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A new book by former civil servant Nicholas Enrich offers an insider’s account of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—and the steps he took to speak out against the destruction.

During the early months of the Trump-Vance Administration, USAID was the target of funding freezes, program cancellations, staff layoffs, and more. Federal officials said they were “clearing significant waste, before the agency officially shuttered in July 2025. But Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID paints a different picture. 

“The agency was dismantled, not because it was wasteful, not because it wasn’t working or inefficient or to better align foreign aid with the President’s agenda,” Enrich tells Food Tank. “It was demolished by a group of uninformed and unqualified sycophants who were working to satisfy the ego of the world’s richest man.” He says he needed to write this book to set the record straight and explain what really happened.

Enrich worked at USAID under four administrations, most recently serving as Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health. Like any institution, there were ways that USAID could operate more productively, he believed. And before officials from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived, he optimistically prepared a list of ways he thought he could be helpful.

But within a couple of weeks, it was obvious to Enrich that DOGE wasn’t interested in making the agency operate better. The tipping point, he says, is when Elon Musk posted on X in early February that the government had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” 

Just a day before, Musk also called the agency “a criminal organization”—a statement that Enrich says was painful to hear. “I thought there was a certain valor in dedicating your career to public service,” he tells Food Tank. “You felt like this is a country that you want to make better, that you’re willing to make that sacrifice….It was a calling.” 

After this, Enrich watched with alarm as life-saving aid was eliminated. Programs to tackle infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria and support maternal and child health were canceled overnight.

“I think people have been focusing a lot on the impacts that have already happened, and they have been enormous,” Enrich says. But it’s the impact on future generations that “really keeps me up at night.” 

Enrich and colleagues began to document what was happening, which he compiled into three memos. The first tracked every effort he and others made to re-start the agency’s work and the roadblocks they encountered at every step of the way. The second focused on the destruction of the workforce “that made it impossible to do our work even if we had been allowed to,” Enrich says. The third highlighted the extent of the damage, based on modeling and projections from technical experts. 

Enrich knew that distributing these memos publicly would cost him his job, but by that time DOGE was terminating contracts needed to continue USAID’s work. “Once it became clear that’s where we stood, I realized that I was not going to be able to fix this from within,” Enrich tells Food Tank. “And my silence, if I continued, would really be complicity.” 

Listen to the full conversation with Nicholas Enrich on Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg to hear more about what made USAID so vulnerable, the impact of the agency’s closure on local communities, and the advice he gives to anyone in a situation like his.

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

Photo courtesy of U.S. Embassy Apia, Samoa

The post What Really Happened to USAID? A Former Civil Servant Tells All appeared first on Food Tank.

“Tonight, the municipality of Jerusalem and the Israeli Building Center are hosting a discriminatory event in which they plan to sell stolen Palestinian land, open to Jews only. This event is illegal under international law and has no place in New York City.

“Right now, Palestinians across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are being expelled from their homes through a coordinated campaign of state policy and settler violence. In East Jerusalem, families are being harassed and attacked while the developers hosting this event build luxury developments available to Jews only.

“The municipality of Jerusalem is directly involved in imposing and administering discriminatory apartheid policies, and should not be hosted anywhere in the city.

“As Jewish New Yorkers, we condemn the sale of stolen Palestinian land and we condemn racist housing practices that discriminate based on race, religion, and national origin. New Yorkers know the importance of fair housing practices and reject these racist events. We, along with Palestinian New Yorkers, know that apartheid practices have no place in New York City.”

Background
Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion

The Mayor of Jerusalem will be in attendance at today’s event. He has publicly stated his intention to oversee the construction of at least 100,000 new housing units in Jerusalem, as part of a “Judaisation plan” for Jerusalem.

Illegal annexation in the West Bank

Israel is illegally annexing the West Bank at an unprecedented rate, resulting in over 50 attacks of settler violence and displacing nearly 1,700 Palestinians in the first three months of 2026 alone. The number of Palestinians displaced in early 2026 surpasses the total displaced in all of 2025. Land sales in New York City further contribute to this annexation.

This week on Talking Headways, Jaime Benevides and Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou of Brown University discuss their new paper showing how community severance by road infrastructure and traffic has led to more mental health-related hospital visits in New York City.

We talk about the role of roads cutting people off from social connections and how impacts of roads on mental health were separated out from air quality.

There are three ways of following the conversation: The audio player embedded below; a full transcript generated by artificial intelligence; and further down this page, a partial, human-edited transcript.

Jeff Wood: I think it’s so interesting that you all kind of lasered in on that specific idea of, like, traffic severance or transportation severance because you mentioned, the research and the findings are independent of the traffic-related air pollution, which has been shown to have impacts on things like Alzheimer’s and dementia and other brain health things.

I wonder what made you look past the air quality impacts and laser in on this specific thing that was the traffic and the connections that people are severed from.

Jamie Benavides: On one side, we have scientific evidence on space used in a way that benefits social cohesion and also exercise, and also that this green space benefits mental health as well. You know, like things like parks or green space. But we don’t have awareness or understanding of what happens on the other side of the range of how we use the space in the city, right?

Like, there is a lack of understanding of if we occupy all that open space with, again, huge volumes moving very fast of these machines, is that good or bad for our mental health? So yeah, it was, as Marianthi said, from my perspective at least, looking beyond air pollution and imagining if the city will have still the same levels of noise and air pollution but had another use of space, would it be more healthy or not?

Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou: Exactly. I think it was similar for me. I’ve been working on quantifying air pollution effects on adverse health outcomes, including depression, Alzheimer’s, all of the above. And I started getting a little bit antsy and frustrated that, okay, we’ve characterized this impact, but two things: One, and so what?

We don’t necessarily see the regulations following in the rate that I would have wanted to protect human health. And so how can we then figure out modifiable, intervenable pathways so communities can protect their residents? And the urban form is one such intervenable pathway. That’s part of it.

The other big part of it is, okay, as we are electrifying our fleet, I will keep saying that the cons of car dependency are not only noise and air pollution, it’s lack of physical activity, it’s lack of social cohesion and in-person social cohesion.

It’s very interesting. We were talking with a colleague of ours who’s from Texas, and Jaime and I both grew up in Europe in very dense, not car-oriented societies, or not so much at least, and our colleague from Texas was saying, “But it’s so easy. I get into my car, in 10 minutes I can go and see my brother. What are you talking about isolation?”

