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Planting a tree in the Amazon does a lot less for the rainforest than simply leaving one alone. That’s the uncomfortable arithmetic in new research on Brazil’s jungles.

Faced with a dollar to spend on the rainforest, scientists found, you’re almost always better off protecting what’s already standing than paying to regrow what’s gone. The gap isn’t small: preventing deforestation or stopping logging and fires delivered far more carbon storage and biodiversity than restoration did, for a fraction of the cost, according to new research in Science.

And while efforts to save rainforests often focus on halting the conversion to open land, it turns out squelching logging and fires could bring even more benefits for biodiversity.

“Protection must go beyond avoiding deforestation,” said Leonardo Miranda, the study’s lead author and a biodiversity researcher at the United Kingdom’s Lancaster University. “Avoiding forest disturbances from wildfires or logging delivered the greatest benefits for forest biodiversity.”

The insights are based on the fate of more than 3 million hectares of land across Santarém and Paragominas, areas in northern Brazil, between 2010 and 2020. Using satellite images to track the condition of the forests there down to the level roughly a square kilometer, the scientists found that during the decade, nearly 160,000 hectares were entirely deforested, 273,000 were either burned or logged, and almost 130,000 hectares regrew into forest.

What would have happened to the carbon and wildlife on that land if policies had prevented all deforestation, or all logging and wildfires, or if reforestation had sped up to hit established government targets? To compare those scenarios, the scientists built computer models showing alternate versions of the jungle in 2020. They then used detailed measurements of wildlife and carbon taken in 2010 at 381 locations scattered across the jungle to estimate how these different “2020” worlds would have affected biodiversity and carbon storage.

 

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The results showed the biggest benefits came from avoiding deforestation (61% more carbon and 24% more biodiversity compared to the real 2020) or preventing logging and fires (47% for carbon and 69% more biodiversity). Both far outranked the benefits of the newly regrown forest (15% more carbon and 7% more biodiversity).

The differences between deforestation and what the scientists called more subtle “disturbance” probably come down to the different dynamics influencing carbon and wildlife, and what patches of land were affected by each kind of forest damage. Full deforestation can wipe out much more of the carbon stored in trees and the forest floor, but it tends to occur at the edges of places that have already been cleared. Those areas already have less wildlife in them, so saving that land came with fewer biodiversity benefits, the scientists concluded. By contrast, even disturbed forest held onto more carbon. But wildfires and logging tended to hit more remote, intact forests filled with more wildlife.

Still, to increase both carbon and wildlife levels in the jungle it takes more than one strategy, the scientists found.  “Net-gains in biodiversity and carbon storage were only achieved” when both deforestation and disturbance were halted, said Miranda. “Combined interventions will be even more important as climate change progresses, especially as forest restoration can be particularly vulnerable to wildfires.”

In addition to being more effective, preventing forest loss is also cheaper. The researchers calculated the cost of each strategy, both in terms of money spent and lost opportunities, such as earnings from crops grown on former forests. For every Brazilian real (the country’s currency) it cost, the biodiversity and carbon benefits of regrowing forest were a tiny fraction of the gains from protecting existing forests.

In other words, it might be politically easier to replant abandoned pastures than to tell large companies and land speculators they can’t touch the forest, or to establish new fire-fighting programs. But economically and environmentally, it’s foolhardy.

“Investing in new forests makes little sense if, at the same time, we fail to protect existing forests,” said Joice Ferreira, a co-author and scientist at Embrapa, a Brazilian research organization. “Otherwise, we are pouring money into a leaky pot.”

Miranda, et. al. “Protecting tropical forests is more cost-effective for biodiversity and climate than restoration.” Science. Sept. 17, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Large-load tariffs and other measures to weed out speculative projects are taking shape. Public backlash to data centers, shifting state-level policies and the utility profit model are complicating those efforts, stakeholders say.

Council officers have allowed the access track to remain to the former Broadford Bridge oil exploration site in West Sussex.

Broadford Bridge access track

The site, near Billingshurst, has been suspended for about eight years. The operator, UK Energy Group plc (formerly UK Oil & Gas plc), is subject to official enforcement action to return the well pad to farmland.

But the track, originally constructed in about 2015, can remain, following a decision this week.

The planning permission was granted to Sheila Francis by county council officers on 21 September 2026 under delegated powers. It did not go to a planning committee meeting of councillors. Link to planning application

The approval allows retention of the 4.5m wide, 400m long track. It also permits the installation of two new 5-bar steel agricultural gates with Adversane Lane.

It requires the applicant to submit a landscaping plan within six months. This is expected to include belts of native shrub planning alongside parts of the track.

According to a report on the application, there were no objections from local councils. Three objections from members of the public focused on:

• Failure to adhere to previous commitments/planning requirements to restore the land following completion of temporary hydrocarbon exploration activities.
• No agricultural need demonstrated
• Impacts on historic landscape character
• Loss of agricultural land
• Loss of habitat and potential impacts on biodiversity

The report by planning officer, James Neave, said:

“it is considered that the development would support the needs of agriculture and would likely result in modest operational benefits to agricultural practices”.

The report also said:

“the proposed development would suitably integrate with its countryside setting and not give rise to any unacceptable landscape character or visual impacts.

“It is further considered that agricultural use of the track would be consistent with established farming activities and would not lead to any significant increase in the overall level of activity in the countryside.”

Planning breach

The Broadford Bridge exploration site, at Woodbarn Farm, has had no planning permission since March 2024 when West Sussex County Council refused an application for a fifth extension of consent. Before that, the site had been mothballed since 2018.

An operation to plug and abandon two Broadford Bridge wells ended in February 2026.

But the well pad, fencing, gates and soil bunds remain, despite a planning condition requiring the operator to return the site to farmland. West Sussex County Council took enforcement action in January 2025 and February 2026.

The officer’s report said:

“the main well pad and associated bund and fencing are in the process of being removed/the land resorted [restored] to agriculture.”

It added:

“The site is subject to live enforcement action (Breach of Condition Notices), that require the restoration of the site by the end of 2026.”

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

Giorgia Caruso always imagined her children one day inheriting the farm her family has tended for three generations.  

Her daughters would do more than produce organic meat and dairy. They would continue a way of life central to Piana degli Albanesi, a community founded 500 years ago by Albanian refugees fleeing the Ottoman conquest. Perched on a fertile plateau in the mountains south of Palermo, the town has long provided much of the wheat and dairy central to Sicily’s agricultural traditions. Caruso hoped to see her children carry those traditions on.

“I have two daughters I wished could take over our farming business one day, which is like our third child,” Caruso said with teary eyes as she tended the last of the family’s livestock. 

Now she’d like to see them build their lives somewhere safer. 

A flock of sheep graze in a vineyard near Piana degli Albanesi, Sicily, Italy, in October 2017. De Agostini Picture Library / Getty Images

One day in late July three years ago, flames as high as a three-story building engulfed the family’s fields and threatened their home. Caruso and her husband Vito lost several acres of land and almost two dozen sheep, making it difficult to imagine their daughters taking over a business that may no longer exist in a few years.

“Many times we’ve thought of resettling to a safer area, even abroad,” she said. “But it’s just so hard to pack up and leave our homeland.”

Caruso’s family is not alone in facing that decision. A growing number of residents are questioning whether they can continue working the land that has sustained the Arbëreshë, as Italy’s Albanian ethnic minority is known, for five centuries. 

Piana is subject to a microclimate marked by extremes even for the Mediterranean basin, which is warming 20 percent faster than the global average. Summertime temperatures have averaged 85 degrees Fahrenheit over the past decade, with little to no rain. Sicily accounts for nearly half of Italy’s wildfires, and blazes struck in or around Piana in four of the last six years, displacing more than 100 people in 2021 and damaging several homes this past summer.

Firefighting operations took place on the ground and from the air after a wildfire broke out in the town of Piana degli Albanesi, near the city of Palermo in Sicily, Italy, in August 2025. Alberto Lo Bianco / Anadolu via Getty Images​​

As farming — the town’s main source of income — grows more precarious, people are leaving. Piana has lost nearly 17 percent of its population since 2015. That is almost three times the rate of decline across Sicily as a whole, raising fears that climate change is accelerating the erosion of one of southern Europe’s oldest ethnic minority communities.

“If our lands burn, there are no jobs for us, no more homes,” Giovanni Scalora said in Italian. He is a fourth-generation Arbëreshë farmer who owns land overlooking a lake — once Sicily’s largest reservoir — that almost dried up in 2024. “It’s a pity because if we disappear a part of Sicily’s and Albania’s and Europe’s cultural history disappears.”

Arbëreshë elderly talk in front of a cafe before the Easter Sunday Holy Mass in April 2004 in Piana degli Albanesi, Sicily, Italy.
Marco Di Lauro / Getty Images

Piana degli Albanesi and much of Sicily’s interior have long been considered the island’s breadbasket. When the Arbëreshë settled there in the 15th century, they integrated through farm work. Beyond cultivating wheat and raising sheep and cattle, they specialized in making ricotta, a cheese used, among other things, as the filling in the globally-renowned Sicilian cannoli.  

“Legends say we invented it,” Scalora said of the pastry. Each May, the town hosts an international cannolo festival, and for many years those made in Piana have been deemed the best in all of Sicily. “But it’s hard to keep making it if there are no sheep left,” Scalora added.

A strong relationship with the land has shaped the community’s identity for generations, a bond that was tested long before climate change. In 1947, armed bandits killed 11 farmers and injured 30 others during a May Day celebration near the mountain pass of Portella della Ginestra. The massacre became an enduring symbol of the sacrifices Sicilians made for the right to work the land, and it shaped the spiritual connection the Arbëreshë have with it.

A photo from the 1950s shows a member of the Arbëreshë community with a donkey carrying hay. Mondadori via Getty Images

That link, however, is growing increasingly tenuous. An unprecedented drought has decimated fields and livestock across Sicily over the past five years. This summer, entire towns were left without running water or electricity for days as Europe endured one of its worst heat waves in decades. In extreme conditions, particularly when hot, dry scirocco winds blow in from Africa, temperatures can top 100 degrees Fahrenheit. On August 11, 2021, they reached a European record of 119.8 F, and the island is increasingly at risk of desertification.

“Extreme droughts as well as sudden, temporary extreme rainfall are severely damaging agricultural fields,” said Christian Mulder, an ecologist and professor at the University of Catania. “Climate [change] is aggravating the emptying of inner rural areas of the island and forcing emigration.”

The European Environment Agency reports that the impacts of a warming world are increasingly concentrated among already vulnerable groups, including ethnic minorities like the Arbëreshë — a point Mulder emphasized.

“Ancient populations, as well as ancient grains, are at risk of disappearing forever,” he said.

Piana degli Albanesi sits amid mountains and farmland in Sicily’s tranquil rural interior, about 40 miles south of bustling Palermo. Flanked by two smaller Arbëreshë towns, it is the social and cultural hub of the entire community.

