livelihoods, living conditions and adequate compensation have been properly addressed.

“Community exchange visits, such as the one already facilitated by CRD, remain critical in enabling communities to share experiences, build solidarity and learn from each other’s struggles,” Mupfumi says.

“Ultimately,” says CNRG’s Nyarota, “the issue is not whether the communities support or oppose mining. It’s about whether mining takes place in a way that respects their rights, protects the environment, and ensures that they have meaningful voices in decision-making on issues that are affecting their lands and livelihoods.”

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Anthrax in Zimbabwe: Caused by Oppression, Worsened by Climate Change

The post How Zimbabwe’s Regime Is Fueling a Dirty Lithium Boom appeared first on The Revelator.

What humans have wrought is heavy. In a new study, researchers calculated the weight of more than 600 million buildings in cities across the world and came up with a total of 835 billion metric tons, or gigatonnes (Gt) [1]. That’s almost as much as the weight of all the world’s plants.

All of that weight—in steel, wood, glass, cement, stone, and other materials—means carbon emissions. “If rapidly urbanizing regions follow historical development pathways, this stock could grow by another 419 Gt by 2050,” says study team member Jinchao Song, a research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems.

Conventional life-cycle analyses and green building certification programs like LEED are built on the principle of material efficiency and less is more. But reducing the environmental impacts of buildings isn’t just about making them lighter, according to a second paper [2].

In that work, Fernanda Cruz Rios, a built environment scientist at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, argues that what matters is how resilient a building is to fires, earthquakes, storms, floods, and so on —especially in the current age of increasing climate disasters.

Consider two otherwise identical buildings: one built directly on the ground and one on a raised concrete platform. The concrete platform increases the carbon emissions involved in construction. But when a major flood comes, the building on the concrete platform stays high and dry, while the one on the ground is inundated requiring costly and time-consuming repairs.

When all the impacts of the flooding are added up—new materials, mold remediation, the need for the building’s occupants to decamp to an alternate location for months—the building on the concrete platform may well come out ahead.

“Once you account for what happens when a building actually gets hit by a disaster, designing it to stay functional can prove to be the sustainable choice, not a trade-off against it,” says Cruz Rios

 

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Existing life-cycle analyses sometimes account for the impact of the materials necessary for repairs. But when Cruz Rios analyzed 40 previously published life-cycle analyses focusing on flood, wind, heat, and seismic hazards she found that none of them captured all dimensions of building resilience.

“Almost no studies look at what happens during a disaster response (the emergency actions like evacuations, temporary fixes, and workarounds a building or community relies on while the event is unfolding),” says Cruz Rios. “Those actions clearly carry environmental costs, but they’re essentially invisible in the data.”

In the paper, Cruz Rios sketches out a new approach to life-cycle analysis that foregrounds resilience, making the benchmark of sustainability a building’s material use in relation to the function it delivers over its lifetime. Cruz Rios reports that her lab is now “working to gather the kind of data that could make this analysis fully usable in practice.”

At the same time, no building is an island. According to the first study, urban form—meaning the height, density, and uniformity of buildings across a city—makes a big difference in material use. Cities with a dense, uniform arrangement of low-rise buildings maximize per capita floor space per pound of building material.

“I was also surprised by how much urban form could influence future material demand,” Song says. Going forward, if rapidly growing cities in the Global South adopt the dense, low-rise arrangement they could require about 30% less material than if they were to adopt the least efficient urban form (a sparse arrangement of uniformly high-rise buildings).

The finding “suggests that early urban planning decisions can substantially shape a city’s long-term material needs,” says Song—underlining the need to consider building sustainability across multiple levels of space and time.

Sources:

[1] Song J. et al.  “Weighing 600 million buildings reveals global urban material inequality and efficiency paths.” Nature Cities 2026.

[2] Cruz Rios F. “Resilience in building life cycle assessment: a critical review and framework for time‐integrated functionality.” Journal of Industrial Ecology 2026.

Image: John Fleck/FEMA.

You know those memories of childhood that catch you decades later when you are doing something entirely different, thinking about something entirely different? For me, one that frequently finds me is waking to the call of the vegetable pushcart walla while visiting my grandmother’s flat in Karachi.

Aloo-ooo, Py-azzzz, Tamatarrrr, Baiṅgan. Sabzi! Sabzi! Sabzi!

(Potato, onion, tomato, eggplant. Vegetables! Vegetables! Vegetables!)

Warm summer morning air filling the room, the fan turning overhead. Waking next to my sister, the two of us insisting on sleeping in my grandmother’s beautiful salwars that were probably not ready to be turned into pajamas. The sounds of traffic humming from the dusty streets below.

I could not see him, but he was ever present as his voice crisscrossed the neighborhood announcing fresh vegetables. And he always called out the price. His call made clear that price was part of the enticement. A good deal was passing by.

That unseen vegetable pushcart was a pocket of possibility.

Each day, Dadu, my grandmother, would sit with Sherbano, who worked in her home, and methodically go over what would be cooked. Dish by dish, they discussed who would be eating, what ingredients were still needed, the cost of the meal in relation to the week’s budget, and what else had been cooked that week. Sometimes Sherbano would double-check what remained from Juma Bazar (the Friday farmers market) or from the supermarket, where shelf-stable foreign goods like canned cheese were available.

Sherbano and my grandmother discussed what to look for when purchasing each vegetable: its appearance, size, texture, freshness, and aroma. Let’s not buy it if it’s not fragrant. The potatoes should be this size. Always the freshest. We’ll only know how many curry leaves and chilli peppers we need once the cooking starts. The aroma should pop.

Planning the day’s meals was a priority. Dadu and Sherbano held these discussions with seriousness, and occasionally argument, as each brought her own knowledge and skill to food procurement and meal preparation. These conversations brought out the most serious side of my grandmother. At most other times, there was always an excuse for a little fun, let’s paint the town red!

Sherbano returned with the day’s purchases to my grandmother’s tiny kitchen. There were a few pots. She sat on a low woven stool and cut vegetables on a cutting board on the ground. With her knowledge, skill, and labor, she transformed whole food ingredients into meals that brought joy. Meals that were festive and nourishing. Meals I long for.

That kitchen in my grandmother’s home was another pocket of possibility.

The vegetable pushcart walla was one of many who started around 3:00 a.m., purchasing vegetables from the Sabzi Mandi before dispersing across neighborhoods. Without a storefront, they helped keep fresh vegetables within reach. Across generations and geographies, mobile vendors have carried fruits, vegetables, grains, and more toward people in baskets, bundles, and pushcarts.

Most of us do not experience the food system in its entirety; we experience it through food environments. Food environments are the living confluences where climate, biodiversity, agriculture, markets, policy, culture, economics, nutrition, and health come together in our daily lives. Collectively, these relationships shape food availability, affordability, convenience, promotion, quality, and sustainability.

The Sabzi Mandi, Juma Bazar, supermarket, and vegetable pushcarts were all part of the built food environment my grandmother accessed. Built food environments extend from traditional markets and mobile vendors to supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and digital marketplaces. People also obtain food directly from wild and cultivated food environments, from forests, rivers, and coastlines to farms, fields, and home gardens.