And so that’s a disconnect there because, okay, you are more connected to a family member, but you’re not necessarily connected to our neighbors. Neither of us lives in New York anymore, but we used to live [there] and I did not know any of my neighbors in the buildings I was living in. Maybe that’s on me. But, I think that’s a general trend, right? We don’t know our immediate community, and there’s so much work on the benefits of both physical activity. Even if I have to walk for five minutes to go get a bus, that’s five minutes more than, you know, garage door and driving, right, door to door.

If you have the plaza, as Jaime said, you go there, you interact with the people more. People check in on you. So that’s beyond just removing the air pollution from the equation. There are so many other benefits from reshaping our immediate environment outside of the house to help us build healthier lives that I think we haven’t looked as much, or at least in environmental epidemiology, other fields probably have, but as much into.

Jeff Wood: There was an interesting part of this as well, is like how you split out the air quality impact, which was like looking at black carbon data. And I’m curious about that data, like what that is and how that impacted the ability to split out the traffic impacts versus the air quality impacts.

Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou: So when we started talking, when Jaime came up with the idea of looking at community severance and mental health and came to me and said, “I want to do this,” and we had the hospitalization data for mental health, my main concern was exactly because of the very big literature on the air pollution impacts on mental health.

My concern was, okay, but if we publish this as is, everybody will just say, “Okay, then it’s just all through air pollution.” Obviously, what you’re capturing is air pollution, so we wanted to see, is it all air pollution, or if we could somehow block the air pollution effect, do we still see impacts? So we used black carbon predictions. Black carbon is a combustion byproduct that is usually associated with traffic in urban cores. And New York City has an amazing program, NYCAS, that has multiple rotating monitoring sites. The number of monitoring sites varies from year. I think it goes from 60-something to 100-something. But they rotate these, and they then integrate these with land use data and traffic data and all other kinds of data to build these pretty high resolution, 300 meter predicted annual surfaces for different pollutants. Black carbon is one of them. And so we then included black carbon in our model, hoping to block the path from community severance to mental health from air pollution. So we said, okay, if we compare now two communities to zip code levels that have the same air pollution, but different community severance, do we see differences in mental health outcomes?

And indeed, what we saw was, as expected, once we added air pollution into the model, our effect estimates attenuated a little bit, became somewhat smaller in magnitude. But importantly, they didn’t completely disappear, which does mean that, yes, air pollution explains some of the effects that we saw, but not everything.

So community severance doesn’t solely act through air pollution to induce the increased rates in mental health hospitalizations that we saw. And I keep saying mental health hospitalizations. We examined multiple causes, but our biggest finding was on schizophrenia hospitalizations, actually.

So it’s not all of it through air pollution, but there are some other pathways, we don’t know exactly how yet, that’s to be, you know, next studies, future studies, but that not through air pollution, that community severance results in higher rates for these mental health hospitalization rates.

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The power gap left hyperscalers with no alternative but to take on utility-scale obligations and lock up gigawatts of generation, writes Peak Nano CMO Shaun Walsh.

The order shifts more infrastructure costs and interconnection obligations to hyperscale customers while positioning Oregon’s 2025 POWER Act as an early test of how states manage AI-driven load growth.

The state senator also objects to the merger itself, calling it “extremely concerning” in an environment of “rising utility bills and unprecedented grid expansion costs driven largely by hyperscale data center growth.”

LONDON — Members of the Samoan and Pacific Islander community and environmental advocates protested outside Coca-Cola Europacific Partners’ (CCEP) annual general meeting Thursday, calling on the company to reduce single-use plastic and bring back reusable packaging systems. CCEP is Coca-Cola’s largest bottler by revenue. Headquartered in London, it produces, sells, and distributes the company’s products across 31 global markets, including Western Europe, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.

At the cultural protest, members from the London School of Hula and ‘Ori performed traditional Samoan song and dance, including "Lo ta nu’u," and presented a performance titled "O le vasa, we are the ocean," highlighting the connection between Pacific Island communities and the ocean.

Advocates delivered a symbolic "message in a bottle," which included a letter signed by Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa / Samoa Conservation Society, Samoa Recycling and Waste Management Association (SRWMA), Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN), the London School of Hula and ‘Ori, Break Free From Plastic (BFFP), and Oceana, placed inside a single-use plastic Coca-Cola bottle from Samoa. The letter, addressed to CCEP’s CEO Damian Gammell, highlights the company’s increased use of single-use plastic bottles, its effects on the oceans and Samoan communities, and how the company can help solve this problem.

In 2021, in Samoa, Coca-Cola stopped bottling its products in reusable glass bottles. Now CCEP imports large quantities of single-use plastic bottles from Fiji and New Zealand. The shift to imported plastic bottles has contributed to rising waste, much of which is littered, burned, or landfilled due to limited recycling capacity. Reportedly, imports of plastic bottles more than doubled between 2020 and 2025, and Coca-Cola products account for about one-third of beverage bottle waste in the country.

"We encourage Coca-Cola to be on the right side of history by moving back to reusable bottles, like glass, in Samoa and becoming a leader in the transition away from plastics. As one of the most recognizable global brands, we believe that Coca-Cola can be a game changer in the fight against plastics, should they choose to prioritize planet over profits, " said James Atherton of the Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa (Samoa Conservation Society).

“Given the limited capacity for plastic recycling in Samoa, most of the waste ends up being littered, illegally dumped, incinerated, or landfilled. For those of us in Samoa, we witness the consequences of your business decisions every day. On our land, across our beaches, and in our waters,” the groups wrote in the letter. 

"Plastic pollution and the climate crisis share the same fossil fuel origin, and Pacific Island communities bear a disproportionate share of both. The science is sobering: microplastics have been documented in 97% of fish species sampled across our ocean region — nearly 50% above the global average — yet CCEP's PET use in the Asia-Pacific outpaces its own global share. Reinstating refillable systems in Samoa is not a favour to the Pacific; it is the evidence-based, climate-consistent decision a company of CCEP's scale is well-positioned to make," said Rufino Varea, Director, Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN).

CCEP continues to sell single-use plastic in Samoa despite growing global concern over the plastic pollution crisis in the ocean and its likely impacts on human health. This trend is not unique to Samoa — according to an analysis by Oceana of CCEP’s reported data, between 2020 and 2025, the company’s global use of PET plastic packaging increased by over two-thirds from 198 to 335 thousand metric tons.