Cobblestone alleys lead to the Church of San Giorgio Megalomartire, named for the town’s most revered saint. It is Piana’s North Star, a point of reference for locals and tourists alike. People have gathered there for centuries, most visibly during Easter Week, when residents past and present come together once again, and the town comes alive.

An Arbëreshë priest celebrates the Easter Sunday Holy Mass in April 2004 in Piana degli Albanesi, Sicily, Italy. Marco Di Lauro / Getty Images

When the celebrations end, the streets grow quiet once again. In Sheshi, Piana’s oldest neighborhood, colorful murals of Arbëreshë women in traditional attire offer a reminder of a vibrant culture that endures even as there are fewer people around to sustain it.

Piana’s population has fallen from 6,293 residents in 2015 to 5,245 in 2024, with some of the steepest losses coming in recent years. (The true number is almost certainly lower, because many Sicilian expatriates do not change their residency status.)  Although no data explicitly links the exodus to the changing conditions reshaping Sicily, residents say high unemployment and the resignation that has settled over the town are intertwined with the loss of farmland. Mulder believes what is unfolding there may represent the first case of climate migration leading to the potential loss of an entire ethnic minority in southern Europe.

Sicilian emigration from rural areas, often prompted by crushing poverty and political strife, dates to the late 19th century. Many sailed for the United States, including a small number of Arbëreshë who, attracted by the similar climate, settled in California. For some leaving Piana today, California remains a key destination.

Many of the people moving on are young, and their elders are coming to terms with the fact that they may be the last to work the land. “We adults don’t want to go away,” Caruso said. “But the new generation, the one of my daughters, I’m sure will not grow up here. I’ve told them, ‘America awaits you.’ I want a better life than this for them.”

Farms dot the landscape near Piana degli Albanesi, Sicily, Italy, in September 2015. DeAgostini / Getty Images

Those who choose to stay find hope in the possibility of adaptation. Scalora has seen members of his own family, mainly uncles and cousins, leave for the United States. But he is trying to find a way to remain, and has begun breeding cattle better suited to Sicily’s changing climate after failing to find a breed of sheep that can adapt as well. The tradeoff is that the ricotta Piana has made for centuries with sheep’s milk may one day have to be made with cow’s milk.

“Our cheese will not be the same, but one can leave, or adapt to survive,” he said.

Piana’s city council is trying to adapt, too. Rosario Petta, who has been mayor since 2022, has made slowing the exodus and preventing Piana from becoming a ghost town a goal of his administration.

“One thousand people who leave is an extra 1,000 people who will no longer speak Arbëresh, which can put at risk language and identity preservation,” he said.

Mayor Rosario Petta (on the right) sits in his office at one of the weekly city council’s meetings in Piana degli Albanesi. Courtesy of Rosario Petta

To counter the population loss and wildfires, which often start on abandoned land, Petta has strengthened collaboration with the local committee of the Civil Protection unit and encouraged more residents to volunteer in wildfire prevention to protect their land. But the town is also looking beyond agriculture.

“We are also trying to diversify our economic strategy by encouraging tourism,” Petta said. He is part of an international diaspora committee that is giving Piana opportunities to build ties with the United States, Albania and Kosovo, hoping their shared cultural connections will attract more visitors. Petta said Piana has seen an increase in tourists from the Balkans over the past three years, and he is now lobbying for direct flights between Palermo and Tirana.

But tourism presents its own challenges. Across Sicily, its growth has offered an alternative to agriculture even as development takes over farmland and increasing numbers of visitors place additional pressure on already strained water and energy supplies.

The San Nicola church or sanctuary, built by the Albanians in the 15th century, is the oldest church in Palazzo Adriano in western Sicily, Italy.
elifranssens / Getty Images

Not everyone believes adaptation is enough. Anna Liscari comes from a family of Arbëreshë tailors that has lived between California and Piana for the past 50 years. She permanently relocated to Newport Beach after developing what she called “a love-hate relationship” with Piana because it “seems to be stuck in time in the way it is managing its disappearance.”

Liscari has seen how Piana’s environmental challenges can ripple through the local economy and traditions. Her great-aunt once owned one of the town’s most famous bars, known for selling some of its best cannoli. She eventually closed the business after the organic suppliers she relied on shut down because of constant livestock and land losses to droughts and wildfires.

“We have survived wars, displacement, and poverty over the course of 500 years,” she said. “It’s crazy to think that climate and the inability to manage its effects is what might wipe us out,” Liscari said from her office in Newport Beach, where she works as a tourist agent for American tourists traveling to southern Italy.

The lake of Piana this past spring, after unusually heavier rainfalls in early 2026 briefly reinvigorated it, sits between mountain plateaus in the Palermo countryside. Stefania D’Ignoti

Whether that fate can be avoided depends on decisions made beyond Piana. Salvatore Cona, who leads Sicily’s Civil Protection Unit, said the Italian government must lead the response needed to develop an adaptation strategy that can prevent further population loss. Towns like Piana, he said, simply do not have the resources available at the national level and are, in practice, being left to find their own solutions.

Officials in Rome, however, maintain that the national government is providing resilience funding and that regional governments are responsible for tailoring the response to local needs. Sicilian officials say they lack the resources to meet the crisis.

Mulder argues that the island’s climate crisis has been aggravated by poor governance at both the regional and national level, worsening its effects. In 2023, wildfires scorched 142,150 acres across Sicily, while extreme heat caused more than 200 million euros in damage to agriculture and infrastructure. The following year, after prolonged drought depleted reservoirs and groundwater supplies, Rome declared a national state of emergency and initially allocated 20 million euros to mitigate water shortages. More national funding followed while Sicily committed 100 million euros to help farmers combat and prevent drought damage.

But adaptation is not simply a matter of resources. Like the Arbëreshë, many of Europe’s linguistic minorities live in rural regions particularly vulnerable to climate change. The European Environment Agency says vulnerable groups, including ethnic minorities, must be considered in adaptation planning to ensure their specific risks and needs are addressed.

Petta said that has not happened for his community, which he believes receives far less attention than other ethnolinguistic minorities in Italy.

Anthony Plescia remembers his elders speaking with great reverence about their ancestral home of Piana degli Albanesi, which they referred to fondly by its Arbëreshë name “Hora” even though most of them knew it only from stories told by their parents and grandparents.

Plescia, the president of the Arbëreshë of Sacramento association and a descendant of immigrants who left Piana more than 100 years ago to settle in that California city, grew up surrounded by such stories. 

“I also remember the large Arbëreshë picnics in McKinley Park and the strong sense of cultural pride that pervaded the events,” he said, referring to the park that has long been a gathering place for the Arbëreshë of Sacramento. “The picnics continue to this day, though many of the old family members are now gone.”

Anthony Plescia (on the right) poses next to a painting of a Sicilian chariot, one of the island’s most famous cultural symbols, at a gathering of the Arbereshe of Sacramento. community  Courtesy of Anthony Plescia

Several Arbëreshë families arrived in California as early as 1910. Many chose Southern California for its plentiful agricultural jobs and nascent wine industry; some even established wineries in Etiwanda and Rancho Cucamonga, continuing their heritage of tending the land. Others favored Northern California and the Central Valley, including Sacramento, because its climate and fertile land mirrored that of Sicily. Some of Plescia’s relatives worked in tomato canneries, while his great-grandfather eked out a living gathering corn husks and selling them to local tamale makers.

Language and culture can fade after families leave Piana, a loss that compounds across generations. Plescia was an adult before he learned of his Arbëreshë heritage; he grew up knowing only that his parents were from Sicily. Losing touch with one’s past is, he says, often the price of safety and stability. 

Still, he’s found that, nostalgia aside, he hasn’t met anyone who regrets coming to America, as it invariably improved their lives. Even though California also regularly endures devastating wildfires, Plescia believes it isn’t experiencing the same pressures he sees in Piana. He also believes the state and federal governments are taking the threat more seriously.

In October, Plescia traveled to Piana, where he met Petta. They agreed to explore creating a confederation of the Arbëresh organizations in the U.S. to establish a formal relationship with the town and strengthen cultural ties and exchanges between the communities.

As more young Arbëreshë leave Sicily, those ties could help preserve a culture that has survived so much over the past 500 years, even if fewer and fewer people remain in the town where it first took root.

Reporting for this story was supported by Journalismfund Europe, and is being published in conjunction with the online magazine Magma Magazine.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Sicilian community has endured for centuries. Can it survive a changing climate? on Sep 23, 2026.

Earlier this year, ocean conservation advocates celebrated what seemed like a major milestone: 10 percent of the Earth’s oceans had been officially designated as marine protected areas.

In theory, this meant that world leaders had successfully implemented varying degrees of fishing restrictions and regulations across a tenth of the oceans’ surface area in an attempt to reduce pressures on ecosystems and help them thrive. It also signaled progress toward a United Nations goal, known as 30×30, to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s land and ocean area by 2030.

But new research in the journal PNAS suggests that the 10 percent figure is misleading. It found that only a small fraction of implemented marine protected areas, or MPAs, are actually making a substantial difference for the ecosystems they’re supposed to protect — largely due to low compliance with fishing restrictions. Conservatively, the authors estimated that just 2 percent of the oceans are covered by MPAs where ecosystems are recovering.

The research raises questions about the broader 30×30 approach, which focuses on a protected area’s square mileage rather than their efficacy. The authors said there’s a need to think beyond area-based conservation metrics and consider what’s really happening to aquatic life.

“There’s this large disconnect between what we think is effectively protected globally, which is now 10 percent of the oceans, and what’s actually effectively conserving marine ecosystems underwater,” said Ella Clausius, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Tasmania and the lead author of the paper.

The conservation world’s focus on this approach emerged in the early 2000s. At a U.N. meeting in 2002, world leaders agreed to establish networks of MPAs, but without setting a target for how much ocean they should cover. Two years later, at a meeting of the Convention for Biological Diversity, the U.N.’s major treaty on protecting life on Earth, countries introduced a quantitative goal, formally agreeing to conserve “at least 10 percent of each of the world’s ecological regions,” in large part through protected areas. A subsequent meeting in 2010 updated the goal to protect 10 percent of the oceans specifically by 2020. When that goal was missed, 30×30 became its successor as part of a broader agreement called the Global Biodiversity Framework. 

Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow focusing on Indigenous-led conservation policy for the Center for American Progress, said the reason countries have rallied behind a quantitative, area-based target is straightforward: “It is easy to measure and communicate.” Scientists understood this simplicity to be critical for securing political support for conservation, and at the time this outweighed concerns that, for example, MPAs would be created in remote areas that didn’t have much biodiversity to begin with, or that governments would create “paper parks” without implemented conservation measures.

Fast-forward to today, however, and it’s worth asking whether the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on MPAs annually actually are helping marine life. Are these designations increasing fish populations? Or just the percentage of ocean area covered by them?