I have delighted in co-creating frameworks, tools, metrics, and surveys to understand diverse food environments. What we define and characterize determines what we see and measure, and what we measure determines what we can manage. If we only measure food available in markets, we miss extraordinary pockets of food diversity in wild and cultivated food environments and the knowledge and relationships that make them accessible.

Food can be available but unaffordable. It can be affordable but poor quality, culturally irrelevant, or undesirable. Diverse foods can persist in a landscape while the knowledge to recognize, harvest, prepare, and value them disappears.

Food environments are dynamic. We are living through a profound global food-environment transition, with growing availability of ultra-processed and ready-to-eat foods and more food consumed away from home. These shifts bring convenience while distancing us from food knowledge and agency once practiced in our kitchens.

A pocket of possibility can shrink. It can also be expanded.

My grandmother’s kitchen reminds me that access to fresh and affordable ingredients was only part of what made those nourishing meals possible. Dadu had support. She and Sherbano brought knowledge, skill, labor, and time to making those meals, discerning quality, working within a budget, minimizing waste, and adjusting ingredients until the aroma popped. Nourishment requires an enabling environment inside the home, too. Today, many of our kitchens have vacancies in time, labor, knowledge, skills, and support.

But we are not going back to our grandmothers’ kitchens, nor the labor arrangements that helped make them possible. The opportunity is to carry the best of that knowledge and intention forward while finding new ways to fill some of the vacancies.

Policies can support mobile vendors in bringing fresh, affordable food closer to home. They can also help community gardens flourish, while hunting, fishing, and foraging can enhance food access. Food education can help navigate increasingly complex food and information landscapes. Where Dadu and Sherbano brought knowledge and collaboration to the meal, better food-quality data and emerging AI tools for meals can offer new forms of support. One possibility we are exploring is Swap It Smart, powered by data from The Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI).

The meal itself becomes another pocket of possibility.

Meals can heal. Evidence is growing that interventions centered on meals can improve diet and health. Providing convenient access to minimally processed meals improved dietary quality and mental health symptoms in a randomized controlled trial. Medically Tailored Meals can improve health outcomes and reduce hospitalizations and healthcare costs. Culinary medicine and cooking interventions can build knowledge and skills to prepare healthier foods. Universal school meals can improve children’s health at population scale, while school meals from regenerative agriculture extend those benefits to planetary health.

Across interventions and scales, the same fundamental possibility emerges: creating the enabling conditions and support for good food to become a nourishing meal.

As leaders and advocates gather in New York around the U.N. General Assembly and Climate Week, conversations about climate and health unfold at planetary scale. We do not have to invent every solution anew. Food environments are powerful levers because so much of the food system converges there. Some of these solutions have been moving through our streets for generations. Others are growing in home gardens. Some emerge from tiny kitchens, where what is available meets knowledge, skill, care, and imagination.

Bring good food within reach.

As we pursue planetary-scale solutions, some of the largest pockets of possibility may already be within reach.

From the dusty streets rises the familiar call.

Sabzi! Sabzi! Sabzi! (Vegetables! Vegetables! Vegetables!)

This essay is part of Food Tank’s Flourish Series: Food and Health from Molecules to Systems, authored by Selena Ahmed, exploring how food connects us to the living world while asking what it means to flourish. For more in the series, click here.

The post Op-Ed | Pockets of Possibility: From Food Environments to Nourishing Meals appeared first on Food Tank.

Human rights lawyer Julian Aguon explores how warming threatens not only the survival of small island nations but also the traditions of their Indigenous peoples. He is citing these injuries in legal actions, including in a major victory at the International Court of Justice last year.

Read more on E360 →

CALGARY — DAVID PICKUP, Director of Electricity at the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to the expansion of Saskatchewan’s Bell AI Fabric centre.Yesterday’s announcement from the Saskatchewan and federal governments...

On August 17, 2026, Mark Carney announced the largest clean energy investment in North American history. The investment totals around $70 billion with $10 billion...

The post How Carney plays both sides on climate policy first appeared on Spring.

Imports from the occupied Palestinian territories, which are not covered by the EU-Israel agreement, have entered the European market incorrectly labelled as Israeli products. This constitutes a fraud.

The post Europe: ECVC calls on the EU and all European countries to suspend imports from the Occupied Palestinian Territory appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Headline News:

• “Germany Switched On A Solar Farm Over 150 Fallow Deer In Time For A Rutting-Season Battles” • Germany has reimagined how solar panels are deployed. An 8.3-MW solar park, developed by Perigus Energy, is in a fallow deer enclosure. The solar panels are elevated 5.2 to 5.9 feet above the ground to allow for rutting season battles beneath them. [Energies Media]

Stag (Pushkaraj Deshpande, Unsplash)

• “What Does The Closure Of Saudi-Arabia’s East-West Pipeline Mean For Gas Prices?” • Global oil prices climbed to their highest level since May after Saudi Arabia shut down a key pipeline, choking worldwide crude supply and threatening to put upward pressure on US gasoline prices. Brent crude had a 50% increase since the start of the war. [ABC News]
• “More Than 56% Of California Electricity Demand Supplied By Wind, Water, And Solar In 2026” • California keeps installing renewable energy power plants and rooftop solar systems. And so it keeps using more renewable energy. Stanford professor Mark Z Jacobson highlighted a few milestones for renewable energy in the state. [CleanTechnica]
• “EPA Announces Repeal Of Power Plant Emissions Limits” • The US EPA said it’s repealing most of the GHG limits for fossil fuel power plants set during the Biden administration. And the agency is proposing eliminating all other other GHG emissions for the power industry, saying there’s been “virtually no benefit” from those regulations. [ABC News]
• “US Solar Has Enough Installed Capacity To Generate Power For 50 Million Homes” • Despite the current administration’s opposition to renewable sources of energy, the US recently hit a significant milestone for solar power. By the end of the second quarter of 2026, US solar installations could match the electricity demand of over 50 million homes. [The Cool Down]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

For several decades, IMF's financing has often been conditional on adjustment measures and economic reforms that profoundly transforms the way a country produces, trades and consumes its food.

The post Briefing Note: Trade Liberalization in the Carebbian Region and IMF Impacts in Haiti and the Dominican Republic appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Several hundred scientists, government officials, and environmentalists gathered for an unusual two-day conference in Newport, Oregon, last week, entirely focused on a single species: gray whales.

It was an urgent meeting. The number of gray whales along the U.S. West Coast has recently plummeted by the thousands, falling by half in the last decade. The leading theory is that climate change has been causing the whales’ food source in the Arctic to dwindle. And the situation seems to be getting worse. This past summer, 187 gray whales washed up dead on beaches across the region. So far, the Trump administration has largely ignored the problem. 

The attendees at the conference, who came from across North America, were there to share as much as they knew about the animals. Bill Keener, a researcher at the Marine Mammal Center, a nonprofit in California, said it was inspiring to see so many scientists come together to tackle the issue. 

But the atmosphere in the rooms was tense, others said. Gray whales have been off the list of animals protected by the Endangered Species Act for decades. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — whose scientists participated in the meetings — recently missed the legal deadline to respond to a petition to relist them. At the end of August, three conservation groups filed a notice of their intent to sue, which would kick off a lawsuit if the Trump administration doesn’t respond to the petition within two months. 