On the occasion of CCEP’s annual general meeting, the groups are calling on Coca-Cola and CCEP to transition back to reusable packaging, reduce single-use plastic, and invest in waste management solutions in affected communities.

“Performed in Sāmoa and London by members from across Pacific communities, this Sāmoan hymn and Sāsā reflects the pride we hold in our cultures and ways of life, our gratitude for the Earth and Oceans that sustain us, and the unity that binds us in protecting these things for generations to come,” said Krysten Resnick, Founder and Director of the London School of Hula and ‘Ori.

“Coca-Cola and CCEP have an opportunity in Samoa to right a wrong by bringing back reusable glass bottles and eliminating their plastic bottle waste. Reuse is the right choice for supporting healthy communities and protecting our oceans,” said Dr. Dana Miller, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives for Oceana. 

“Coca-Cola has been the world's worst plastic polluter six years running, accounting for at least 11% of all branded plastic waste found in the environment. And yet, rather than scaling up the reusable glass bottle systems that reduce single-use plastic, the company is phasing them out in places like Samoa. This company has the solution and all the know-how to make it work. Instead, it is actively choosing a path that generates more pollution - to the detriment of the communities and ecosystems left to deal with its waste. Coca-Cola must bring back reusable glass, urgently and at scale,” said Emma Priestland, Global Corporate Campaigns Coordinator for #BreakFreeFromPlastic

To read the full letter to CCEP, click here. 

Photos are available here.

###

Additional Background: 

• The protest and letter come amid growing global scrutiny of Coca-Cola’s sustainability practices. A peer-reviewed study in the journal Science found that Coca-Cola was the number one polluter of branded plastic found in the environment.
• Despite its rapidly growing plastic footprint, the company abandoned its goal to increase reusable packaging in December 2024.
• In 2025, Oceana released a report that projects The Coca-Cola Company’s plastic use will exceed 9.1 billion pounds (4.1 million metric tons) per year by 2030 if the company does not change its practices. This would be nearly a 40% increase over the company’s reported plastic use in 2018 and a 20% increase over the company’s most recently reported plastic use in 2023, which was already enough plastic to circle the Earth more than 100 times.
• The report also estimates that up to 1.3 billion pounds (602,000 metric tons) of the plastic packaging that Coca-Cola uses annually by 2030 would enter the world’s waterways and oceans if the company continues on its current course. This amount of plastic could fill the stomachs of over 18 million blue whales. 
• The Oceana report also found that Coca-Cola could reduce its annual plastic use below current levels if it were to reach 26.4% reusable packaging by 2030.
• In December 2021, the Samoa Conservation Society delivered a petition to Coca-Cola South Pacific asking the company to resume glass bottling in the country.

About the Sosaiete Faasao o Samoa:

Sosaiete Faasao O Samoa / The Samoa Conservation Society is a Samoan non-governmental organisation dedicated to promoting the conservation of Samoa’s natural heritage and helping the public reduce their environmental impacts and develop greener lifestyles. We work collaboratively with communities, the Government and NGO partners to raise awareness on the state of, and threats to, Samoa’s environment and biodiversity. We also teach the public and youth groups about our natural heritage and the practical actions we can take to promote species and ecosystem conservation and to reduce our environmental footprint.

About PICAN:

The Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN) is a regional alliance of civil society organisations working on climate change in the Pacific region. Since 2013, it has brought together civil society actors across the Pacific Island countries, advocating for climate justice and environmental integrity. PICAN aims to unite civil society under a common voice to increase the influence and impact of their advocacy demands on Pacific Island governments, leading non-Pacific governments to respond with more powerful and ambitious climate change policies and action at the national and regional level.

About LSHO:

The London School of Hula and 'Ori (LSHO) is a cultural arts organisation dedicated to preserving and advancing Pacific heritage through lineage-based cultural practice, education, performance, and community engagement. LSHO provides a vital space where Pacific diaspora communities in London/UK, as well as anyone interested in Pacific cultural arts, can gather, learn, and participate, helping to create a more visible presence where Pacific arts, knowledge, and communities are valued, connected, and sustained.

About Oceana:

Oceana is the largest international organization dedicated solely to ocean conservation. Oceana is rebuilding abundant and biodiverse oceans by winning science-based policies in countries that control one-quarter of the world’s wild fish catch. With more than 350 victories that stop overfishing, habitat destruction, oil and plastic pollution, and the killing of threatened species like turtles, whales, and sharks, Oceana’s campaigns are delivering results. A restored ocean means that 1 billion people can enjoy a healthy seafood meal every day, forever. Together, we can save the oceans and help feed the world. Visit Oceana.org to learn more.

About BFFP:

#BreakFreeFromPlastic (BFFP) is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 3500 member organizations and 11,000 individual supporters in 186 countries have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP member organizations and individuals share the values of environmental protection and social justice and work together through a holistic approach to bring about systemic change. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain—from extraction to disposal—focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions.

Surface heat average through 2030 likely to exceed 1.5°C target

Source

The grid operator stopped short of taking a position on the complaint itself. States and consumer advocates oppose it, while at least one major data center company supports it.

Cement is one of the world’s most commonly used manmade materials. It is also one of the largest industrial sources of carbon dioxide; producing cement generates about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

In a new paper in the journal ACS Energy Letters, researchers report a new kind of cement that cuts energy use by 70% and carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 98% compared with traditional cement-making methods.

The new process incorporates an electrochemical conversion step before heating the limestone to reduce the extreme heat needed later. The researchers also utilize recycled cement and concrete to further cut carbon emissions.

Making cement is an inherently carbon-intensive process. The emissions come from two routes. First, the process requires heating limestone (calcium carbonate) and silica at temperatures of over 1,450°C, the energy for which traditionally comes from burning fossil fuels.

Second, the chemical reactions themselves produce carbon dioxide. That’s because the heat converts the limestone to lime by driving off carbon dioxide. The lime then reacts with silica to form calcium silicate clinkers that are used to make cement.

 

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Instead of cooking limestone and silica in a high-temperature kiln, Curtis Berlinguette and colleagues designed an electrochemical reactor that converts limestone and silica into a compound called calcium silicate hydrates. This conversion happens at a temperature of only 60°C. Then the researchers convert the hydrate to calcium silicate mineral in a kiln at 650°C, less than half the temperatures used in traditional methods.