To answer this question, Clausius’ team created a pair of models. The first used real-world observational data from protected and unprotected shallow reefs to estimate the effects of several hundred protected areas on marine biomass. The researchers then linked those effects to four measurable characteristics of such locations — level of protection, compliance with fishing regulations, size, and age — and used those relationships to estimate conservation effects for the majority of the world’s MPAs that lack observational data.

Their results suggested that only a fifth of the area currently covered by MPAs is actually “ecologically effective,” which they defined as contributing to a doubling in fish biomass. This is partly because so few areas offer full protection from fishing, which scientists say is necessary to deliver the best conservation benefits, and partly due to poor management in other areas. Indeed, Clausius said violations of fishing restrictions are so widespread that it’s not uncommon to see compliance officers breaking the rules. They visit protected areas and then cast fishing lines off the back of their boats, she said. “They know they can get the big fish there.”

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Clausius and her team’s findings add weight to longstanding criticisms of the effectiveness and equity of 30×30, particularly its emphasis on the size of MPAs. Callum Roberts, a marine conservation professor at the University of Exeter in the U.K., offered two alternative metrics to focus on: Each area’s level of protection from fishing and other commercial activities, and its “stage of establishment,” ranging from proposed to actively managed. Another researcher, Bruce Mann, with the South African Association for Marine Biological Research, suggested a framework called NEOLI, which describes five characteristics of MPAs — “no-take, enforced, old, large, and isolated” — as appropriate indicators of MPA effectiveness. 

Of course, those are still just proxies for what conservationists ultimately want to measure: ecosystem health. But it’s hard to come up with a universal metric for this, according to Clausius, because ecosystems differ so dramatically and face different threats. Fish biomass might be appropriate for areas struggling with overfishing, but it wouldn’t be as useful a metric for MPAs primarily intended to protect against deep-sea mining.

Villagomez defended 30×30 as a useful political pledge. “It has elevated environmental protections to the highest levels of government around the world,” he said. “It’s unlocked millions of dollars of funding. Leaders of countries all around the world agree that we need more ocean conservation, better conservation, and that we need it faster than ever.”

But he agreed with other experts who argue that 30×30 has contributed to a problematic focus on the size of an area. One alternative he’s been developing for the U.S. would prioritize “beloved ecological areas and coastal habitats” in each of the 35 coastal or Great Lakes states and territories — areas that are close to where people live and recreate, in contrast to what he’s described as “large, distant, isolated protected areas.”

George Branch, an emeritus biology professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said the 30×30 target is “overambitious,” and that at this point it may be more helpful to improve the effectiveness of existing MPAs than to add more. 

Another reason to think beyond 30×30 is the need for better ocean management everywhere. “We can’t just do whatever we want in the other 70 percent of the oceans,” Clausius told Grist. In areas where total fishing bans aren’t appropriate, whether for cultural, subsistence, or commercial reasons, there are still ways to protect ecosystems from pollution and overexploitation, such as by setting science-based catch limits or restricting coastal development.

“It needs to be a global oceans picture,” Clausius added.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Marine protected areas aren’t as protected as you think on Sep 23, 2026.

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The post Other Features Offered by Togel123 Login Alternatif appeared first on HAMBACHFOREST.

Everything in the food system is interrelated, from agriculture to nutrition to medicine to climate. And among these institutions, farms are the connective tissue that binds them together, panelists said at Climate Week NYC. The way food is grown, raised, and produced shapes its nutritional value and, ultimately, its impact on eaters’ well-being.

Ranchers, chefs, scientists, business leaders, and health experts joined an engaged crowd for the Food Tank Summit “Nourishing the Future: How Farming Practices Shape the Food We Eat, the Health We Build, and the Longevity We Seek,” in partnership with Diestel Family Ranch.

Watch the livestream recording on Food Tank’s YouTube channel. 

“Everything starts in the soil; everything is grounded in the soil,” says Heidi Diestel, a 4th Generation Family Farmer at Diestel Family Ranch. “The family farmers are the ones who have figured out not just how to farm, innovate, and market the products, but help people understand the value (of healthy food).”

The connection between better farming practices and healthier food is not theoretical—it’s science. Everything from animal health to soil biology to regenerative production practices on the farm helps shape the nutritional value of crops that leave the farm, which in turn shapes public health outcomes and societal well-being.

“For regenerative agriculture…there is pretty good evidence that crops are more nutritious, and even livestock that are pasture-raised are more nutritious,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, Cardiologist, Public Health Expert, and Director of the Tufts Food is Medicine Institute. “We have to link agriculture to human health to human productivity.” 

As Paul Lightfoot, General Manager of Patagonia Provisions, said later in the Summit, we need to be engaging more in conversations about these nuances.

“Should we eat beef? That’s not the right question; not all beef is the same,” he says.

But understanding this reality relies on conducting—and communicating—strong research. For too long, Mozaffarian says, many of the most important nutrient markers were not the ones being measured. That’s changing now, thanks to large-scale efforts like the Periodic Table of Food Initiative (PTFI). 

“We now have the molecular tools to be able to profile foods beyond what’s conventionally on the back of the nutrition label…which allows us to elevate foods with nutrients that might not show up on a label,” says Nile Nair, Senior Program Manager for Health Science, Research, and Translation at PTFI. 

This also means strengthening local food systems that bring farmers as close as possible to the end consumer.

“Getting closer to the source oftentimes is the very beginning of the choice to having a whole food, not as much processing involved,” says Kate Fullam, Team Lead for Food Systems Resiliency at the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets. “Whose voice is not at the table yet that needs to be?”

Ann Marie Hourigan, Head of Quality Standards for Whole Foods Market, echoed this sentiment: “We need to invite farmers to the conversation and understand what their needs are,” she says. 

Engaging farmers could transform entire nations, as Chef Andrew Zimmern, a Television Host, Author, and Food Advocate, said in a special fireside chat.

In Zambia, for example, changing “what they’re farming can change the landscape of a country economically,” he says. 

At the same time, panelists said, creating stronger food systems also means engaging consumers—but effective ways to reach eaters are quickly changing, says Tambra Raye Stevenson, Founder of WANDA (Women Advancing Nutrition, Dietetics, and Agriculture). 

“We are at a state of food system illiteracy, not truly understanding the impact of what’s happening to our food system,” she says. “The media and algorithms (such as TikTok) are becoming the determinant of our health.”

Interestingly, consumer interest in high-quality food is increasing—but for personal wellness reasons, not necessarily for its impact on environmental well-being. That opens up a huge opportunity for advocates to help consumers understand these links between the health of our bodies and the health of the planet. 

“Consumers are sick and tired of being sick. They’re turning to food as health more and more,” says Kristine Root, Chief Strategist and Founder of Socha. “We’re seeing mass segments of consumers who care about food quality…but they need our help in communicating better.”

When we draw straight lines from farms to tables—and when we grow crops with sustainability in mind and feed our communities with care and love—the food we’re eating literally tastes better, panelists said. 

“We believe that food is medicine, and therefore we work hard to grow food, provide quality food to families, and for the past five years, we’ve charged no one anything,” says Elder Raymond Bryant, Presiding Elder of AME Church and Co-Founder of San Antonio Million Gardens Project. “If the food is not good, people are not going to eat it. It doesn’t matter how healthy it is.”

From a family farm perspective, this could not be more true.

“Stewardship goes beyond just what we do. It’s really about the legacy of food and being intentional about the food that we’re producing,” says Jason Diestel, Farmer at Diestel Family Ranch. “I wish more people understood that what we eat matters, what we feed the soil matters. It’s just one long chain.”

Explore the entire Food Tank event schedule during Climate Week NYC 2026, and live-stream every Summit on FoodTank.com and Food Tank’s YouTube channel.

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

Photo by Ryan Rose for Food Tank.

The post “It’s Just One Long Chain”: How Regenerative Farming Equals Tastier Food, Healthier Eaters, And Nourished Communities appeared first on Food Tank.

Look at the worst, most barrier-choked places for wheelchair users in your community, and you’ll likely find that they have something in common: they were all planned by 100-percent able-bodied teams, who don’t understand the real needs of people with mobility challenges. 

It’s not just about the disability realm. Planning history is littered with top-down, failed projects, where the majority imposed what it thought was best for the minority. And even if that majority was well-meaning, they got it wrong. 

That’s why experts like Charles T. Brown argue that planning teams must be led by firms that understand the unique and nuanced requirements of placemaking for all — or at least include key sub-consultants on their teams. And in an era when the very concepts of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are under fire in Washington and beyond, they say diverse hiring is even more important.

“Diverse firms often bring lived experiences, deep community relationship, and unique ways of seeing a problem,” added Brown, who is the Founder & CEO of the urban planning, public policy and research firm, Horizon 54, formerly called Equitable Cities. “Often, that leads us to ask questions or identify impacts that others may overlook.” 

Recommended ‘Whether They See It Or Not’: How the ‘Arrested Mobility’ of Black Americans Harms Everyone Kea Wilson May 28, 2025

Still, Brown and the other experts we interviewed for this story acknowledged that minority-owned firms face uniquely steep barriers today. Affirmative action programs were a required part of federal contracting for a half century, but President Trump signed an executive order revoking it as one of his first acts in office. The Trump administration also has banned federal contractors, subcontractors, and grant recipients from operating diversity, equity and inclusion programs of their own. 

The Ending Discrimination in Government Contracting Act introduced this April would enshrine that order into law, among other provisions to “stop federal agencies from violating the Constitution by awarding contracts based on recipients’ race or sex,” co-sponsor Sen. Glen Grothman (R – Wisc.) wrote. And several states are already undoing longstanding race- and gender-based set asides and requirements, even though the bill has yet to pass.

Minority industry leaders, though, emphasize that their community does bring unique value and results — no matter what Washington says. 

“It is not that large firms cannot do good work, because they often do,” Brown continued. “It is that perspective matters. Diverse firms do not just bring different faces to the table. We often bring different questions, experiences, and ways of understanding the people affected by the work.” 

“Why? Because we believe those closest to the problem are closest to the solution,” Brown continued.  

Planning 101 = Planning for Everyone

Experts Charnelle Hicks note that minority communities help foot the bill for public projects — even though hiring minority-led firms is the exception to rule. And that imbalance leads to unfair outcomes for travelers on the ground.

“In the public sector, taxes are paid by everyone – so you would think the plan would be for everyone, but we all know it doesn’t always turn out that way,” said Hicks, who serves as principal at Philadelphia-based CHPlanning.

Charnelle Hicks

If different people with different backgrounds are not considered from the beginning of the planning process, Hicks argues that projects will fail. 

“Whether the community is Amish or Muslim, unique perspectives exist,” she added. “You must think about [questions like,] ‘What are the things they care about?,’ and ask, ‘What are their priorities?’ At some point, we all will have disabilities. So we must design for accessibility.”