“People were walking on eggshells there,” said Mark Palmer, who helps lead a project protecting marine mammals at the Earth Island Institute, one of the groups behind the potential lawsuit. Presenters at the conference were careful to focus on science and avoid politics, he said, adding that the event organizers “made it very clear from the beginning that they would not discuss policy issues.”

That’s likely because many of the attendees were scientists who work in the government, or depend on federal funding in some way, Palmer said. Since taking office in 2025, the Trump administration has made sweeping cuts to staff and funding at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to better align with partisan beliefs. It has also proposed eliminating the Marine Mammal Commission, which helps other parts of the government protect animals like whales, and it recently rolled back habitat protections from the Endangered Species Act. There is a backlog of some 400 species currently awaiting a federal listing decision.

“Obviously they are very nervous about what the administration could do to them,” Palmer said. In addition to failing to respond to the petition, NOAA is several months late in releasing the count of gray whale births this year. “Yes, they’ve been dragging their feet, but also the administration has been targeting this funding,” he said. The agency declined to comment in response to Grist’s request.

In many ways, gray whales’ fortunes have long been decided by humans. Starting in the 19th century, commercial whaling drove their numbers to historic lows, but bans on the practice, along with federal endangered species protections beginning in the 1970s, helped the population along the U.S. West Coast more than double. Their recovery was so strong that, in 1994, U.S. officials decided to remove them from the endangered species list.

Now, sharing a planet with humans appears to have reversed their fortunes again. Those found on the U.S. side of the Pacific are known as eastern gray whales, and they are distinct from the western population, found near East Asia and Russia. They feed on small crustaceans in the Arctic waters near Alaska in the summer, and then swim down to Mexico to give birth in the winter — one of the longest migrations of any mammal. But climate change is heating up the Arctic nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet, and the melting ice has led to a number of cascading changes that have caused the whales’ prey to sharply decline. Scientists think hungry gray whales are beginning their migrations with too little energy in reserve, leading to fewer births and more deaths. 

“The science on this is perfectly clear,” said Richard Steiner, a marine conservation biologist who initially submitted the petition to relist gray whales. “As goes Arctic sea ice, so goes the gray whale population. And Arctic sea ice will continue its decline throughout this century.” If humans don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions that warm the planet, he said, the consequences could be “apocalyptic” for gray whales, as well as many other species on Earth.

Gray whales on the other side of the Pacific are struggling too, with only a few hundred remaining. And the Atlantic gray whale disappeared centuries ago, likely due to whaling. The loss was “the only extinction of a whale in human history,” Steiner said. “Thus, we know this particular whale population is extremely vulnerable to anthropogenic impact.”

Experts from the Marine Mammal Center and the California Academy of Sciences pull in a gray whale carcass found in the San Francisco Bay for examination.
Clara Field / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Malnutrition may be making it harder for whales to withstand threats along their routes, like collisions with ships or getting tangled in fishing gear. It may also be pushing more whales to forage for food in dangerous stretches of their route — like the San Francisco Bay Area, where scientists have been tracking an increased number of whale strandings in recent years. At least a fifth — and possibly up to half — of all whales that enter the San Francisco Bay end up being killed by ships. This summer, 13 were discovered dead in the area, but scientists say many more are sinking before they can be counted. 

U.S. government scientists estimate that eastern gray whales peaked in 2016 with some 25,000 to 30,000 individuals. But in the last decade, the population crashed to about half that, with estimates ranging from 11,700 to 17,000. Normally, a thousand calves are born each year. But last year, scientists estimated just 85 births — a record low. 

Relisting gray whales as an endangered species is an important first step, said Miyoko Sakashita, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit, who is leading the impending lawsuit against the Trump administration. Once a species is formally protected, federal agencies are generally required to develop a recovery plan. Listing also opens the door to federal funding for monitoring, research, and efforts to protect or restore habitat. That could “buy us some time for us to solve that bigger climate change problem,” Sakashita said. 

If the Trump administration decides not to relist the whales, Sakashita said, the plaintiffs would file another lawsuit and probably end up in court anyway. “The law says they have to use the best available science,” when deciding which species are endangered, she said. “When we look at this terrible population decline, it seems like there cannot be any other answer than to proceed forward with a threatened or endangered listing.”

NOAA has released estimates indicating that whale populations rebounded by roughly 5,000 whales in the last year. Palmer, of Earth Island Institute, is among those who are skeptical of these numbers. Especially considering the low number of calves born last year, “it’s just physically impossible for gray whales to produce that many animals in such a short time,” he said.

Many groups are racing to protect whales, even without an endangered species listing. One promising approach starts with asking ships to slow down near hotspots of whale activity — a step that can significantly increase the odds that a whale will survive a collision, said Rachel Rhodes, a scientist with the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She leads Whale Safe, a large project that has been mapping whales in shipping lanes by using sonar, thermal cameras, and satellite tags. 

In an ideal world, ships would be able to avoid whales entirely. But waterways are often too busy and confined for that to be possible, she said. “So the next best thing is to ask ships to slow down to 10 knots or less.” 

Similar speed limits are mandatory for large vessels on the East Coast, but remain voluntary on the West Coast. Another California project, Blue Whales Blue Skies, has had success in paying and publicly praising shipping companies whose ships slow down. But some vessels, particularly cruise ships, continue to speed through these areas. 

“The scientists have done their job in reporting the dire situation for gray whales,” said Steiner. “Now it’s time for the policymakers to put that science to work in protecting them as much as possible.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Gray whales are starving as the Arctic warms. Will the US protect them? on Sep 15, 2026.

A fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are linked to international trade in goods and services, a new tracker shows, spotlighting a little-studied issue that researchers say should be tackled by the UN climate process.

Currently, as part of the Paris Agreement, every country is responsible for counting and reducing the planet-heating emissions that are produced within its territory. Manufacturing countries, for example, may have high emissions even if what they make is exported for consumption elsewhere.

But new analysis from the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and climate consultancy Matière, based on the tracker’s data, shows that some countries have a high footprint of “imported emissions” from goods and services they ship in. These emissions are often ignored in the places where the products are consumed because they are not formally counted under greenhouse gas inventories.

In the European Union, for example, while domestic emissions have declined since 2015, imported emissions have remained unchanged, the analysis shows. In some countries, like Austria or Sweden, they are as high as the country’s entire annual carbon footprint.

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Former EU lead climate negotiator Jacob Werksman said that under the Paris Agreement, these traded emissions are accounted for in the countries where they are originally produced, but importing countries can also take responsibility for their consumption.

“It starts with a wide recognition by many jurisdictions around the world that we need to know the carbon content of these products, and we then need to agree what is a fair, effective, transparent and relatively easy-to-implement way of measuring that carbon in traded products,” he told a launch event for the trade emissions tracker, which contains data for different countries, sectors and gases.

Trade and its role in addressing climate change has become a higher priority at UN climate talks after a push led by emerging economies including China, India and South Africa led to the first trade and climate change dialogue held this year at the mid-year session in Bonn.

At the upcoming COP31 UN summit in Antalya, some voluntary initiatives like the Brazil-led Integrated Forum on Climate Change and Trade are expected to continue, but the issue does not feature in Türkiye’s Action Agenda of climate initiatives and formal negotiations are not scheduled on the topic.