Because of the electricity use and lower temperatures, the new method reduced the energy required by 70% compared to traditional processed. It also cut carbon emissions.

Then, the team went a step further. Instead of using new limestone, they tested their process on recycled waste cement. They found that it could also serve as a source of calcium carbonate in their electrochemical reactor to produce calcium silicate hydrate.

Using recycled cement dramatically slashed emissions, resulting in only about 20 kg of carbon dioxide emitted per ton of clinker produced, a reduction of almost 98% compared to the production of ordinary Portland cement.

The work presents a credible path for dramatically reducing the carbon footprint and increasing the circularity of one of society’s most ubiquitous materials, the researchers say.

Source: Shaoxuan Ren, Tengxiao Ji, Sabrina S. Scott et al. Electrochemical Synthesis of Calcium Silicate Hydrate for Low-Carbon Cement. ACS Energy Letters, 2026.

Image based on Getty Images for Unsplash+

Queensland’s new planning regime for large-scale renewables and battery storage remains “very messy and very complicated,” one year down the track.

The post “No sense:” One year on, Queensland’s strict renewables rules still baffle developers and councils appeared first on Renew Economy.

Workers at Sistering in west Toronto (OPSEU 540) took strike action and walked off the job on Monday.  Sistering is a 24/7 community drop-in service...

The post Striking OPSEU social service workers are fighting for their communities first appeared on Spring.

Record temperatures in spring – ‘glorious weather’ or a wake-up call?

Image by dae jeung kim from Pixabay

By Graham Petersen

The last week of May has broken temperature records in the UK. UK records hottest spring day as heatwave hits 35C

This has been overwhelmingly treated as a good news story where we can bask in weather that is ‘better’ than many exotic holiday destinations. It also came a few days after a Climate Change Committee Report ‘A Well-Adapted UK’ that highlighted the threats from heat, flooding and drought. British way of life under threat from heat, flooding and drought  – Climate Change Committee

The report is a damning indictment of the failure of successive governments to respond to these threats. In over 500 pages it identifies 14 critical systems that need urgent adaptation for survival from the severe impacts expected over the coming decades. These range from Health through to National Security. In many ways it echoes the National Emergency Briefing campaign that is a call for action based on the science. National Emergency Briefing

The recent election of Reform Party mayors and councils only serves to underline the challenge in responding to these threats. Of course it is not just Reform. Much of the mainstream media and other political parties are largely complicit in trivialising the debate and are terrified of solutions that could threaten vested interests. Nothing has shown this more than the proposal in the report that grabbed most of the headlines – a legal requirement for a maximum working temperature.

Extreme heat – Trade unions like UNISON  issued press releases welcoming this. Regulating workplace temperatures and adapting for climate change is long overdue – UNISON National Tory politicians have predictably been on TV saying, ‘it will hurt business’ and it’s not the right way to go.’ Their call for a voluntary approach flies in the face of the evidence that leaving it up to employers to decide whether they want to introduce risk control measures just doesn’t work. Employers have had plenty of opportunity to provide decent standards of protection but have failed in most cases.

Strengths of the CCC Report – One of the 14 critical systems addressed in the report is Chapter 5 Built environment and communities. This is the section of the report covers climate risks in the workplace. Given the importance of the world of work it can be argued that it should have its own section, but even limited references improve on most climate studies which often fail to reference the subject at all. The GJA has spent years commenting on government, local authority and academic reports that fail to mention workers, never mind engagement with trade unions. Chapter 16 Economy and finance is the other part of the report that has general implications for workers. This is the part that contains the recommendation that has made all the headlines – ‘Regulations can protect workers or enable coordination under changing climate conditions. Appropriate regulations may include maximum working temperatures or clear climate resilience standards. Alongside regulating, governments can support businesses by addressing market failures and providing incentives for adaptation.’ The call for a legal maximum is to be welcomed. It is now up to unions and campaigners to lobby over the details of what any future regulations should contain.

Weaknesses of the CCC Report – The CCC report predictably doesn’t contain a single reference to trade unions, and the need to engage with workers. It lacks detail on the range of workers at risk and the risks they are exposed to. For example, the report states ‘The risk of extreme heat in homes and offices is projected to be four times higher in the 2050s, than present day.’ The focus is indoors and fails to address the risk to outdoor workers. It also fails to mention air pollution anywhere in the whole report. This is unfortunate given the clear link between extreme heat and poor air quality.

In terms of standards unions could do a lot worse than those contained in the new International Labour Organisation (ILO) Report – Occupational safety and health in extreme weather events and changing weather patterns.  Adopted on 24 April following five days of negotiations with union and employer representatives, the conclusions mark the first global agreement focused on occupational safety and health (OSH) in extreme weather and changing weather patterns. Extreme weather at work: ILO tripartite experts set global OSH measures to protect workers and businesses | Human Resources Online

In the TUC Year of Climate Action unions will need to respond to the recommendations in the CCC Report. A key part of this will be getting behind the campaign for legal changes to make climate risk assessments a requirement for employers.

The GJA will be publishing a blog later this month with a detailed assessment of the CCC Report, and the opportunities for trade unions.

Further comments on the CCC Report

“This report (from the Climate Change Committee) makes clear the major risks that heatwaves, flooding and other extreme weather events pose to schools. There are already problems with overheating in the summer, made worse by the poor ventilation of many ageing school buildings and the growing frequency of extreme temperatures. There is a human cost to working in uncomfortable conditions and ultimately this results in lost learning.

“The school and college estate has been neglected over a long period of time and is not equipped to deal with the challenges posed by climate change. We are still waiting to see the DfE’s refreshed climate and sustainability strategy, and it’s vital that this includes investment to ensure schools and colleges are protected from these growing threats.” 

“It’s a stark reminder relying on non-domestic energy sources is sheer folly and leaves the UK brutally exposed to the whims of the market.” GMB  As domestic supply of fossil fuels cannot be significantly increased, and no proposals for increases would make any difference to prices, the logic of this is an increased pace of investment in solar and wind. Ed

Photo: flickr.com/photos/sasastro/

“Yet another rise in energy bills will be a kick in the teeth for the millions of people already struggling with the cost of living.

“The UK remains locked into heating and powering our homes with expensive, volatile gas, so every global energy shock sends our bills higher. Today’s forecast feels like a bad case of déjà vu that we can’t afford to repeat again, especially for those who haven’t recovered financially since the last time energy prices surged.