Hicks cited a plan for the Central Ohio Transit Authority that looked at sustainability not just in terms of the environment, but also in terms of how the transit system of greater Columbus, Ohio could be more inclusive.

The resulting plan didn’t simply look at sourcing environmentally friendly materials as part of the transit authority’s resilience effort. It also charted ways of sustaining economic justice by ensuring small, diverse businesses could become contractors for the transit agency, balancing social impact with economic growth. 

“Our only shareholders are the community,” she added. “[If the plan lacks an element of diversity, we need] to ask the question: ‘So you’re good with not including this consideration for the community?’” 

Nurturing home-grown growth

Cecilia V. Estolano has been working on redevelopment and economic development issues for over three decades. Her experience leading the Los Angeles-based Estolano Advisors has made her skeptical of strategies that call for luring large firms into a community with big subsidies and tax breaks without asking much in return.

Estolano said most consistent growth comes from home-grown small businesses. 

Cecilia V. Estolano

“This is how we build wealth in this country, particularly when so many folks are locked out of home ownership in high cost cities,” she added. “We need to invest in infrastructure because it is the foundation for our quality of life and for business growth. And we have to work directly with businesses to design workforce training programs tailored to their needs, but only if they can deliver jobs and careers that pay enough to support a family.”

To generate incremental, sustainable development, Estolano said cities often have to overcome cynicism and mistrust in working class communities of color — because those communities have been misled, disappointed and underestimated in past failed planning processes.

“We work closely with communities on changing the things that result from poor planning and poor policy,” she added. 

Estolano’s firm is currently leading the planning process for the future of a state-owned site in LA’s Crenshaw district that’s been shuttered for more than a decade. Served by light rail, it could be redeveloped with housing, job training and other community services.

“Our approach is, ‘how do you help people take back their power?’” she said. “How do you help communities to become places where they can actualize all their abilities? Diversity as a perspective makes our profession better.” 

When it comes to sustainability, Estolano emphasized that firms owned by people of color can frame issues of climate justice, pollution, the clean energy transition, and water quality in terms that reflect the direct experience of the communities that have been most impacted.

“We had our neighborhoods bulldozed to build freeways that caused more air pollution that seared our lungs,” she added. “We understand what it means to live within the evacuation zone of an oil refinery and can appreciate what clean cars and renewable energy can mean for our kids and their kids.”

Delivering healing to collective trauma — not just lip service

As Chief Executive Officer of the Los Angeles-based Thrivance Group, Dr. Destiny Thomas says equitable planning is about actions — not just words. Even when reports are couched in diverse language, she questions whether conventional planning is truly addressing the desires and needs of diverse people and communities.

“When I think about what sets so-called minority [firms] apart from others, I think about the process,” she added. “I think about opening the process, so diverse opinions are not just gathered but are a part of the plan and policy.” 

Thomas has developed what she calls “The Geography of Memory” framework, which examines how collective trauma becomes embedded in physical places and continues to shape mobility, public trust, redevelopment outcomes, and community interaction with the built environment. 

Dr. Destiny Thomas

The framework encourages agencies to map the location of police violence, highways that displaced neighborhoods, forced housing relocation, and neglected public infrastructure, among other public sites of trauma. She said when those areas are plotted and acknowledged, cities avoid “making investments that unintentionally reinforce harm.” 

Moreover, recognizing sites with negative history in a marginalized neighborhoods can help communities to move forward while shaping local trust in mobility, redevelopment and infrastructure projects.

“When you visit the street where Mike Brown was killed [in Ferguson, Missouri, or] when you visit the intersection where George Floyd was killed [in Minneapolis] – the places where their blood spilled out — it is very clear there is no process, tool, or policy that deals with the need to heal the land,” she said. 

Diversity in decision-making

Despite the current political climate, Brown emphasizes that his minority-owned firm is growing — and others can too. Because even if the rules change, his clients recognize the benefits of both his expertise and his lived experience. 

“There is a big difference between being on the team and having influence over the work,” said Brown, an award-winning transportation professional. “Too often, the minority firm is one of eight or nine subs, has a small scope, and has little say over the budget, methodology, or final recommendations. 

“Diversity at the bottom of the organizational chart is not the same as diversity in decision-making,” Brown continued. “Giving qualified, diverse firms opportunities to lead means they help shape the project from the beginning rather than simply being brought in to check a box.”

Transgender transit riders experience harassment far more often than their cisgender peers, according to a recent report. And that means public transit may be a major focal point of a larger anti-trans crisis — and that without intervention, ridership could take a hit.

Of the more than 350 trans and nonbinary riders surveyed by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, nearly 60 percent reported at least one instance of being targeted on a bus or train.

Even compared to other vulnerable groups, the rate is alarmingly high. A staggering one in four cisgender women who ride transit have experienced harassment onboard, but that’s still less than half the rate of their transgender peers.

Even so, the crisis is hardly noticed at all.

“We still know very little about the mobility experiences, challenges, and associated harassment faced by transgender people,” lead researcher Tam J. Guy wrote in the report.

Previous studies on gender-based harassment have exposed the treatment of women onboard transit, but fail to explore the unique experiences of trans and non-binary passengers.

Unsurprisingly, many of the survey’s respondents reported taking public transportation less than they wanted to — and fear of harassment played a major role in that decision. Nearly one in four respondents named it a primary reason, and slightly more said that fearing violence onboard altered their travel behaviors, even if doing so limited their mobility.

The researchers were careful to note that safety concerns weren’t the biggest reason why respondents shifted their travel behaviors. The lack of frequent, fast trains and buses often played a bigger role in motivating trans riders to take car trips instead.

Sometimes, though, slow service made experiences of harassment worse.

“Nothing makes you feel more like a sitting duck for harassment like being at the stop for 15 minutes waiting,” said Cedar, one of the trans respondents in the study.

Not all transgender riders are treated equal: the report notes that Black and women transgender individuals may be particularly vulnerable, due to the heightened levels of harassment against other groups that they identify with.

Guy emphasized that more research is necessary to draw definitive conclusions about the extent of the trans rider harassment crisis, the types of harassment experienced and what factors may heighten one’s risk of being targeted. That begins with changing how the issue is studied.

“Researchers need to change our approach to using gender assumptions,” they say in the report.

The alarming findings come as federal policymakers wage a war on minority Americans and transit.

Since the start of President Trump’s second term last January, the White House has pillaged federal funding for any research it says supports diversity, equity, and inclusion. One non-profit, the National Science Foundation, had more than 10,000 of its grants flagged for review, according to Nature. Any grant that includes a wide-range of common keywords — not limited to “gender”, “LGBT”, and “women” — appears to be flagged for cancellation.

Recommended San Francisco Advocates Document Harassment on Public Transit Indigo Rosenberg August 17, 2026

Even without federal support, public transit agencies and their riders can do more to promote safety for trans riders onboard.

Participants in the study named improved lighting at transit stops, real-time service information, and non-police station attendants amongst potentially helpful interventions. More than half of respondents stated that increasing police presence would not increase their feeling of safety.

“I can tell you that the answer is not more police,” said Nandina, one of the respondents.

Of course, transit is only one extension of the broader societal issue of anti-trans discrimination — even if transit reform can be the part of the solution, the report authors argue. Agencies can implement systemwide anti-harassment and education campaigns and train employees to intervene. Members of the public can challenge discriminatory treatment where they see it, too.

For public transit to become a safe, desirable alternative nationwide, the US needs a “general shift in the perception of trans people,” added Mahogany, a survey respondent. “The transit is fine. It’s the social aspect that’s scary.”

Activists Drop a banner at General Dynamics to protest the sale of weapons to Colombian death squads.(2001) Photo: Orin Langelle/GJEP

Tejiendo esperanza en tiempos de crisis: Informe de la 2.ª Asamblea General del Tejido Global de Alternativas THIS IS NOT YET PUBLIC, FOR INTERNAL REVIEW Introducción La segunda Asamblea presencial del Tejido Global de Alternativas () se llevó a cabo en Bandung, Indonesia, del 12 al 17 de abril de 2026, en las instalaciones de GTA

Serie de entrevistas realizadas durante la Asamblea de la GTA 2026 en Indonesia Franco Augusto y Shail Sathi llevaron a cabo estas conversaciones durante la «Confluencia Global sobre Democracia Radical, Autonomía y Autodeterminación (RaDASD)», del 11 al 17 de abril de 2026. Las grabaciones fueron producidas por Franco Augusto y ??, y editadas por Marco Andrade.<…

The head of the United Nations has called on all countries to deliver plans for phasing out their production and consumption of fossil fuels, as rising oil prices and climate shocks threaten energy and human security.

In his farewell speech to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York on Tuesday, outgoing UN Secretary-General António Guterres for the first time urged “every government to adopt a national plan to transition away from fossil fuels” aligned with limiting warming to 1.5C. The plans, he said, should include “clear timelines and protection for affected workers and communities”.

“We know fossil fuel interests won’t step aside on their own. For decades, Big Oil has treated the atmosphere as an open sewer – and cashed in on the consequences,” Guterres told diplomats in his speech opening the leaders’ segment of the assembly, also calling out the industry’s windfall profits after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Sep 22, 2026 News COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment Campaigners and experts say the goal’s effectiveness in reducing emissions may be limited unless countries agree to meet it using only clean energy Read more
• Sep 22, 2026 News Climate change and energy transition rise up national security agenda Leaders highlighted the national security risks posed by global warming and fossil fuel dependency at New York Climate Week Read more

At last year’s COP30 climate summit in Belém, a group of about 80 governments led a failed push to develop a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels. Brazil instead proposed to draft a voluntary report that will be presented this year ahead of COP31 after countries and organisations submitted their views to the process.

Governments first agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems at COP28 in Dubai in 2023, but have since failed to agree at UN climate talks on how to move forward with that commitment, as efforts to do so have been effectively blocked by large fossil fuel-producing countries.

France, Netherlands issue plans

A few countries have moved forward with their own transition plans. France launched the first one at an international conference on the issue in April and the Netherlands followed suit this month. Not being major fossil fuel producers, both European nations aim to end their coal, oil and gas consumption by 2050, although the Dutch plan was criticised for not setting specific phase-out dates for the dirty fuels.

Adão Soares Barbosa, climate ambassador from Timor-Leste and chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group in the UN climate negotiations, told a press briefing on Tuesday that last year’s discussions on shifting away from fossil fuels need to continue at COP31, adding that developed countries should lead the way with transition plans and curb their use of fossil fuels.

“We are expecting that we can make a request to major-emitting countries to limit emissions from this sector,” he said. “For LDCs, we’ll also try to reduce fossil fuel use, but it will depend on national circumstances.”

Samoa’s lead negotiator Anna Rasmussen said small island states have outlined their energy transition plans in their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – countries’ plans for meeting the Paris Agreement goals – but added “we’re still waiting” for climate finance to help implement those plans.