China: the world’s top emissions exporter

As a manufacturing powerhouse, China ranks first in the new tracker as the world’s top-emitting country, but the data shows that a large chunk of the country’s carbon emissions – an amount larger than Brazil’s entire annual carbon footprint – are linked to products that are exported and consumed abroad.

Russia, Brazil, the US and the EU rank as the top destinations for Chinese trade-related emissions, which are mostly linked to components for power generation, basic metals like copper and lead, and non-metallic minerals like graphite and phosphorus.

Yet China is also the world’s top emissions importer, related mostly to agricultural products, fossil fuels and minerals brought from the US, the EU, Japan and India, among others. The US ranks second by a close margin, with both countries importing about 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit

Richard Baron, ECF’s industrial policy and trade director, said Chinese clean energy products are key for reducing emissions around the world, adding that Europe is “not able to do without those technologies” for its energy transition.

“China has an emissions trading system that counts CO2 differently there. But if China and the EU were to agree on some kind of translation mechanism to say ‘this is how we measure it’, and companies can understand the protocol to navigate both markets, that would set the tone for a lot of other conversations,” he said at the platform’s launch event last week.

The analysis suggests that if the EU and China aligned their climate requirements for products, the resulting standards could influence trade flows representing about 7% of global emissions.

Baron said there’s “a plethora” of multilateral spaces to hold these discussions, including the climate and trade dialogue at the UN climate talks or the Climate Club at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which seeks to cut industrial emissions.

Trade breaks into agenda of UN climate talks – but will it have teeth?

Controversial trade measures

Instruments like the Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) – a recent piece of legislation that penalises emissions-heavy imported products – are one tool that could be used to address trade-related emissions, said Antoine Oger, executive director at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.

He said a significant portion of imported emissions in Europe are already covered by CBAM, as it includes sectors like cement, iron and steel, fertilisers and aluminium. This then allows the EU “to engage in constructive dialogue with our trade partners”, he added.

An employee of Dirostahl, a medium-size forging steel firm that produces large parts, works on a glowing steel element that has been heated in a classic natural gas-fired furnace to 1,200C in Remscheid, Germany, June 30, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen) An employee of Dirostahl, a medium-size forging steel firm that produces large parts, works on a glowing steel element that has been heated in a classic natural gas-fired furnace to 1,200C in Remscheid, Germany, June 30, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen)

But across diplomatic summits, including at UN climate talks, emerging economies have pushed back heavily against the CBAM and other trade measures. The most recent BRICS declaration adopted on Saturday by 11 such countries – including China, India and Russia – condemns “protectionism under the guise of environmental objectives”.

The declaration calls for the “elimination of such unlawful measures”, which they argue have “far-reaching negative implications for the human rights, including the rights to development, health and food security” of vulnerable communities.

“The question of responsibility is a political question,” Oger said. “These emissions exist – they are emitted somewhere to make a product that will be consumed elsewhere. So you can debate responsibility but the idea is for the two parts to recognise there’s a problem.”

The aim, he added “is not to point fingers, but to accept this is a reality of our emissions profiles and ask what we can do about it”.

The post International trade linked to 20% of global emissions – but imports ignored appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the face of climate change, these small changes can support the recovery of declining populations of birds, insects, and other pollinators.

Humanity has dug itself into a hole. The first step to digging ourselves out is to acknowledge the depth of our civilizational failure.

On Monday morning, Sept. 21, Food Tank will host “Solving Food Waste is a Key Solution to the Climate Crisis” at Climate Week NYC 2026, in partnership with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), Food Planet Prize, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Restaurant Technologies, CookUnity, and Mill. 

Food waste is one of the world’s most overlooked climate challenges, and one of its greatest opportunities. The summit will explore how reducing food loss and waste can cut greenhouse gas emissions, strengthen food security, and build more resilient food systems at the city, state, and global levels. 

“Reducing food loss and waste is a powerful example of how a simple action can deliver multiple benefits: feeding more people, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, protecting nature and strengthening economies,” says Martin Krause, Director of the Climate Change Division at UNEP. “By changing how we value, consume, and manage food, we can drive a future where every resource matters, every meal is valued, and no food goes to waste.”

Tackling food waste, speakers say, will require action at multiple levels, from individual eaters’ choices to broader policy changes.

“The world needs an array of interventions from different parts of the food system, and food waste is an important piece of the puzzle,” says Emily Norford, Nominations Manager at Food Planet Prize. “We hope the event will yield a renewed motivation to take action, whether it’s changing individual behavior, supporting policy solutions, or joining forces with others.”

Across the United States, advocacy and research organizations are already working to put those solutions into practice: “This event will highlight a range of impactful food waste solutions already taking place across the country and inspire us in our push towards the goal of reducing food waste by 50 percent by 2030,” says Rebecca Riley, Managing Director of Food & Agriculture at NRDC.

Some of those efforts are focused on one of the most consequential destinations for discarded food: landfills.

“Keeping food waste out of landfills is one of the most immediate opportunities we have to make our food system more sustainable,” says Diana Geseking, Chief Legal Officer at Restaurant Technologies. “We help commercial kitchens reduce their waste and turn what remains into something valuable. We are excited to bring that perspective to this conversation and learn from others working across the food system.”

But speakers say reducing food waste is about more than what happens after food is discarded; it can also mean getting surplus food to people who need it.

“Food Tank’s event at Climate Week perfectly illustrates how deeply food is connected to many of the challenges the climate crisis has forced us to confront,” says María Bengochea, Director of Sustainability, Nutrition, and Standards at CookUnity. “For our team at CookUnity, contributing to the fight against food insecurity—by rescuing surplus food, working with our donation partners to support local communities, and preventing good food from becoming waste—is central to both our day-to-day operations and our mission to empower chefs to feed and nourish more people.”

Discussions on chef partnerships to reduce food waste, city and state food waste action, advancing a national policy agenda on food waste, and food waste action in food service and retail will explore how food waste is a problem that can be addressed at a global scale.

“For decades, we have treated food waste like it was inevitable, but it’s actually one of the most solvable climate problems that exist today,” says Matt Rogers, CEO of Mill. “If people walk away from this summit understanding that we can move the needle on this massive-scale, high-impact problem, that’s a win for the economy and for the planet.”

The event will be at WNYC-NPR Studios’ The Greene Space in New York City at 9am with breakfast and live musical performances, followed by a reception until 12pm.

Speakers include María Bengochea, Director of Sustainability & Standards, CookUnity; Veleké Brown, CEO, E-RoadMap and Velloris, and Executive Director, E-RoadMap Corporation; U.S. Representative Nikki Budzinski; U.S. Representative Maxine Dexter; Adalberto Maluf Filho, National Secretary for Urban Environment, Water Resources and Environmental Quality, Brazil’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change; Julie Gehrki, President, Walmart Foundation and Senior Vice President, Philanthropy, Walmart Inc.; Diana Geseking, Chief Legal Officer, Restaurant Technologies; Robert Jones, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, Industry Leadership, and Impact, The Culinary Institute of America; Matthew Jozwiak, Founder and CEO, Rethink Food; Madeline Keating, Senior Advocate, Nature, NRDC; Martin Krause, Director, Climate Change Division, UN Environment Programme (UNEP); Danielle Nierenberg, President, Food Tank; Emily Norford, Nominations Manager, Food Planet Prize; Emily Peck, plant-based chef and holistic nutritionist; Lou Pieh, Head of Federal Affairs, Mill; Gwyneth Rampton, Vice President of Sustainability, Compass Group USA; U.S. Representative Andrea Salinas (D-OR); Tia Schwab, Senior Manager, U.S. Food Systems, C40 Cities; Jackie Suggitt, Senior Director of Waste & Circularity, Walmart; Sydney Thayer, Pollution Prevention Specialist, Virginia Department of Environmental Quality; and Jacob Wallace, Senior Reporter, Waste Dive.