“If we’re to break free from our dependence on fossil fuels, then we must rapidly roll out clean, homegrown renewable energy – which is now cheaper than oil and gas – alongside insulating homes. This is how we can permanently lower bills and shield people from another energy price crisis.”

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The post Record temperatures in spring – ‘glorious weather’ or a wake-up call? first appeared on Greener Jobs Alliance.

They never thought the fires would reach them. They lived in cities, after all, far from the parched, combustible wilderness.

There’s the woman who never expected to have to grab her 1-year-old out of her bed in the middle of the night, shielding her soft head from a hailstorm of flaming embers as she dashed to the car. Or the mom of two who wound up on the beach holding her youngest, a 9-week-old baby, wondering how she would swim if the fires bearing down on her from the hills above forced her into the ocean. Or the pregnant asthmatic who had to decide where to put her air purifier as suffocating smoke blanketed her neighborhood — in her own bedroom, or the bedroom of her eldest child. The women don’t know each other, but they share the same instinctive feeling that they didn’t know enough — and didn’t do enough — to keep their children safe.

As urban sprawl encroaches on wilderness — and as the planet grows drier in many places and hotter almost everywhere — wildfires are becoming more dynamic, unpredictable, and far-reaching, affecting broader and broader swaths of the world’s population. On the east coast of Australia and the west coast of the United States, two of the planet’s most densely populated wildfire hotspots, millions now find themselves in the midst of a public health crisis that is not yet fully understood. Even fires that are limited to wilderness can blanket major cities in levels of pollution that are without recent precedent, leaving residents to guess how to protect themselves and their families. And when wildfires push through city limits, they incinerate synthetic materials, vehicles, and buildings, producing a mix of pollutants more toxic than the smoke that comes from burning vegetation. 

None of this is theoretical. It’s been six years since Australia’s so-called Black Summer coated the country’s east coast in choking smoke, three years since 100 million Americans were exposed to deadly pollution from Canadian wildfires, and just one year since fires decimated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, destroying about 13,000 residential properties and killing 31. But Australian and U.S. public health systems are ill-prepared for the inevitable return of such blazes. Nowhere is the lapse more clear than in the paucity of guidance provided to pregnant people. Scientists are just beginning to study how pollution from fires affects babies in the womb, and warnings from public officials and doctors consistently fail to account for the most vulnerable. 

Years after prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy, parents are left wondering whether asthma, developmental delays, and other health problems suffered by their children began with what was in the air before they were born — and whether it’s safe to raise a family in a place where every summer brings the same threat back to their doorsteps.

Smoke shrouds the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the Australian bushfires in November 2019. Bai Xuefei / Xinhua via Getty Images

Anneke French was excited for her maternity leave. A nurse at Canberra Hospital in Australia’s capital city, French was in her third trimester in the spring of 2019. Many in her tight-knit group of childhood best friends were also preparing to give birth or already had babies of their own.

“We were really looking forward to getting out and having lots of free time to go and have ladies’ lunches, or do some things by ourselves to treasure our time before we had a newborn to care for,” she remembered.

But by the time her leave began, French was preparing for a very different kind of summer.   

Earlier that year, in the depths of Australia’s winter, parts of Queensland and northern New South Wales began to burn — an ominous start to what is typically the country’s quietest fire season. By spring, new blazes were flaring along the east coast, feeding on vegetation desiccated by years of drought. Strong winds pushed flames across parched forests and grasslands, while dry lightning strikes sparked new fires faster than crews could contain them. Summer brought unprecedented heat waves; temperatures rose higher than most Australians had experienced in their lifetimes, cresting to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius) in some areas. Hundreds of fires broke out across southeastern Australia, burning millions of hectares of land. More than two-thirds of Australians were exposed to flames or smoke, making it the most far-reaching environmental disaster in the young nation’s history. 

While fire never touched central Canberra itself, the city endured some of the most prolonged and suffocating air pollution in the country, at times registering the worst urban air pollution in the world. Any air quality reading above 300 is considered hazardous, the index’s highest category of warning. Canberra’s reading exceeded 5,000 on New Year’s Day 2020.

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Throughout the crisis, pregnant women and new parents in smoke-affected areas, tasked with the responsibility of protecting both themselves and their infants, were largely given the same public health guidance as other sensitive groups (the elderly, asthmatics, and people with diabetes): Stay indoors as much as possible. 

Even French, a nurse, couldn’t find reliable guidance on what more she could do to protect herself and her baby from the smoke. At a prenatal appointment several weeks before her due date, French’s obstetrician told her to avoid going outside. She stayed indoors as best she could, preparing the house for its newest arrival. But the smoke worried her. “The smell was strong enough that it felt dangerous,” she said, “like you would feel if you were too close to a bushfire and felt it was time to evacuate.”

One night when she was a little more than 35 weeks pregnant, French felt a stabbing pain in her stomach so severe she could hardly take a breath. She and her husband, James, rushed to the hospital, where their obstetrician quickly discovered that French had a placental abruption, meaning the placenta was partially or fully removed from the walls of the uterus, cutting the baby off from its source of oxygen. The condition is usually preceded by either sudden trauma like a severe fall or chronic maternal cigarette smoking. French had not fallen, and she didn’t smoke.

She was rushed into an operating room for an emergency cesarean. 

Stephen Robson, French’s obstetrician, smelled smoke in the operating room that night and realized that the pollution from the fires had penetrated through to the very center of the hospital, into the rooms that doctors are trained to keep sterile at all costs.

French’s daughter, Margot, was born nearly five weeks early and underweight. It wasn’t until later that French began to wonder whether her placental abruption had anything to do with the bushfires surrounding Canberra. She was never told that the smoke might affect the timing of her birth or the health of her baby. She was never given a mask to use. 

As the summer continued and the fires only got worse, French began to notice the smoke in her home as she cared for Margot. She could see blue bands swirling beneath the overhead lights in her house. And even when she couldn’t see it, the stench was always there.

Margot’s birth wasn’t the only abnormal delivery Robson witnessed that summer. He remembers seeing smoke floating in the beam of light cast by an overhead medical spotlight during what was otherwise a routine birth. “It looked like the bat signal,” he said. “It was truly extraordinary.” 