Despite the global push to clean up the energy mix, countries leading climate talks are themselves also expanding fossil fuel production. COP31 co-presidents Australia and Türkiye have both recently given the green light to mine and drill more coal, oil and gas, and still depend on fossil fuels for 60% and 56% of their electricity production respectively.

Fossil fuel expansion threatens COP31 hosts’ credibility, experts warn

COP30 host nation Brazil has also persisted with its plans to explore potential new oil reserves near the mouth of the Amazon River – a region known as the Equatorial Margin.

These are moving ahead despite President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announcing last year at the Belém climate summit that the country would develop its own fossil fuel phase-out plan. This is still under development with little information about its progress and may be hampered by elections next month.

“We have achieved our self sufficiency in oil and will continue to explore the potential of new reserves, such as those in the Equatorial Margin,” Lula said in his speech to the UNGA on Tuesday. “But we will not abandon the environmental agenda,” he insisted. “We will move forward with the roadmap for the decarbonisation of the Brazilian economy.”

Transition far cheaper than status quo

Speaking at the main Climate Week NYC venue, Mads Christensen, executive director of Greenpeace International, said given the fast-shifting cost dynamics for both fossil fuels and renewables, countries should revise their existing energy plans because they are now out of date.

Gas power generation now costs around 150 euros per megawatt compared with around 50 euros for solar with battery storage – making the latter two-thirds cheaper.

“If these plans were updated, I think we would have a much faster transition because it simply makes good financial sense,” he said.

A technician walks next to solar panels that partially provide electrical power to the Grand Mosque of Istiqlal in Jakarta, Indonesia (Photo: REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan) A technician walks next to solar panels that partially provide electrical power to the Grand Mosque of Istiqlal in Jakarta, Indonesia (Photo: REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan)

Tzeporah Berman, founder and chair of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, told Climate Home News that the Santa Marta process for transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF), launched at April’s conference, could help countries discuss, design and develop their national roadmaps, as well as mobilise the international cooperation required to actually deliver them.

“Many countries want not only national roadmaps but a global roadmap off the highway to hell,” she added. “A global plan is necessary to ensure the rules aren’t rigged against those who want to do the right thing and so all countries can make credible commitments.”

The second TAFF conference will be held in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu next spring, co-chaired by Ireland. In New York, Tuvalu’s climate minister Maina Vakafua Talia called for stepped-up efforts to tackle the fossil fuel use that is threatening his country’s “demise” by driving global warming.

“The world is running out of time, and so I ask every government to come to… Tuvalu with solutions – real solutions, not false solutions – for us to ensure that we have a pathway and a way forward,” he urged.

The post UN chief urges countries to adopt fossil fuel transition plans with timelines appeared first on Climate Home News.

Diesel prices have hit a record high nearly every day this month, with a national average on Tuesday at $6.52 a gallon, according to AAA. That is driving a growing call to combat this climb by banning the export of the fuel, a move President Donald Trump endorsed today.

“I’ve said, Let’s not send out the diesel,” Trump said from the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. As to a ban, “I’ve called for it. I’ve called for it within my people.”

Although relatively few Americans fill their cars with diesel, it’s a backbone of the U.S. economy. It powers the trucks, ships, and trains that move goods across the country, and it is used throughout the agricultural sector. That means everyone is feeling the effect of fuel prices that have climbed almost 80 percent since the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran earlier this year. They have risen almost $1 per gallon in September alone. 

The war brought ship traffic to a standstill in the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a tenth of the world’s water-borne diesel flows. Ukrainian strikes on Russia have further curbed the global flow, leaving other countries to make up the difference, especially the United States.

During the week of September 11, the U.S. produced over 5 million barrels of distillate fuels per day and sent about 1.6 million of them abroad, according to U.S. Energy Information data. At the same time, domestic oil reserves have fallen to their lowest levels since 1982. This has led some lawmakers to recently urge Trump to curb diesel exports and direct production toward U.S. consumers.

“If our govt can embargo chips to China it can embargo diesel to help American farmers & truckers,” wrote Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, on X. Representative Ashley Hinson, also a Republican from Iowa, posted Monday: “Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran.” Senate majority leader John Thune of South Dakota has expressed interest as well. “If that would take pressure off of prices,” he said, “I’m open to exploring it.”

An online dashboard that has been tracking the impact of rising diesel prices since the war started shows that the ongoing increase has cost American households nearly $400 each — or more than $51 billion overall. Jeff Colgan, a Brown University political scientist who helped build the tracker, explained that banning exports would boost the supply and therefore lower the price. 

“It could make a huge difference,” he said, though others disagree. Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy, wrote on X, “U.S. diesel prices are determined not by a U.S. supply and demand balance, but a global one. Keeping distillates and diesel home does not change the world price.”

The idea isn’t new. In 1975, after OPEC stopped shipping oil to the U.S., Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which included what ended up being an effective ban on crude oil exports. It continued until President Barack Obama lifted it four decades later. Since then, oil companies have made billions exporting their products and oppose reviving any limits on where they can sell them. 

Read Next What the record-high cost of diesel means for you Tik Root

The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers association has said that such a ban would make the problem worse. “Export bans do not create more fuel for Americans,” the organization wrote in a press release. “They reduce U.S. fuel production, put upward pressure on prices, weaken energy security and hand market share to foreign competitors.”

Some Republicans, including within the administration, also expressed concern about a ban. Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, which is the country’s biggest oil-producing state, told The Hill that a ban would be a “gimmick.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told CNBC that “it could actually hurt Americans.

Democrats have in the past called for export bans on oil products, including earlier this year and in 2021 when President Joe Biden was in office. So far they have been largely quiet on the diesel debate. “Trump is all smoke and mirrors,” said Senator Peter Welch of Vermont when Grist asked about the export ban. “If he’s serious about lowering prices of oil, gas, and home heating oil, he needs to end his illegal war with Iran.”

Before the president offered his thoughts on a ban, a White House official told Grist that the administration was not considering an export ban. It’s unclear if President Trump’s statements change that and how he might advance the issue — or whether Congress can build bipartisan will for legislation. But regardless, Tyson Slocum, the energy program director at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, would like to see a more nuanced discussion of the way forward. 

“The debate is so absurdly simplistic. People are like, either total unfettered, unregulated exports, or zero exports,” he said. There are many options in between, he added, including how much diesel gets shipped overseas rather than cutting off that supply entirely. 

“It could be very significant,” he said of even partial measures. “You would absolutely see a significant short-term drop in diesel prices.”

Correction: This story originally misstated Senator Chuck Grassley’s party affiliation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is backing a diesel export ban. How much would that do? on Sep 22, 2026.

The Alameda Labor Council and 19 local unions were among the leadership of this campaign to keep coal out of the East Bay ten years ago.

Today, we need even more labor presence in this campaign.

Let me tell you five reasons why.

1) As you can see from this map, people of all classes would be hit by the toxic coal. But working-class communities would suffer the most. Workers are more than their jobs. They are parents whose children will be poisoned by coal. They are neighbors who will inhale toxic air and watch the people next door fall ill.

2) Our detractors tell us we have to choose between jobs and the climate, and we therefore must accept the consequences. But this terminal will create at most thousands of unhealthy, short-term jobs and a hundred permanent jobs in toxic workplaces. Some of our laboring brothers and sisters say, “Short-term unhealthy jobs are better than no jobs.” We hear them, we empathize with them, and therefore we are saying:

3) This is a “Yes to Healthy, Unionized Jobs” campaign as much as a No Coal campaign. Our coalition has been championing the redevelopment of the old Oakland Army Base, but in a way that will foster permanent, socially responsible employment. It is therefore crucial that many more unions and laborers join us because we can’t get that kind of development unless there is a mass movement of workers that puts pressure on local, state, and national governments to generate good jobs. This builds up to my next point:

4) The people who are behind this terminal – Trump and his oligarchs – are the same kind of people who bust unions throughout the country. They are also the ones who prevent any kind of legislation that would generate renewable energy jobs. In the last couple of years, bills that could have produced literally millions of green jobs in the US (with a heavy concentration in California) were killed due to their opposition. In other words, they are giving us (at best) thousands of unhealthy, short-term jobs with one hand, while they are taking away potentially millions of healthy, permanent jobs with their other hand.

5) This fight is also a matter of labor pride. The bosses want to build this terminal not just for the cash, which might be their primary motive, but also as an act of class vengeance. They always tell us that without them labor would be nothing. They create the jobs and they pay the wages, we are told. But the labor leadership in this campaign has shown that labor can coalesce with social movements and environmental justice communities to make big things happen. Whenever bosses see that kind of action, they are afraid for their fundamental privileges. That kind of victory shows that a world without oligarchs, a world where labor and communities self-consciously produce and control value, is possible. And therefore, they want to crush any living trace of such victories. Our win in 2016 is a cherished jewel of working-class memory. Ceding this turf to the oligarchs would mean abandoning our belief in a different world as much as abandoning our health and dignity.

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Cihan Tuğal is a sociology professor at UC Berkeley and an organizer in East Bay DSA’s Climate Action Committee. He studies social movements, populism, capitalism, democracy, and religion and has a forthcoming book from Stanford University Press entitled The Social Roots of Autocratic Resilience. This piece is based on remarks Cihan made at the community rally of September 15, 2026, outside the Berkeley City Council meeting that adopted a resolution opposing the proposed Oakland coal depot. Photo credit: Leon Kunstenaar

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Photo at top: Labor delegation led by Alameda Labor Council leader Josie Camacho speaks out against coal at Oakland City Council meeting in 2015 | Credit: Brooke Anderson

There aren’t very many Marxists around today who would defend central planning as practiced in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s through the 1980s. But there are many who still think some form of central planning is essential to socialism. Marxist Sociology Professor, Catalyst editor and podcaster Vivek Chibber isn’t one of them. In an aptly titled  recent interview, “Socialism Has a Future. Central Planning Doesn’t”, he explained his position.

Chibber’s critique is based on the top-down, bureaucratic planning as it was practiced in the Soviet Union. As he notes, aside from its clones in Eastern Europe, North Korea, and, for a time China, there is no other actual existing model of central planning to examine. His argument is complex but boils down to the proposition that in an economy of any significant size where there is no market there are simply too many materials, inputs, and products for any commission or central authority to allocate efficiently. Only a competitive market could do this, according to Chibber. Hence misallocation, breakdowns, waste, poor products, wrong incentives, and the inevitable accumulation of these  problems lead to a crisis of the system. No doubt this pretty much describes what actually happened in the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Chibber argues that these are unavoidable features of any centrally planned economy. Before we accept this, and with it the notion that only “market socialism” provides a workable model for the future socialist society we seek, we need to look more closely into the Soviet model and the society in which it played out. What is most glaringly absent in Chibber’s general description of the Russian model is the social reality of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s to the bitter end—above all the question of social class. This is all the more remarkable because Chibber is an ardent advocate of the almost exclusive centrality of “class analysis” when it comes to contemporary politics.