“Solving Food Waste is a Key Solution to the Climate Crisis” will feature a special musical performance by Nathan Lucrezio, a Broadway actor, singer, dancer, and recording artist whose credits include Schmigadoon!, Pirates! The Penzance Musical, The Who’s Tommy, Diana, Aladdin, and Cinderella. He will be joined by Cullen Curth, New York City-based pianist, music director, and conductor who recently made his Broadway conducting debut with Just in Time.

This summit will be streamed live on FoodTank.com and Food Tank’s YouTube channel, here. Join the Food Tank newsletter list for reminders, and click here for Food Tank’s full lineup of events at Climate Week NYC 2026.

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.

The post Turning Food Waste Into Climate Action appeared first on Food Tank.

For all our flaws, we evolved toward community and cooperation. Toward enough. Yet somehow, we got Egypt. What happened between ten and five thousand years ago that made this possible?

The EU has placed competitiveness, industrial renewal, and strategic autonomy at the centre of its agenda. But will these ambitions support the green and social transition, or become a pretext for deregulation and a weakening of Social Europe? The General Director of the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), Andrew Watt, explains what this changing political landscape could mean for workers and trade unions and social policy – and for the kind of economic model Europe is building.

Seden Anlar: Competitiveness, strategic autonomy, industrial policy and deregulation are rising up the EU’s political agenda, while the bloc is also navigating war, energy shocks, trade tensions, competition with China, and growing uncertainty around the United States. Where do you see Europe within these overlapping pressures, and what kind of transformation are they driving within the EU?

Andrew Watt: Europe is changing because the world is changing. There are longer-term trends driving that change, like demography, decarbonisation, technology, and now AI. Then there are shorter-term developments: war, the dislocation of the global political system, the behaviour of powers like Russia, but also our erstwhile ally, the United States, and renewed inflationary shocks.

For populations, policymakers and trade unions, most of these changes are initially perceived as threats. They constrain our fiscal resources, for instance. We spent a lot of public money getting out of the Covid crisis and dealing with the inflation crisis. That reduces the size of the cake available today, for example for social policy.

Then there is the demand from the US and from many Europeans for a more autonomous European defence policy, and that is going to cost money. We also have the burdens associated with ageing. So if you take the fiscal situation as a focal point for all these things, you can see how pressure is building in the system. We are going to have to face up to some trade-offs and make some difficult decisions.

But I don’t think it is all negative. Some of the responses we are seeing – industrial policy, a more critical attitude towards trade, a greater role for governments and perhaps, hopefully, for the European Union itself – are things that some of us have wanted for a long time.

There is that old story about Europe progressing through crises. It is often only when crises come that the political space opens up to take steps we think are anyway necessary .

How is this broader transformation affecting Europe’s economic model? Are we moving towards a genuinely different model of EU economic governance, or are older political-economic cycles returning in new language?

We have seen some considerable changes, and we are seeing pressure for further change. The open question is whether it is going to be enough.

If we understand economic governance as both what the EU itself can and cannot do in economic policy, including through the EU budget, and the framework within which national governments conduct economic policy, then there have been important changes. We had NextGenerationEU and the Recovery and Resilience Facility, which was a substantial investment package. It broke new ground in terms of European-level borrowing, with money distributed to member states to enable them to invest when they otherwise would not have been able to, and the debt being paid back at the European level.

This was actually a big deal, but it was temporary. What we need is something like that, or even something more ambitious, on a permanent basis, and there is considerable resistance to that. We just about managed to get political support for NextGenerationEU on the understanding, in some capitals – I won’t mention any by name – that it had to be temporary. Making something like that permanent is really a sort of Rubicon. There are some decisive member states – all member states are important, of course, but some are more important than others – where there is resistance. I would hope that we take that step, but whether we do or not remains to be seen. The fact that the market for US government bonds has come under considerable pressure could, and I believe should, serve as a window of opportunity here.

We have also seen changes to the national fiscal rules. They have been revised in a good direction, but still not enough. The decisive thing we still do not have is the ability for governments to invest and to borrow in order to invest without coming up against legal constraints.

There is now an opening for more spending, but it is for defence spending. Defence may also be necessary, but we do not have that same opening for other forms of investment, and the multipliers from defence spending are much lower than for civilian public investment projects.

When you say Europe needs more investment, what kind of investment are you talking about? What is holding it back, and how could Europe unlock it?

The first distinction is the most basic one, between public investment and private investment. Public investment is much smaller, but it is important because, if it is done intelligently, it can drive private investment. We are no longer in the bad old days after the euro crisis when public investment was very depressed. Things have improved slightly, but still not enough to really move the dial.

Business investment is much bigger, so we also have to think about what gives the private sector an incentive to invest. The message we are getting is that there is a heavy regulatory burden and, if we cast that off, companies will invest. I don’t think that is going to happen.

What is holding back investment in the short term? Energy prices are a huge problem. The breakdown of trading relations is another. We also have a genuine competitiveness issue, which is with China.

But what I think is less well discussed is the internal situation, particularly internal demand. Investment that expands productive capacity will only happen if entrepreneurs are convinced there will be demand for the additional products. Europe’s population is now hardly growing at all and is set to shrink, so that is another structural factor holding companies back from investing. We are unfortunately getting locked into a pessimistic, self-reinforcing cycle. That is why the public sector can sometimes kick-start a more virtuous circle and get us out of a vicious one; public investment “crowds in” private investment.

Another factor is regulatory uncertainty. Look at the constant debates in the automobile sector about whether, from 2035, petrol and diesel engines are going to be allowed or not – backwards and forwards. That sort of uncertainty is killing investment.

Other issues include the way investment is financed in Europe and the lack of a venture-capital market. So it is not a simple matter where you pull one lever and suddenly get investment.

What is holding back investment in the short term? Energy prices are a huge problem. The breakdown of trading relations is another. We also have a genuine competitiveness issue, which is with China.

We need to do several things. We need a bigger role for the public sector at the national level, and major European initiatives on the green transition, technology, and infrastructure. We also need investment in schools, hospitals and care services, in addition to classical infrastructure, grids, and interconnections between countries. In technology, we need to build up our own indigenous tech sectors. That is where we really need investment.

We also need more regulatory certainty and, in some cases, support for companies. If European industries need protection from aggressive Chinese competition based on excessive subsidisation, then I would support that. I am not a China basher, but we do need to protect our industries where those distortions exist. And this is where I think we need to see the different orders of magnitude. The whole political system, the media, and the Brussels bubble are investing so much time and energy in the deregulation agenda, which is of more marginal importance.