It’s not just the placental abruption that bothers French now, six years later. She had two more children in the years after giving birth to Margot, none of whom endured the kind of bushfire season her firstborn weathered in utero in 2019. Margot is the only one of the three who struggles with asthma, a chronic, non-curable respiratory disease that afflicts neither French nor her husband, and eczema, an itchy and recurrent skin condition. 

Many of the children born to French’s friend group during the Black Summer have also developed asthma and eczema. “Her early months of life were in the Black Summer, and I worry about that for her as she grows,” she said. 

Anneke French sits with her daughter Margot. French worries that early-life smoke exposure may have contributed to some of Margot’s health conditions, like asthma. Jess Davis / ABC News

The evidence connecting chronic conditions suffered by babies born during the Black Summer to the smoke their mothers inhaled is largely anecdotal. That’s part of the problem; the scale of smoke exposure in recent years is unprecedented, so evidence-gathering is still in relatively early stages. But treating the harms of wildfire smoke as an open question is less about waiting for the science to settle, and more about ignoring what we already know about the risks of very similar pollution. In other words, not preparing for wildfire smoke is a policy choice.

General air pollution from trucks, factories, and other industrial sources is one of the most extensively studied environmental health risks in the world. It’s been the subject of sustained scientific inquiry since the 1970s, when governments began regulating and measuring air pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide. This research shows that fine particulate matter seeps deep into the lungs and circulates through the bloodstream, touching nearly every organ system in the body. 

The resulting inflammation, clotting, and blood vessel damage is linked to coronary heart disease and a higher risk of stroke and heart attacks in adults. Lungs chronically exposed to air pollution are more likely to develop cancer. Brains show signs of neuroinflammation, cognitive decline, and dementia. Immune systems are more fragile and susceptible to disease. In total, the World Health Organization estimates that indoor and outdoor air pollution from all sources combined kills some 7 million people every year — more than the number of people who die from diabetes, tuberculosis, and in car accidents combined. 

In pregnancy, fine particulate matter is particularly damaging. A baby developing in the womb is uniquely vulnerable to disruption. Every organ in the body is rapidly developing. The health of the person carrying the baby is closely connected to narrow developmental windows; reduced lung function in the mother, for example, can restrict the flow of oxygen that’s crucial to brain development and overall growth. Studies show that particles in polluted air can enter the bloodstream and migrate across the placenta and even into placental tissue, where they disrupt oxygen and nutrient exchange with the fetus. Across large epidemiological studies, higher exposure to general air pollution has been consistently associated with increased risks of preterm birth, low birth weight, and stunted fetal growth — outcomes that already affect millions of pregnancies worldwide each year. 

“The exposures in utero, during gestation periods, have an impact on life and the development of children when they’re born,” said Sotiris Vardoulakis, director of the Health Research Institute at the University of Canberra. “It can have consequences for many years — the rest of their lives.”

Sotiris Vardoulakis, director of the Health Research Institute at the University of Canberra, holds an air quality monitor in his office. While fire never touched central Canberra itself, the city endured some of the most prolonged and suffocating air pollution in the country, at times registering the worst urban air pollution in the world. Any air quality reading above 300 is considered hazardous, the index’s highest category of warning. Canberra’s reading exceeded 5,000 on New Year’s Day 2020. Jess Davis / ABC News

There is some early evidence that wildfire smoke — which also contains fine particular matter — carries similar risks for babies and their mothers. A 2024 study that looked at a large cohort of births in the southwestern U.S. found that particulate matter from wildfires was linked to higher risk of preterm birth and low birth weight. An Australian cohort study of pregnant asthmatic women found that exposure to bushfire smoke was associated with asthma in their babies. Two studies published this year using large sample sizes provided by hospital systems in California found a novel connection between wildfire smoke and autism diagnoses in children exposed in utero. 

Examining the health consequences of breathing in wildfire smoke remains, however, a nascent area of scientific study — largely because, until recently, wildfire smoke was viewed as a periodic byproduct of disaster rather than a chronic public health threat that could match the scale of other sources of pollution. In the U.S., for example, wildfire smoke is still treated differently than other sources of air pollution by the Clean Air Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency considers pollution from wildfires as natural “exceptional events.” The agencies tasked with air quality protection in other countries, including Australia, largely view the issue similarly. 

But the research landscape is changing as global warming lengthens the frequency and intensity of fire weather and wildfire smoke starts to affect more people. Exposure to wildfire smoke, while variable year to year, is trending upward in the U.S., Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, Europe, Russia, Canada, and parts of South Africa, among other places. In the U.S., smoke from wildfires has contributed up to a quarter of the total particulate matter pollution nationwide in some recent years, unraveling the air quality gains the country has made since 2000. Some research indicates that wildfire smoke might be more damaging than general air pollution — up to 10 times more harmful than the compounds in car exhaust, according to one study.

Luke Wright takes a rest after putting out spot fires at his brother’s home near Sydney in December 2019.
ABC News

Emergency department records in areas affected by fires show that these intense episodes have the same consequences as background air pollution, but on shorter timescales. They boost hospitalizations for respiratory stress and cardiovascular conditions, and cause premature death. More than 400 people died from indirect smoke inhalation during the Black Summer, and several thousand more were hospitalized. Asthma-related emergency department visits across New York state spiked 82 percent at the peak intensity of the Canadian wildfire smoke event in 2023. Emergency room visits for heart attack symptoms rose 46 percent in the three months following the Los Angeles wildfires. 

The problem is set to get worse as the world moves deeper into the 21st century. Already, particulate matter from forest, grass, and peat fires kills an estimated 339,000 people a year worldwide. And climate-driven wildfire conditions are expanding across Australia, South America, Europe, and boreal Asia. A recent analysis found that millions of people at the edges of Australia’s biggest cities could experience urban wildfires similar to the devastating blazes that beset Los Angeles in the winter of 2025.

The Black Summer was a golden opportunity to extract valuable information about the health effects of wildfire smoke on major population centers, but Australia’s government at the time appeared more interested in downplaying the severity of the crisis. “We’ve had fires in Australia since time began,” Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, leader of the right-wing National Party of Australia, said as the fires burned in 2019, calling the push to study the role climate change may have played in fueling the blazes the “the ravings of some pure, enlightened, and woke capital city greenies.”