Socialism is the rule of the working class. Planning is an instrument of the democratic workers’ state for organizing production for human need under its collective political and social rule and the transition to a classless society. While the Soviet Union promoted itself as socialist and in the transition to a classless society, it was anything but. It was, in fact, a highly stratified and bureaucratized society.

Socialism is the rule of the working class. Planning is an instrument of the democratic workers’ state for organizing production for human need under its collective political and social rule…While the Soviet Union promoted itself as socialist and in the transition to a classless society…It was, in fact, a highly stratified and bureaucratized society.

By the late 1930s anti-Stalinist Marxists began to question whether the USSR was still any sort of workers’ state, degenerated, deformed or otherwise. Many, mostly in the Trotskyist tradition, though not Trotsky himself, concluded that since there was no longer even a shred of workers’ democracy or the right to dissent, to organize for change, or form independent unions, much less to exert influence on the state’s economic priorities, that the bureaucracy that controlled the state was in fact a new ruling class. This bureaucracy controlled the means of production and collectively hired and directed the Soviet workforce.  Some called it state capitalism (C.L.R. James, Tony Cliff) some bureaucratic collectivist or state collectivist (Joseph Carter, Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, Big Flame).nd Like good Marxists, they fiercely debated these differences, but all saw Russia and its offsprings as class societies.

This had enormous implications. For one, this new ruling class won and maintained its class position and power through the most ruthless means. Workers’ democracy was suppressed, no party other than the ruling Communist Party was permitted, no factions within the party were allowed, no free press, or rights to assembly, no independent unions. The potential penalty for active dissent was forced labor, the Gulag, or the firing squad. It was, in a real sense, a totalitarian society.

Chibber admits its “authoritarian” nature made things worse but insists it was not a basic cause, which was the lack of competition. In contrast, as Hal Draper wrote when the Soviet Union was at the peak of its power and influence in the early 1950s:

The Stalinist state has an economic plan. Like everything else in this totalitarian structure, it is a plan devised, imposed and enforced from above, bureaucratically. But no bureaucratic commission can itself plan such a labyrinth of social processes. Such a plan must be constantly checked from below, corrected from below; it must depend on initiative and responsibility below; it must be self-correcting through the give-and-take of democratic planning between the lower and upper echelons on every level.

And these were just what it lacked. Note that Draper wasn’t just talking about the millions of materials to be allocated to thousands of enterprises but the social processes between the various levels of planning: the central commission (GOSPLAN), regional commissions, industry, enterprise, the people who ran or worked for them, and the role of the party at every point. Of course, there was feed-back between various levels, but as Chibber points out almost everyone lied about shortages, resources, profits, etc. It wasn’t lack of competition that led to misallocations and lies, it was the repressive state, and the culture of the society as a whole, in which failure or criticism were seen as “sabotage” with serious punishment possible. This was combined, as we shall see below, with the conflicting interests of the different layers of Soviet society. Debates over inefficiencies and reforms such as those Chibber mentions took place within the central party bureaucracy aided by loyal academics and technocrats. The workers had no say in any of it.

Trotsky recognized this in 1932, at the end of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan:

The only prerogative which [the bureaucracy] ultimately left to the workers was the right to exceed production limits. Any attempt to influence economic management from below is immediately described as a right or a left deviation, that is, practically made a capital offence. The bureaucratic upper crust in the last analysis, has pronounced itself infallible in the sphere of socialist planning…. Thus the basic mechanism of socialist construction—the adaptable and elastic system of Soviet democracy—was liquidated [Emphasis in original.]

Before going further into the implications of Stalinist society’s class structure, it is necessary to look more closely at how the planning system worked.

Things, prices, money and conflicting class interests

The Five Year Plan began with a census of production and materials based on information from existing workplaces.1This description of the planning system is taken mainly from George Gary, Money, Financial Flows, and Credit in the Soviet Union, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, 1977 and Ernest Mandel, The Soviet Economic Reforms and Yugoslav Experience, October 1968, Marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/mandel/1968/10/ref-yugo.html ; Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, London: Merlin Press, 1971, pp. 248-604. Although it was based on actual material things, the planners did not attempt to allocate each and every item to a workplace or enterprise. Allocation was done with prices and money. Each item, whether raw materials, machinery, parts, energy, etc. was given a price based on cost plus an average profit. These were not market prices, however, since they were seldom adjusted for changes in demand or technology. Nevertheless, they served to aggregate and direct millions of items. Aggregates were adjusted at the regional and industry level. To meet the planned targets, enterprises purchased their inputs from one another up and down their supply chains at the assigned prices.

While the state allocated resources for new investment, the national, regional, and industry planning centers did not distribute physical items themselves but tracked them in monetary terms. Targets (often missed) were adjusted annually. The principle of management bonuses tied to profitability of enterprises as an incentive to reduce costs was introduced as early as 1935, while the so-called Liberman reforms of the 1960s made enterprise profits the measure of performance. Each enterprise had a line of credit and could take loans from the State Bank in order to expand and/or adjust for shortages or bottlenecks. Some enterprises were even shaped by U.S. industry. As Victor Reuther recounts from his time in Russia, Ford engineers helped shape the giant Gorky Car works along the lines of Ford’s River Rouge complex, using the latest technology, while other U.S. giants such as General Electric, RCA, DuPont, and Westinghouse concluded technical and trade agreements with the Soviet government in the early 1930s.2Victor Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW/ A Memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976, pp. 90-93. Stalin, apparently, was not averse to new capitalist technology. Western inputs, though marginal, continued during the war with the lend lease program and afterward under “turnkey” projects such as a Fiat built auto plant in the 1960s. In the early days of the Soviet Union, workers often pushed themselves to help make targets, but that did not last as living standards stagnated and party-led management did the pushing.

There were various contradictions in this system. One lay in the conflicting interests between the enterprise managers and their workers, with managers receiving as much as four times the incomes of workers via bonuses. Another was that between the enterprises (and hence workers) and the bureaucratic state ruling class. According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, cited above, to sustain and expand the state, on which the power and higher standard of living of the ruling class rested, 90 percent of state budget receipts were obtained from these enterprises.3Gary, p. 86. There was also a sales tax on consumer goods and some capital items, known as a “turnover” tax which was a form of regressive taxation.

But it was the expropriation of the profits from the enterprises -profits which came from the exploitation of the workers – that funded the state and its bureaucracy. The state budget grew by four times from 1950 to 1971, even as the economy slowed down. While Soviet enterprises could not go bankrupt, they were under pressure and incentivised via manager bonuses to produce increased surpluses to fund the state’s growth. This meant that enterprise managers were encouraged both to push the workers to create more profit, leading to poor working conditions, and to hoard resources in order to meet performance and bonus targets. Hence there were incentives for managers to both lie about their enterprises and to misallocate resources.

The contradictions in the Stalinist system of planning were most thoroughly analyzed in the mid-1960s by Polish Marxists Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski (henceforth K&M), who spent a number of years in prison for their efforts.4Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, (henceforth K&M) “ An Open Letter to the Party”, an International  Socialism Publication, 1968; also in New Politics, vol. 5, nos. 2 & 3, 1967.   In their view “the central political bureaucracy is the ruling class” by virtue of its “exclusive command” of the means of production and the fact that “it buys the labor of the working class” collectively appropriates the surplus produced by the workers  “in order to strengthen and expand its rule over production and society.” As we saw above, the central political bureaucracy rules collectively on the basis of the surplus it extracts from the workers in the enterprises that fund the power of the state.  In practice this meant the expansion of what K&M call Department A, the production of the means of production at the expense of Department B, the production of consumer goods, a distinction similar to Marx’s division between Department I and Department II developed in volume II of Capital.

Evidence of this is that both Western and Soviet estimates for the relative growth of capital (K) and labor (L) inputs for the 1950s and 1960s show that capital inputs grew between seven  and nine times more than that of labor inputs over that period.5Martin L. Weitzman, Soviet Economic Growth and Capital-Labor Substitution,  The American Economic Review, Vol. 60, No. 4, September 1970, p. 677. Figures taken from Soviet sources also show that the growth rate of “Output of Production Means (Group A)” increased faster than that for “Output of Consumer Goods (Group B)” almost every year throughout the 1950s, 1960, and 1970s. Only as Soviet rulers desperately tried to curry favor with the workers, as the system’s crisis increased in the late 1980s, did consumer goods output grow slightly faster as the regime approached collapse.6Soviet History Archive (marxist.org), Annual Growth Rates in the Soviet Union, 1941-1989, https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/economics/statistics/growth-rates.htm#1950s

As Chibber pointed out, the state provided or subsidized some aspects of working-class subsistence—healthcare, basic education, and to some extent childcare and housing. The overall living standards rose from the still largely peasant economy of the 1920s to an industrial economy of the post-war period. But for the working class living standards grew relatively slowly,well behind that in Western industrial countries and that of the bureaucracy and the new ruling class—as Russian workers could plainly see. The provision of most consumer goods, and hence worker living standards, depended on their production in Department B and that was seen by the bureaucracy as a cost that undermined the production of the means of production that allowed for the growth of the economy, the state, and the international and domestic power of the central political bureaucracy. This included not only capital goods and raw materials, but the nation’s massive military. It also underlies the bureaucracy’s penchant for huge infrastructure projects, many of which were famously wasteful or never completed: highways that ended in the middle of nowhere, bridges that failed to cross the river, and so on. Despite the outcome, the larger the project, the more income and influence for the planners and managers. This meant a perpetual constraint on the growth of the living standards of the working-class majority. Increases in effort or nominal wages made no difference since consumer production in Department B remained relatively limited and store shelves empty.

But it also meant an increasing disproportion, indeed a contradiction, between the growing means of production and relatively slower output for consumption, that led to overproduction and underutilization of the means of production and hence waste and the crisis of slower growth. As K&M put it, “The common cause of the non-utilization of productive capacity and of accumulation of unneeded reserves is the general inadaptation of production to needs (emphasis in original)” As they summarized it: “it is a contradiction between class goals of production and consumption, and it results from existing conditions, not from mismanagement.” On the basis of this contradiction, even in the mid-1960s over two decades before the collapse of the system, K&M predicted the crisis. They wrote of this disproportion.: “Without eliminating it, without changing the goal of production and the conditions of production as a whole, it will be impossible to overcome the ever growing crisis.”7K&M, p. 34.