Even if regulatory simplification is successful on its own terms, I don’t really think anybody believes – and I certainly don’t believe – that it is going to deliver the scale of investment Europe needs. It might reduce some costs, but it is not going to move the dial.

The main point of the Draghi report was that we need around 750-800 billion euros a year in additional investment. Even if we got half of that, it would make a big difference if it were done effectively, in the right places, and in the right sectors. How is regulatory simplification going to deliver that investment? I don’t think it will.

The EU’s growing focus on competitiveness, strategic autonomy, and security is arguably putting its social agenda at risk. Do you see these agendas as compatible? And is it still realistic to think of Social Europe as a structuring political project in this new context?

There are certainly political forces using the competitiveness argument to make Europe less social and to weaken it. But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Let me say a few words about competitiveness. If you use the word in a businesslike sense, Europe is competitive. We have had a current-account surplus for many years. We have no problem paying our way in the world. So this chain of thought that goes, “Europe is not competitive, therefore we have to cut pensions, cut childcare allowances, or make people work longer hours” just doesn’t fly from a very basic point of view.

The more useful understanding of competitiveness – the one Draghi and that most sensible economists use – is really about productivity. We should not get obsessed with the idea that a country is like a company, because it isn’t. Competitiveness is about productivity, living standards, and what we can afford as societies. If we don’t have productivity growth, the cake is not growing. And if the cake is not growing, we will have distributional conflicts that are very difficult to resolve.

I very much believe the labour movement and trade unions need to play a role in the debate about how to raise productivity, and many of them do. We have evidence in our research that when you involve workers in decision-making – through works councils, at board level, through collective bargaining, or at sectoral and national level – you get better outcomes. It is not hard to understand why. If you involve people in processes of structural change, for example restructuring or the green transition, the outcomes will be better. There will be less resistance and less conflict, and productivity can grow faster. That is one example of how a sensible competitiveness or productivity agenda goes hand in hand with good social policy.

There are numerous other examples. Think about childcare, education, and healthcare. It is perhaps an instrumental way to think about these things, but from an economic perspective they also affect how productive workers are, how often they can go to work, how much work they miss because they are ill, and how productive they are when they are working.

One of the main ways the competitiveness agenda is manifesting in this mandate is through the simplification-deregulation agenda. What risks do you see this creating for Social Europe, workers’ rights, and labour protections? And how should trade unions respond?

I think we can have a debate about simplification in some cases, but deregulation should be out of the question. That is essentially also the line the trade unions take. We have sectoral bodies and interprofessional bodies where business and labour are represented and can work through the issues that make regulation unnecessarily complex. European Parliament committees can do that as well. That is all fine.

What concerns the trade unions, and us at the ETUI, is the speed with which these things are now being pushed through. There can be over-regulation, or cases where the same thing is covered by two different directives. Nobody wants things to be more complicated than they have to be. But we need to understand that regulation was put there for a purpose.

We can have a debate about simplification in some cases, but deregulation should be out of the question. That is essentially also the line the trade unions take.

It could be that that purpose no longer exists. For instance, we do not need a regulation for steam trains if we no longer have steam trains. Some regulations simply become obsolete. But usually the public purpose is still there, whether it is health and safety, or protecting the environment, workers, or pregnant women. So if you want to weaken or remove a regulation, you need to answer the question: what about that public purpose? How is it still going to be achieved?

Unfortunately, I don’t think we are really having that detailed debate at the moment. It would have to be a very granular, detailed, and time-consuming debate, and instead these things are being pushed through the institutions very quickly. It also makes no sense to talk about regulation simply in quantitative terms. Business lobbies champion ideas like “one in, one out”: every time you introduce one regulation, you have to throw out an old one. That is absurd.

The question should be: what public priorities do we want that the market will not provide without regulation? And then, of course, we can discuss how we achieve those objectives without imposing unnecessarily high costs.

Europe is again talking about strategic industries and reindustrialisation – areas in which trade unions historically played an important role, both in industrial development and in shaping workers’ rights. At a time when collective-bargaining coverage has declined considerably, what might this renewed industrial agenda mean for trade unions and their capacity for renewal and mobilisation?

Following the Covid-19 pandemic and the energy shocks and highly politicised trade relations of recent years, we are simply in a different world. In this context, the renewed focus on industry is welcome, but we should not take it too far because most European workers are in services. That said, industry still has an outsized economic importance. It matters for exports, it is often where productivity growth is generated, and a lot of service employment is built around the industrial sector. It also has strategic significance, including in relation to defence.

For trade unions, industry matters because it is a big part of their history and, in many countries, where they remain relatively strong. Large workplaces are easier to organise than many fragmented service-sector workplaces, and practices of industrial relations have developed over decades – even centuries to some extent – in which trade unions have a recognised voice at the table. You have national and European works councils as well as board-level representation. Union density tends to be higher than in services, although the public sector is of course now extremely important for the trade-union movement as well.

The unions want to play a role in this new industrial-policy debate, and we as a research institute want to support that. This is also closely linked to trade and China. I said before that Europe does not really have a classical competitiveness problem except vis-à-vis China. We have a very large trade deficit with China – roughly one billion euros a day, or around 360 billion euros in 2025. Germany, for instance, had trade surpluses with China for many years but now also runs deficits.

That is partly linked to Chinese policies which, in my view, need to change. China needs to import more and address over-subsidisation in some industries, such as the car industry. It needs to pay its workers more or revalue the currency. There are lots of different steps it could take, and Europe should be negotiating with China about them. But I do not want to bash China. China is also very important for the green transition. I am fine with cheap solar panels coming in and, to some extent, cheaper cars. But we also need a chance to export. That is what trade is for: countries import things others are good at producing and export things they themselves are good at producing, and everybody benefits. But China deliberately restricts imports.

We have been losing manufacturing employment. We lost around 220,000 manufacturing jobs between the average of 2024 and 2025. That is a lot, and that can’t continue.

At the same time, we do not want Fortress Europe. We do not want to stop the green technologies we need from coming in. What has changed is the naïve faith that was dominant in Brussels for decades that we simply need free trade, and everything will be fine. That is gone, and that also creates opportunities for trade unions.

Unions are worried about forced labour, deforestation and the oppression of organised labour in some of our trading partners. They want to use trade as a lever to improve conditions in other countries. That has become more possible, and I think that is an important development.

There has long been a wider debate about the limits of GDP as a measure of economic and social progress, including whether it adequately captures dimensions such as wellbeing, care, and ecological sustainability. Given your point about how the economic “cake” is distributed, how should we think about growth and productivity in an era of extreme wealth concentration and weak redistribution?

Let me split that into two things and first focus on the beyond-GDP question.

We have a long tradition at the institute of work on just transition, and I intend to continue that. Growth is not the solution to everything. What we need, I think, is qualitative growth and investment-driven growth, because that is also a path to decarbonisation. It is easy to become depressed about the climate crisis, but if we have a hope, I do think technology is an important part of it. Technology comes through scientific processes and research, but it only changes economic outcomes if it is actually invested in and becomes part of the capital stock of the economy.

So I am not a “go-for-growth” person in a traditional sense. But I am also very clear that I am not in the degrowth camp. Whether we like it or not, if the cake is not growing, distributional conflicts build up. Politics becomes poisonous: it is you against me; either you have it or I do. If we want decent pensions and we want to take care of elderly people with a shrinking labour force, we need productivity growth and some economic growth.