The federal government ultimately committed just 5 million Australian dollars for bushfire-related health research across nine projects: AU$3 million for smoke exposure, and AU$2 million for the mental health consequences of the event. The sum was only enough to scratch the surface of the work required to understand the full scope of the smoke’s effects. (A single large epidemiological study in the U.S. can cost $3 million alone.) The health ramifications of the Black Summer were quickly eclipsed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which struck as the fires were ebbing. The biological samples — blood, tissue, placental cells, and other clues that could have laid the groundwork for long-term analyses of the health consequences of smoke exposure — were never collected and studied. 

“Initially, we had grand plans of going and getting blood samples and doing respiratory tests,” said Christopher Nolan, an endocrinologist in Canberra who conducted surveys of pregnant women in 2020 to assess the impact of the fires on maternal and fetal health. The onset of the pandemic complicated those plans, and Nolan never ended up getting funding at the scale necessary to collect samples. After a series of public meetings, the Australian Parliament published an interim report in 2020 concluding that “long‑term funding and research is needed to more definitively determine the impact of hazardous smoke exposure and inhalation on individuals and the community.”

“We had a missed opportunity in Australia to invest in [understanding] the long-term consequences,” said Arnagretta Hunter, a cardiologist based in Canberra who is part of Doctors for the Environment Australia, a network of medical professionals that advocates for climate action. 

Robson, the obstetrician who was working at Canberra Hospital during the Black Summer, feels similarly. “When babies were born, I noticed many of the placentas had changes that often you only see in severe disease, like severe blood pressure, or women with immunological diseases,” he said. “It was striking and it occurred for months afterwards, because I presume women had been affected by the smoke when it was there and it played out across the rest of the pregnancy for them.”

Stephen Robson worked as an obstetrician at Canberra Hospital during Australia’s Black Summer wildfires.
Jess Davis / ABC News

Both Hunter and Robson say they fear Australia’s capacity to respond to smoke events hasn’t improved since. Robson envisions a protected area inside the country’s hospitals that can keep smoke out — a sort of citadel deep inside medical facilities where surgeons and other specialists can do their work without fear of smoke creeping in. Hunter would like placentas and other biological samples that may have been preserved in hospital freezers from that time to be thawed and studied. But the institutional will to take that on hasn’t materialized.

“I don’t think we’re any better prepared to deal with an environmental catastrophe like this than we were the last time around,” Robson said. 

Arnagretta Hunter, a cardiologist based in Canberra, looks at lung scans.
Jess Davis / ABC News

Even in the U.S., the country that produced the bedrock research on fine particulate matter underpinning global air quality standards, the dynamics of fire are changing so quickly that parents are still being left in the dark. 

Irene Farr could hear cars exploding somewhere in the distance on the night of January 7, 2025, near her house in northern Pasadena, California. When she poked her head out of her front door, she smelled thick smoke in the air. There was a red glow in the sky around Eaton Canyon, a nature preserve a few miles to the east. Farr thought she might get an alert telling her to evacuate or see fire trucks racing down her street. But the neighborhood was eerily quiet. Her neighbors were indoors. It seemed like just another night in Pasadena.

Reddit, the social media site, told a different story. People were putting pins on a live map that showed where flames were erupting. Every time Farr checked the map, the pins were closer to her house. At 3 a.m., she reached her breaking point. She roused her daughter, Azul, and rallied her husband, David, and his parents, who live on the same property. They drove to David’s brother’s house half an hour away and stayed awake the rest of the night, wired and anxious for news about their neighborhood. The sun never rose that morning; the smoke was so thick that 6 a.m. looked like midnight. 

Smokes and flames overwhelm a commercial area during the Eaton Fire near Altadena, California, on January 8, 2025.
Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images

The Eaton Fire, one of two devastating wildfires that struck the Los Angeles area that January, ultimately killed 19 people and destroyed 9,000 buildings. Most of the deaths occurred west of a prominent north-south thoroughfare called Lake Avenue, where Farr’s house is located. Evacuation orders from the city arrived late — hours after residents on the east side of Lake Avenue had been told to leave. 

The Farr’s house was spared, but more than a year later the family still hasn’t moved back home. Azul was just 11 months old when the fires broke out — too young, Irene figured, to risk her being exposed to whatever the fires left behind. Schools, hospital clinics, supermarkets, warehouses, appliances, and plastics had been burned to ash. People online were saying that the affected areas would be toxic for at least a year. 

“We decided that we would wait until we had more data and information,” Farr said. “What ended up being a two-week wait ended up being a one-month wait, ended up being a three-month wait …”

Whenever she went back to check on the old house, Farr felt a burning in the back of her throat, a “bubbling up.” There was something lingering in the air, she thought, but she didn’t know what it was.

Irene Farr holds her daughter Azul. They evacuated their home during the Eaton Fire in January 2025.
Zoya Teirstein / Grist

Frankly, no one knew — not even local air pollution researchers who have spent years studying the health dangers of wildfire smoke in the American West. “It was unprecedented,” said Yifang Zhu, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Air monitoring stations across the country installed by the federal government are often designed to monitor general air quality. They take measurements every few days, data that helps states determine whether they are compliant with federal regulations. When the fires broke out, stations in Los Angeles continued to collect routine data on urban air pollutants, but the sensors weren’t equipped to capture the novel mix of compounds produced by burning cars, buildings, and asphalt. Many of the sensors were themselves lost to the fires.

“One big lesson we learned is if something gets burned that’s not a traditional wildfire compound, if you don’t specifically look for it, you’re not going to find it,” Zhu said. “It’s as if it didn’t exist.” The problem is that designing and deploying air quality monitors that can capture the heady mix of pollutants released by urban wildfires is expensive and requires a lot of technical expertise. 

Yifang Zhu is an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Zoya Teirstein / Grist

Zhu’s colleague Mike Kleeman, an air pollution researcher at the University of California, Davis, drove around the Los Angeles burn zone in April last year, when cleanup crews were hauling away material, and took air samples with an expensive specialized air sampling instrument. He was looking for hexavalent chromium, a very toxic form of chromium used in industrial welding and manufacturing that’s linked to lung cancer. Air monitoring stations, and even air pollution research laboratories like Zhu’s, don’t measure the toxin because it requires unique equipment and it’s unstable, meaning you only have a short while to get it to the lab before it disappears. 

Kleeman found hexavalent chromium in the samples he collected at levels that were 200 times higher than they would be on a normal day in the city — not high enough to warrant a public health emergency, but illuminating for air pollution researchers who quickly realized that these urban blazes had introduced a new set of unknown variables.

“We are facing an entirely new challenge when wildfires burn into major cities,” Kleeman said. 