Banned from striking or organizing genuine unions, fighting politically, or in any way influencing the functioning of the enterprise, much less the direction of resources under Stalinist planning, the working classes of Russia and its associated Eastern European nations turned to their weapon of last resort—the withdrawal of cooperation and efficiency. That is, the withholding of effort and the tacit skills and knowledge production workers everywhere possess. Those are the skills and knowhow that Frederick Taylor attempted to shift from the workers to management by breaking down tasks and offering incentives, that Elton Mayo and the human relations school sought to manipulate with changes in lighting and other conditions, and that lean production’s “constant improvement” (Kaizen) through teamwork tried to extract from the workers.8For Taylor and Mayo see Gerard Hanlon, The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of Management Theory, New York: Routledge, 2016; for lean production, Sungur Savran, Lean Production and Flexibility: The Highest Stage of Taylorism, in Sungar Savran and E. Ahmet Tonak (eds.), In the Tracks of Marx’s Capital: Debates in Marxian Political Economy and Lessons for 21st Century Capitalism, Cham Switzerland: palgrave macmillan, pp. 265-316. Those skills and knowledge, along with extra effort,  were withheld from the planners, bureaucrats, and managers of Stalinist central planning. As K&M point out, “The worker tries to lower efficiency and hides the reserves in his sector to delay the changes in norms; he makes a product of inferior quality in order to meet the norms more easily.”9K&M, p. 33.

Another form of worker dissatisfaction and/or resistance in the Soviet Union was the relatively high rate of labor turnover. In theory, the Soviet Union maintained full employment at all times. In reality, there was significant labor turnover due largely to job dissatisfaction.  Measured as only voluntary quits and firings in official figures (yes, workers could be fired) from 1950 to 1970, turnover in industry averaged 20 percent, while in construction it ran in the mid-30s. Workers left jobs due to poor working conditions or to seek higher wages elsewhere. This turnover was cited by Soviet sources as one of the causes of low productivity.  This figure did not include workers assigned to other jobs or regions by the state, those who left to care for children, enrollment in studies, etc. Total “separations” were much higher.10David E. Powell, Labor Turnover in the Soviet Union, Slavic Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, January 1977, pp. 268-285.

The consequence of these forms of resistance was an ever-decreasing rate of productivity, along with poor quality, and missed goals throughout the system that undermined planning targets, delivery of materials, the profits meant to measure performance, and innovation, further creating shortages and other problems. This most basic resistance was expressed in the well-known Russian workers’ joke of the 1960s through the 1980s, that “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” In other words, it wasn’t just (or even) the lack of market competition that led to inefficiency and crisis, but the suppression of democratic norms, on the one hand, and the stagnation of working-class living standards that resulted from the bureaucracy’s production goals, on the other.

It wasn’t just (or even) the lack of market competition that led to inefficiency and crisis, but the suppression of democratic norms, on the one hand, and the stagnation of working-class living standards that resulted from the bureaucracy’s production goals, on the other.

The irony here is that in the Stalinist system, the workers and public in general were paid in money and bought consumer goods with that money—like a market—but at the planners’ prices and within the constraints of Department B production. This led K&M to argue at one point that the market for needs should determine the output of consumer production. One might interpret this as advocating market socialism before the idea was common or simply that the goals of planning needed to begin with an assessment of production for needs as K&M did. In no way did they reject central planning. In their view, a democratic workers’ state “will set goals of social production, decide on the sharing and use of the national income, hence define the size and purpose of investments, the size and disbursement of expenditures for social benefits, health services, education, science and culture, the amount for the power apparatus and its current tasks.” Since such decisions “can only be made centrally” this requires a fully democratic multi-party system with workers councils and independent unions.11K&M, pp. 60-63. That is, central planning by the workers’ democratic state.

Certainly, in a workers’ democracy that must support any version of socialism in which workers possess the freedom and rights to organize economically and politically, complain, suggest, and produce for need rather than the priorities of an exploiting upper class, they will be motivated to use their skills and knowledge in the cooperative and collective pursuit of raising the living standards of the masses with whom they live and work. Workers will have a direct interest in pointing out the inefficiencies, blockages, and problems that will arise with central planning and have the power to correct them over time. They will be able to innovate for their own advancement. Few of those socialists who give thought to these questions imagine that democratic planning will emerge overnight in one stroke or reject out of hand that elements of the market might play a role in the transition to socialist planning. But to rule out central (or decentralized) planning altogether is to throw out the socialist baby with the Stalinist bathwater.

Market Socialism: An Oxymoron?

In another interview published in Jacobin, Chibber lays out his arguments for what he sees as the only viable alternative to a planned economy: market socialism. His vision of this, as yet untried, version of socialism is one in which enterprises are state- or worker-owned, hence no capitalists, the market distributes resources, and an elaborate welfare state provides a decent standard of living and safety net for all, including the inevitable losers in market competition. Rather than attempting to pick apart Chibber’s description of and detailed arguments for market socialism, I want to put some admittedly rhetorical questions to Chibber or any defenders of this version of socialism.

Chibber’s basic argument for market socialism as opposed to a planned economy goes like this:

This is the key thing, and the reason you want market socialism. The biggest failure of the planned economies was the inability to innovate, and the absence of innovation, efficiency, dynamism. The whole motivation to move toward a market socialist model is to give managers of firms, producers, an incentive to consistently innovate. And that incentive comes from competition.

That is quite an assumption-loaded statement about the incentives for socialism, not to mention about human nature or desires. Is it really true that only competition can spur innovation? Isn’t the whole economically competitive ethos of capitalism and, indeed, capitalism itself, an historically specific and limited development? In fact, isn’t it mainly the capitalists and their hangers-on who are so economically competitive? On the other hand, isn’t it the case that workers given the opportunity to form unions in their defense will struggle, as J.R. Commons put it, “to take labor out of competition.” Doesn’t even our weak labor movement attempt to lessen competition through collective organization (i.e., cooperation), bargaining, and regulatory legislation to limit capital’s competitive drive?

Chibber’s abstract version of competition with its price signals overlooks the fact that competition between firms is in reality a battle over market share in which innovation is a means to that end. If this is a real market and not just something like the Soviet “market reforms” there will be winners and losers with real consequences. As Braverman, Noble, and others have argued, technological innovation is never socially neutral.12Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York: Monthly Review Peress, 1998; David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Would technological innovation for production for need be the same as that for increased market share?  Why would socialists want state or worker owned enterprises (and hence their workers) to fight one another over market share rather than working cooperatively through mutually agreed local and national plans to increase production for need. Capital pits workers in competition with one another—individual v. individual, black v. white, men v. women, citizen v. immigrant, firm v. firm—in order to keep wages down, effort up, the competition down, market share up, and capital accumulating. Why would worker-owned enterprises want to follow that pattern?  After all, struggle and the process of fighting for change transforms people and their values.

Why would socialists want state or worker owned enterprises (and hence their workers) to fight one another over market share rather than working cooperatively through mutually agreed local and national plans to increase production for need. Capital pits workers in competition with one another…Why would worker-owned enterprises want to follow that pattern?

Why would workers in their millions organize, struggle, sacrifice, and endanger their lives and livelihoods to get rid of the capitalist bosses just to create state or cooperatively owned businesses that compete to survive, because—advanced welfare state or not—that’s what economic competition is about as even Chibber admits at one point. Not to mention the periodic crises that competition generates. Around a million business establishments in the U.S. go under in normal years, more during recessions.13BLS, Table 3, Number of private sector establishments by direction of employment, by establishment age, 5/22/26, www.bls.gov/bdm/us_age_naics_00_table3_txt Why wouldn’t they fail under market socialism? Why wouldn’t competition under market socialism lead to pressures for work intensification in order to survive? Might workers not worry that competition would, once again, lead to pressure to contain consumption rather than increase it and increase effort rather than reducing it?

Couldn’t it be, instead, that workers, inventors, technicians, computer wizards, etc. would cooperatively innovate in production in order to lighten the workload, shorten work time, raise the standard of living and the culture of society as a whole domestically and internationally, and, indeed, to save the planet and future generations?  That instead of hoarding innovations through “proprietary” knowledge and technology, to get the upper hand in competition as competing firms do, they would share it through planning? Couldn’t it be that the incentive to collectively improve both work and life would prove as strong or stronger a motivation to innovate—this time in their own interest—than competition? Why assume that only competition and profits will motivate people to seek innovations in shifting to production for need?  Couldn’t it be that the solution to efficiency and innovation lies not in competition, but above all in worker initiative spurred by the goal of a better life and a safer world and the experience of beginning to actually achieve both? Would workers really organize collectively and fight against great odds only to compete? Isn’t our goal the cooperative commonwealth?

No transition to socialism, no expropriation of the expropriators, without a rupture

Here I have to admit that my optimistic view of worker initiative stems in part from my years at Labor Notes seeing how workers we knew understood how production and competition actually worked and why collective action was their best defense. It also comes from my visit to Portugal in the mid-1970s during its revolution. There the young officer core of the military sided with, and indeed helped lead, the revolution that overthrew the fascist government so that capital was unable to mount a violent counter revolution. When the workers moved to seize the plants and other workplaces, most of the bosses and owners fled the country. The police and army stayed in their stations and barracks. The trams and trains ran for free, run and maintained by their workers. The lights stayed on. Our small group of ISers visited several worker-run facilities, but the most impressive was the giant shipyard at Lisbon.

A shipyard is a complex of factories producing parts for the huge assembly facilities on the river. It involves almost every skill any manufacturing firm would need. We met with the elected workers’ committee running the whole shipyard which was composed of workers from several political tendencies or parties,as well as non-affiliated workers. The old management personnel stayed meekly in their offices and played no role in production or discipline. The trade unions, some of whose leaders we also met with, functioned to defend workers when necessary and process grievances. Members of the elected managing committee abided by the “a partido” ethic whereby no one spoke for their tendency and all worked together cooperatively to manage the shipyard. Imagine that, socialists of different stripes working together! Of course, outside the workplace the parties competed for supporters as you would in a democracy. But, again, the struggle for a better life changes people.

They explained the process of production and when asked how they could run such a complex operation, one replied something like—we’ve always run it. The cafeteria was flush with free food and wine. Well, it was Portugal. This was procured by barter from farmers for whom the yard’s machinists made farm equipment parts and other tools in return for the food and wine. No market there. Needed inputs came from other worker-run factories and energy from worker-controlled utilities. Not sure how they were paid for.  The biggest problem was that global capital was boycotting this and other worker-controlled firms and contracts were becoming scarce. International capital saw a precedent it didn’t like and acted to stop it. Tragically, the counter revolution, although relatively bloodless, was not far off as the Socialist Party and Communist Party made their peace with capital and its acceptably non-fascist politicians. None of the so-called socialist countries offered aid or contracts to these enterprises either, no doubt as workers’ control was as much anathema to them as to their capitalist rivals. The Portuguese workers didn’t have the opportunity to initiate planning above the enterprise level or rudimentary barter, but they did show the instincts and ability to turn to collective and cooperative production.

Remember, Chibber sees no capitalists in the market socialist economy. As he explains,14Chibber, How Socialism.

That means you’re not going to have privately owned means of production. Either you’re going to have the state owning the means of production at the national level; or you’re going to have an economy of workers’ cooperatives, in which there is no capitalist class that owns things but workers themselves have property rights.