But the distribution question is absolutely central. Think about comparisons between the United States and European countries. Even if GDP per capita in the United States is higher, people work longer hours and have shorter holidays, and income is much more unequally distributed. So, the benefit for the average person – or, more precisely, the median citizen or median worker – can look very different. How GDP is distributed is therefore absolutely vital.

Whether we like it or not, if the cake is not growing, distributional conflicts build up. Politics becomes poisonous: it is you against me; either you have it or I do.

We are seeing rising concentrations of wealth and income within the corporate sector, more in the US than Europe, but increasingly here too. That is not only an economic problem; it is a political problem. People with enormous amounts of money have outsized political influence. Europe has stricter rules around party financing than the United States, but wealthy people still have influence. They buy newspaper publishers, for example.

Digital services and technology also tend towards monopoly, and wherever you have a monopoly you tend to get concentrations of wealth. That is bad socially, but it can also be bad economically.

And that brings us to AI. If AI improves productivity and those gains are distributed through the economy, then it can be a very good thing. We become more productive, living standards rise, and maybe some boring tasks that people do not like doing can be done by AI. If the gains are shared, people have higher wages and use that income to buy other services, and you can maintain full employment. That is more or less how the positive scenario works.

But that won’t happen if the gains from AI become concentrated among a handful of billionaires or trillionaires, some tech workers, and shareholders. In that case, aggregate demand breaks down, you do not get the corresponding expansion in other services, and you can expect unemployment and social strife.

There is also a more specific labour-market issue beginning to emerge. It looks as if AI may be hitting entry-level jobs – not only in coding, but office positions, skilled jobs, and some professional occupations. Some studies point to this outcome, and there is evidence that fears around AI are quite concentrated among people who are just starting their careers. At the same time, those who already know the ropes may benefit from AI. They can use it to become more productive and perhaps increase their earnings.

So, once again, the question is about distribution: who benefits from the technology and who carries the costs?

Earlier you touched on the challenges posed by Europe’s changing demographics. While ageing societies and shrinking workforces are usually framed as a crisis, tighter labour markets could actually also give workers greater bargaining power, perhaps even strengthen collective bargaining. How do you see those two sides playing out, both now and in the future?

There is a joke going around about a young person who goes to a job interview. At the end, instead of the employer saying, “We’ll call you,” the candidate says: “I’ll put you on my shortlist.” It is a joke, but for certain sectors and skills there is something to it. People can afford to be a bit more choosy. For teachers and healthcare workers, for example, large cohorts are leaving, and employers need people. The same applies to some parts of industry.

This can be good for job quality as well. Even in countries we think of as having high standards, there are sectors – notably care – where working conditions are pretty bad: low pay, long hours, and physically demanding work. We are already seeing that employers who want to keep people in these sectors or attract new workers have to pay higher wages and offer more flexible arrangements, including working hours that make it easier for people with caring responsibilities to remain in the labour market. So, tighter labour markets can also bring positive changes.

We are still relatively early in this EU mandate, and political agendas are likely to evolve over the coming years. Looking ahead to the next few years, what do you think is likely to happen? What would success for Social Europe look like from the ETUI’s perspective? What concerns you most, and where do you see reasons for optimism?

We have to get through some short-term issues first, and they are going to be decisive. If geopolitical conflicts drag on or relations between the major powers deteriorate further, things are going to get very hard. We already face big challenges, and I don’t think we should be under any illusions about that.

We have done some scenario analysis that actually looks beyond five years, towards 2040. Even some of the “muddling through” scenarios for Europe and Social Europe, to be very frank, do not look great. So we need to do things. We cannot simply continue with the status quo.

In that sense, I think Draghi did us a service, even though I don’t agree with everything in his report. He essentially said: look, if we don’t get our act together and move beyond the status quo and the constant “I can’t agree to this, I can’t agree to that,” the outlook is not good. We need some kind of social pact: agreements between member states with different views, between capital and labour, and across political divides.

Maybe it sounds slightly naïve, but people need to recognise that things can get worse and find ways of overcoming some of their differences and making concrete proposals for moving forward. Because if we don’t, things will go downhill. I do think there is scope for a more positive scenario. If we get some tailwinds at the global level and international tensions decline, some of the pressure around huge increases in defence spending could ease.

Technology is another source of optimism. Look at how dramatically the price of solar panels and batteries has declined. I think the price of electric vehicles will also come down considerably. If AI is managed well and fulfils its expectations, I think it can be a force for good. It may not be, but it can be. Higher productivity growth could help us address some fiscal problems and some of the problems connected with demographics.

There are avenues forward. But to be frank, most of them require a stronger European level. Unless we get something like what we had with NextGenerationEU – some sort of central capacity to invest in our common future – it is going to be hard. We need to face up to the fact that even quite large European countries are small on a global scale, and they are becoming smaller in terms of their share of global GDP and their political influence. We need to overcome that fragmentation.

We have seen some positive signs of that happening, but also some limits. We are pushing up against those limits now with the idea of a common European fund or a bigger EU budget. There is a lot of resistance, but we need to overcome it.

So, I am always cautiously optimistic. There is the famous Gramsci quote, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”. That is certainly a sort of motto for me personally and, I think, for the institute. We need to do what we can. We need to point things out, make proposals and hope they are picked up by trade unions, political parties, opinion-makers and the media. That is what we do. That is the game we play every day. And it is the game we are trying to win.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. Some answers have been reordered thematically.

Women who have driven social change are often sidelined in movement histories. Esther Freeman highlights five capital rebels you should know

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The Lock the Gate Alliance says new laws introduced to Queensland Parliament today could undermine Queenslanders’ rights to scrutinise and object to mining projects that threaten their water, farmland and climate.

Along with grief and loss, the anniversary of 9/11 brought home for many the "incalculable cost" of the quarter century of carnage it unleashed - the militarizing "beyond all sanity," the othering of "everyone who isn't 'them,'" the lying, fear-mongering, inflicting of terror that's left America hollowed out from forever wars now mostly against imaginary enemies within. The bleak consensus: There would be no Trump without 9/11, the senseless, self-defeating war on terror did not end, and it damn near did us in.

The commemoration of 9/11 came hard on the tawdry heels of a pointless, "historic" midterm convention by a "staggeringly incompetent" dumpster fire of a GOP shameless enough to hoist "Never Forget" signs while forgetting or twisting beyond recognition what it was we vowed not to forget - our unity and humanity in the face of unprecedented loss. Instead, it mirrored the betrayal of a nation's history and values, the turning of a government on itself to morph into an engine of its own destruction. "Defend Freedom!", vaguely blared other signs, without specifying just whose freedom, or at what cost. Thus did the event's speakers giddily spiral into paranoia and conspiracy, pointing stubby fingers at their "enemies" of choice: "Terrorists. Muslims. Criminals. Antifa. Black or trans people. Undocumented immigrants. Suspected undocumented immigrants. Opinion-havers. Op-ed writers." Etc etc.