“No capitalist class.” The expropriators are expropriated. But where did the capitalists go? Why did they go? Unlike in Portugal in the mid-1970s it is unlikely that the superrich U.S. capitalists would just pack up and leave. I checked Chibber’s manifesto, “Our Road to Power” written in 2017 to see what he said about transition. There was a lot in there about political and worker organization I agreed with (a mass cadre party with internal democracy, a certain level of discipline, rooted in the working class). But he also wrote, “Our strategic perspective has to downplay the centrality of a revolutionary rupture and navigate a more gradualist approach.”15Vivek Chibber, “Our Road to Power,” Jacobin, December 5, 2017, https://jacobin.com/2017/12/our-road-to-power “Strategic perspective”?! No matter how much one might wish to downplay rupture or attempt to move gradually, given their numbers, incredible wealth, the owners of capital in the U.S. will certainly see their impending or unfolding expropriation as a rupture of historic proportions. As, indeed, it would be. Much greater in scale and impact than the Russian Revolution no matter how it was done. It is inconceivable, given their legions of paid dependents, friends in politics and the military, their wealth, etc. that U.S. capitalists would simply surrender all of that without a vicious fight of some sort—even if, let’s imagine, a DSA-backed majority in Congress passed a law (gradually?) nationalizing their property and President Ocasio-Cortez signed the bill. I looked at the highlighted reference to “transition” in the text of the piece on market socialism, but it only led to an article about how social democracy had gone from a revolutionary movement to a reformist one as revolution ceased to be a foreseeable possibility. Hmm?

Is that really something new? Eduard Bernstein, a leading theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), laid the basis of modern social democratic reformism in 1899, a decade or so before one of the biggest revolutionary upsurges in European history. He argued capitalism had stabilized and revolution was off the agenda. Then came 1905, 1917, 1918, etc. Despite his famous statement that the final goal was “nothing” and the movement “everything”, Bernstein denied abandoning socialism altogether but instead downplayed a “catastrophic” revolutionary transition (rupture?) in favor of the gradual accumulation of reforms and the movement’s strength, what was called at the time “revisionism.”. In his 1909 preface to the famous Evolutionary Socialism (bad translation of his title), he insisted, “the book can, all in all, be regarded as an exposition of the theoretical and political tendencies of the German social democratic revisionists.”16Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, New York: Schocken Books, 1961, pp. viii   The revisionists would become the majority of the party’s leadership and parliamentary delegations. The leadership of the SPD consciously derailed the 1918 German revolution in which the workers initially seized production and set up workers’ councils.17Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, pp.129-283.

The problem is, as the history of German social democracy demonstrates, if you abandon the idea of a rupture, and simply embrace gradualism you necessarily give up the final goal: socialism of any kind in practice. As German (French, etc.) social democracy did well before the neoliberal era. 18See, for example, Hal Draper, The New Social Democratic Reformism, in Hal Draper, Socialism From Below, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019, pp. 97-114.See, for example, Hal Draper, The New Social Democratic Reformism, in Hal Draper, Socialism From Below, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019, pp. 97-114. There is no way to eliminate the capitalist class as a class without an historic social/political rupture. A world without capitalists is a qualitatively different one. You can, at least theoretically, do it by legislation rather than direct worker confiscation. You can go after the biggest ones first and work your way down the economic ladder, but it is still a rupture—and that is not a matter of semantics but of social reality. So, if you “downplay rupture”, what you are left with is a gradualism that has no way to achieve the expropriation of the expropriators. No doubt, Chibber would like to see the expropriators expropriated in order to achieve worker- or state-owned enterprises in market socialism. But he seems to have excluded any actual means of accomplishing that.

The history of German social democracy demonstrates, if you abandon the idea of a rupture, and simply embrace gradualism you necessarily give up the final goal: socialism of any kind in practice…There is no way to eliminate the capitalist class as a class without an historic social/political rupture. A world without capitalists is a qualitatively different one. …So, if you “downplay rupture”, what you are left with is a gradualism that has no way to achieve the expropriation of the expropriators.

What about the Meidner Plan? The last refuge of gradualists, Sweden’s Meidner Plan came as close as one could to a non-rupture model of the transition to a version of market socialism.19I have mainly used this highly favorable account of the Meidner Plan: Joe Guinan, Socialising capital: Looking Back on the Meidner Plan, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/37368092/Socializing_capital_Looking_back_on_the_Meidner_Plan. Formulated fifty years ago, hence its current semi-centennial celebration as a panacea, by (German-born) Swedish trade union economist Rudolph Meidner, the plan proposed that each enterprise over a certain size annually issue new shares reflecting “excess profits” that would go into “wage-earner funds” that were to be governed by union officials. Its dividends were mostly to go to social projects such as worker education. The idea was that as profits grew, the number and proportion of the fund-based shares would grow. Hence, in theory at least, eventual worker-ownership under union control would result. Investment decisions, however, were left to management, not the wage-earner fund. Meidner estimated that for a highly profitable company like Volvo it would take 20 years for the wage-earner-fund to own a majority of company shares (52%)—longer for other companies. For the funds to control almost all shares (97%) it would take 100 years—and that’s for a highly profitable firm. The capitalists would be squeezed into a tiny minority of owners. Gradualism at its most glacial.

In addition, since the shares were based on increased “excess” profits it meant the workers would be encouraged to work harder and longer and/or reduce the workforce via new technology to get to socialism. Class struggle to increase worker income or improve conditions would in practice reduce profits and hence the number of shares sent to the wage-earner fund, thus lengthening the road to ownership. The incentive was for unions to minimize conflict.  Nevertheless, due to strong employer opposition and the retreat of the Social Democrats, the plan was drastically watered-down when implemented in 1984. Share ownership by the funds was controlled by government officials with some employee representatives. Wage-earner fund shares in any one company were limited to eight percent. After seven years the funds controlled only 3.5 percent of the total value of all Swedish company shares. It was a flop and further opposition from capital and its conservative government killed it in 1992.

While in its original form it might appear to have passed the non-rupture test, its dilution and eventual death, in fact, underline the basic reason why there is no transition to socialism, no expropriation of the expropriators, without a rupture: the systemically-rooted dialectic of class conflict for survival. No matter how polite or gradualist the proposed transition, the capitalist class will recognize it as a threat and will not sit still for its own demise. In Sweden the threat was minimal and this was all quite peaceful. In Russia, Germany (ask Rosa), Chile, etc. not so peaceful. Any proposed “Road to Power” that fails to take that into account is a path to defeat or worse. There is no socialism without a rupture.

The major difference between revolutionary socialists and reformists or gradualists, of course, is not about whether you fight for reforms over time. Revolutionary socialists have always fought for reforms often alongside classic reformists and liberals. Nor is it a matter of revolutionary fantasies or impatience.  It is about that big step, that rupture, the expropriation of the expropriators, no matter how it’s accomplished, without which the final goal is inconceivable.

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: Dunk; modified by Tempest.

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COP31’s flagship initiative to accelerate the electrification of the world’s economy has been criticised for failing to include a commitment to produce the power from clean energy. 

Governments that sign the voluntary pledge at this year’s UN climate summit will commit to increasing electricity’s share of total energy consumption to 35% globally by 2035 in line “with pathways consistent with keeping 1.5C alive”, the text unveiled by the Turkish presidency on Tuesday says. 

While the document says that the electrification goal is “complementary to efforts to expand renewable energy and improve energy efficiency”, governments are not explicitly asked to commit to producing the extra power with clean sources and driving down greenhouse gas emissions. 

The text instead says the “use of clean electricity” will vary according to national circumstances. Fossil fuels are not mentioned by name, although the pledge cites the COP28 Global Stocktake decision, which called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels” in energy systems.

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COP31 president Murat Kurum said earlier this month that the push to make electrification more “widespread” – through measures like the rollout of electric vehicles and heat pumps –  will “automatically” lead to a reduction in the use of fossil fuels. 

But many campaigners disagree, criticising the proposed pledge for failing to give an explicit signal on the fossil fuel transition. 

Lack of clarity on energy sources

“Let’s not let electrification become the Trojan horse of our times, used to hide new fossil fuel consumption rather than promote renewable energy,” Claire Smith from civil society umbrella group Beyond Fossil Fuels said in reaction to the pledge’s publication. 

She added that the commitment will only help address the climate crisis if electrification is powered by a flexible energy system where solar and wind are complemented by enhanced grids and storage. 

The pledge’s text says that the electricity goal should be supported by “diverse and sustainable energy sources”, but it stops short of explaining what these sources are. 

Alden Meyer, an international climate policy expert and senior associate at think-tank E3G, said the details of the pledge matter to how effective it will be in helping bring planet-heating emissions down.

“It has to be clean, and we haven’t got enough clarity on a guarantee that it will be a decarbonisation move,” he told Climate Home News.

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

According to an annual electricity review from energy think-tank Ember, in 2025 renewables edged ahead of coal power for the first time in 100 years. Continued growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global electricity generation to just under 34%, compared with coal at 33%, it said.

Janet Milongo, energy Transition lead at CAN International, said success cannot be measured simply by how much of the world’s final energy consumption becomes electric. 

“We must ask what generates that electricity, who has access to it, who owns the infrastructure, and whether it is helping communities transition away from fossil fuels,” she added. 

Electrification alone can’t meet climate goals

Analysis published by the IEA on Tuesday, alongside the pledge, found that it would already be cost-effective to raise electricity’s share of global energy use from 23% today to around 33% with existing technologies, putting the COP31 goal “within striking distance”. Based on current policies, however, the share reaches only about 30% by 2035.

Hitting the 35% target would cut fossil fuel importers’ import bills by around $400 billion a year by 2035, the IEA said. At the higher prices caused by the conflict in the Middle East, that saving rises to more than $500 billion.

Speaking at New York Climate Week on Tuesday, IEA executive director Fatih Birol said the agency’s figures show that in 2026, about 80% of all new power plants built will run on renewables, with a few percentage points coming from nuclear power and the rest from fossils fuels. “So therefore, electrification itself will lead reduction of the [greenhouse gas] emissions,” he added.

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol speaks at Climate Week NYC on September 22, 2026 (Photo: Megan Rowling / Climate Home News) IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol speaks at Climate Week NYC on September 22, 2026 (Photo: Megan Rowling / Climate Home News)

However, the IEA warned in its new report that electrification “by itself is not enough” to meet the world’s climate targets. It noted that, if “low-emission” sources of power continue to simply grow in line with current policy scenarios, that would be only just enough to cover the extra demand from electrification, driving a modest decline in emissions.

Matt Webb, associate director of global clean power diplomacy at E3G, said the pledge is a “welcome signal of leadership” and can help COP31 be a “critical moment” for countries to double down on the energy commitments made at COP28.

But to secure the full benefits of electrification, he added, it is essential that we “urgently clean up” by speeding up the rollout of renewables and developing credible national plans to transition away from fossil fuels.

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A newly-announced goal would decimate Montana’s wolf population.