And, these days, commies. Ted Cruz savaged "communists and Islamists (who) hate Christians, hate Jews and hate capitalism.” Little toad-like, wide-eyed MAGA Mike shrieked we are a nation "being attacked from within" (true, that) by Dems "beholden to radicals. We have let the barbarians inside the gate, and next year the Communists will be in Congress." (Oh, please.) Ever-slimy J.D. called half of Congress "the party of hatred (that) despises America and the people who built it." Don Jr. revisited the "dystopian hellscape" of left-wing ideology, declaring, "Communism is on the march." His demented old man said Dems "turned our cities into scenes of death, misery, murder, poverty and destruction," but thank God "we took that dark age of America and turned it into a golden age." Also, he'll give you a $5,000 bribe if you "cheat like hell" on Election Day. Inspiring.

Later, at a 9/11 Pentagon event, he and his lackeys reiterated their devotion to “never forget” not to learn anything from a grievous, vengeful past. Trump said his Iran debacle fulfills a "sacred oath" to "never, ever forget,“ or learn, squat. Dangerous zealot Pete said "our warriors" have "fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for half a century, that cheered on 9/11," a total lie. Iran's government and people decried the “mass murder of human beings" on Sept. 11, with huge crowds attending candlelit vigils. Sliding past pesky facts, Pete yawped Iran still "plots to kill our citizens" and "we're still sending terrorists where they belong - to Hell." Then he crudely veered to Scripture: The struggle against evil "will continue until Judgment Day, "our only answer (is) eternal vigilance,” and thank you Jesus for brave new "warriors who will say when it matters most, 'Send me.'”

Startlingly for those of a certain age who, dumbfounded, watched it unfold on that blue-sky day - and then rewatched it a thousand times, trying to grasp a reality so much of the world, but not this once-shining city on a hill, has experienced - about a third of Americans are too young to remember the chaos of 9/11 - its searing images of office workers, often holding hands, plunging to their deaths; the collapse of both towers in a vast cloud of ash, dust, paper, carcinogens; the courage of firefighters and first responders, thousands of whom died that day or later of cancers; the initial summoning of our better angels as a nation came together for one another. Historian David Blight cites "the essential grief of it...a sheer sense of unspeakable loss." He also calls it "the most visual event in our history, so shocking, so horrifying that you can’t watch it without a certain weeping."

Obviously, it didn't last. At first, Bush's language was of criminality, not war. The resources of the federal government would go to help victims' families and "find those folks who committed this act." He was rational: He told Congress the terrorists "practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism (that) perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam." Then - from fear, hubris, ineptness, talking to mad Cheney? - his rhetoric pivoted to the martial, the need in a new world to "win the war against terrorism." “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," he said, and new Sen. Hillary Clinton echoed him: “Every nation has to be either with us or against us." Absurdly, he vowed to end terror, evil itself, "a frightened child wishing to rid the world of bad guys." Even language warped into creepy, blood-and-soil, "Nazi-resonating" totalitarianism with the newly coined "Homeland Security."

9/11was "when things began to go wrong for the United States," argues former Bill Clinton adviser Bill Galston. When "the world's most powerful country responded to the worst terrorist attack in its history by inflicting terror of its own," we swiftly squandered our global good will, power, money, resources and whatever remained of our moral capital after decades of imperialist crimes to invade Afghanistan, then Iraq, now Iran, in forever wars born of the same lies, missteps, ignorance, arrogance and racism whose abuses and lack of accountability continue to haunt and fracture us today. Added to millions of innocent lives lost, the reflexive move to demonize, dominate or torture those seen as lesser also led to "a staggering level of the willful infliction of suffering...of gratuitous cruelty and sadism that became operationally part of the war on terror."

An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct, post 9/11 violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen; up to another 3.8 million people died indirectly in those war zones. Bush promised great military victories, as Americans learned (again) to equate national strength with the ability to inflict harm. When misbegotten wars faltered, ravaged, failed - it took the Taliban just 20 years to retake power - leaders began recycling 9/11 lies to justify new wars (see Iran), recycling hardware and manpower from the old, well-funded wars for a paramilitary and counter-insurgency force at home (see ICE), finding domestic enemies to scapegoat and target (see migrants et al), and pitting Americans against each other while turning a blind eye to the boundless corruption behind it. In brief, after a long road of death and destruction, "The war on terror has come home."

Historians debate whether Osama Bin Laden "won" after all in the dark aftermath of 9/11. He failed in his desire to establish a caliphate and expel western countries from the Middle East, but "the magnitude of the self-inflicted wounds (of) America's overreach," argues former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes, "hastened our own decline, division and betrayal of our own story.” Rhodes is often haunted by the cost in blood and treasure of what we did - and what we didn't do, say, for climate change, health care, education: "If you came down to Earth from another planet and tried to make sense of the fact that the United States spent several trillion dollars chasing a relatively small number of terrorists around a few countries, toppling governments and then fighting insurgencies when it has huge problems...you would think this is a country that has gone insane.”

To The Intercept's Nick Turse, a quarter century after 9/11, "It's clear that bin Laden won." A major goal, Turse notes, "was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger domestic economic collapse." In 2001, America enjoyed an unimaginable budget surplus of $128 billion. After decades of ruinous wars, tax cuts for the rich and too much spending on the wrong things, today's national debt is over $40 trillion, we'll pay more than $1 trillion in interest, and that will likely double in the next decade. In 2004, Bin Laden touted his strategy of "bleeding America to the point of victory," writing, "All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without achieving for it anything of note.”

Of late, America's "swirl of toxic policies and overreach has opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams" - the rise of a more deadly terrorist than any foreign threat or even Cheney, who deemed "quietly" waterboarding detainees "a no-brainer.” Trump, Putin's fragile, useful idiot, has "stepped into that slipstream of othering people" - Black president, Mexican "rapists," immigrant caravans, Democrats - unleashed by 9/11, and swiftly taken nearly 4,000 authoritarian actions, 1,050 undermining democracy: Over 940 silencing dissent, 650 destabilizing foreign policy, 600 gutting civil rights, 500 spewing misinformation, one biggie tryiing to kill us all with greenhouse gases, and now headlining the global erosion of democracy to render the U.S. "Patient Zero." "Bin Laden is long gone, but his spiritual successor remains ensconced in the White House," Turse darkly notes. "The Al Qaeda leader couldn’t have hoped for better."

At last week's 9/11 remembrance, several relatives of the dead spoke out against the same "sickening, unfathomable" othering, denouncing "using this tragedy to spread hate, which does no honor to the victims." Jonathan Larsen likewise urges we find hope in the "stories of what people did when faced with the prospect of horrific death, people who had to weigh that against their own humanity." Those stories offer "hopeful messages about America" because "they’re about humanity, a humanity 9/11 was engineered to make us forget." Our own "true instincts," he argues, are "of greatness, of self-sacrifice," demonstrating "that any of us, unburdened by stupid stories about who our fellow humans are, will help each other." 25 years later, "What we need to recover our forgotten better natures are better stories." May we tell them, and hear them above the unutterable carnage, and find solace going forward.

Update: Oh look! Over there! Another lying scumbag, another hapless scapegoat, another desperate, vengeful, shiny circus - "Operation Heartland Surge To Find New Imaginary Enemies" - to distract us from colossal crimes and failures. Huh.

ICE, born of Bush/Cheney's ill-conceived War on Terror, brought the war home to Chicago.Getty Images