Zhu and Kleeman are members of the Los Angeles Fire Human Exposure and Long-Term Health Study, a collaboration between eight universities across the U.S. aimed at studying the short- and long-term health effects of the Los Angeles fires. The collaboration, funded by the Spiegel Family Fund, a philanthropic foundation formed by the creator of Snapchat, collected some of the biological data that researchers in Australia largely couldn’t obtain during and after the Black Summer. 
An initial study found peculiar trends in sodium and protein levels in the blood of people affected by the fires, an outcome experts still don’t understand. More research on those abnormalities and other findings is coming. Researchers involved in the initiative were focused initially on measuring the contaminants the fires produced and recruiting cohorts of people to study. Now, they’re turning to the work of investigating the long-term health impacts of the fires on those people, including subgroups like first responders and pregnant women.

More in this series

• In Arizona, a fight against a deadly fungus is under threat from Trump’s health policies
• As aid dries up in Kenya, millions are threatened by the climate-driven disease kala-azar
• Rising heat, failing kidneys: Climate’s hidden toll on migrant workers
• In Bangladesh, thousands of volunteers are battling climate-fueled disease at its source
• A hotter, wetter South is becoming a breeding ground for mold
• The frantic, high-tech fight to stop climate-fueled dengue fever

But the funding that rolled in from ultra-wealthy Los Angeles philanthropists in the immediate aftermath of the fires is starting to dry up. The federal government, beyond failing to fill the void, is cutting resources needed to understand the conditions that fuel wildfires in the first place. In April, the Trump administration announced a reorganization plan that includes closing 57 of 77 Forest Service research stations across the country, many of which study fire risk. 

There’s not much more momentum in Australia. Despite a change in government in 2022, no new major federal funding has been earmarked for bushfire smoke exposure research since the Black Summer, perhaps in part because a smoke event of that scale hasn’t happened since. 

As countries around the globe begin to grapple with the health consequences of smoke exposure, tens of millions of data points are entering the public record. But the way researchers in different countries conduct research — even the way scientists define the term “smoke exposure” — is highly variable. Some scientists use satellites to study smoke exposure, while others use computer modeling. For pregnant populations, some scientists choose to analyze smoke exposure by trimester, others look at the total number of “fire days” pregnant women live through. Efforts to identify long-term health trends are often scrambled by this lack of standardization, delaying the kind of unequivocal findings that prompt hospitals and governments to quickly implement new policies. 

The American and Australian co-authors of a 2024 global meta analysis of the research on wildfire smoke exposure in pregnant women found just 31 studies of a high enough caliber to include in their review. Their analysis was inconclusive because the studies, conducted in various countries with different methods, couldn’t be appropriately compared. In the end, the authors were forced to conclude that they had found “suggestive evidence of harm from exposure to wildfire smoke during pregnancy” and that more research was needed. 

Nolan, the Australian endocrinologist, thinks there should be a scientific protocol that experts all over the globe use as they conduct research on the effects of smoke exposure on natal health. A universal standard that harmonizes datasets would allow researchers to share data between institutions and hone in on the biggest risks more quickly. “[When] different groups around the world collect the data the same way, well, then you get statistical power,” Nolan said. 

Epidemiological standardization is what formed the basis of general air pollution regulations. The World Health Organization created global air quality guidelines in 1987 and established a benchmark for particulate matter pollution in 2005. Researchers were then able to draw concrete conclusions: A 2015 study, for example, found that for every 10 micrograms per cubic meter increase in fine particulate pollution, all-cause mortality rises by 4 percent. 

We know that wildfire smoke is bad for pregnant women. But answers to more specific questions — should women evacuate when particulate matter reaches a certain threshold? How many days of smoke exposure meaningfully increase the risk of preterm birth? — are still out of reach 

Read Next An early-life wildfire exposure sickened these monkeys for decades Jesse Nichols

It’s not a matter of if the fires will come again, but when. Much of the American West just had one of its warmest winters on record. More than half the region is in a drought at a time of year when snowpack should have hit its peak, priming the landscape for fire. “We are facing a very challenging fire year,” Mike Morgan, director of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, said in April. “Our resources will be tested not only in Colorado, but across the West.” 

Earlier this year, southeastern Australia experienced the most intense heat wave it has seen since the Black Summer — an event made five times more likely by climate change. The heat fueled a spate of bushfires across the state of Victoria that burned hundreds of homes and killed one person and thousands of livestock. 

In Canberra, where temperatures approached 110 degrees F, the smell of smoke from prescribed burning this fall brought French back to 2019. “As soon as you see that plume of smoke or smell it on the air, you want to know: Where? How close? Is it in control? Is it accidental?” she said. 

French can find the answers to those questions on the Australian Capital Territory Parks website. But there is nowhere she can go for resolution about the long-term effects of the Black Summer on Margot’s health.

“I don’t know how that will affect her,” she said. “I still don’t know.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Wildfire smoke engulfed their cities. Did it make their babies sick? on May 28, 2026.

A sprawling, 40,000-acre data center planned for northern Utah has stirred up controversy across the state over the past month, partly because of the pollution it’s expected to contribute to a region that already struggles with smog.

Officials with the quasi-governmental Military Installation Development Authority, or MIDA, which approved the project and created tax incentives to spur its development, have become de facto cheerleaders for the data center campus, called the Stratos Project. They say Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian TV personality and the main backer of Stratos, specifically selected a remote valley north of the Great Salt Lake because a gas pipeline runs through it.

The plant that will generate electricity for the data complex would be powered “100 percent off the Ruby Pipeline,” a MIDA official said in April. 

But after weeks of protests, reams of comments against the project, and disgruntled Utahns digging into state leaders’ finances and family businesses, the state’s Republican governor has now asserted the project will “never” be solely powered by natural gas.

“That’s never going to happen,” Governor Spencer Cox told The Salt Lake Tribune last week. “The very first phase will be natural gas, but the other phases should not be. They should be nuclear, and they should be geothermal, and solar and other technology.”

The proposed Stratos Project is light on details so far. O’Leary has said that at full build, it will be one of the biggest data centers in the world, as large as Washington, D.C. Scientists, environmental advocates and some residents have raised alarms about the impact that the project — and the possibility of a massive natural gas plant to power it — could have on air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and water supplies near the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

According to some estimates, a 9-gigawatt power plant entirely powered by natural gas could raise Utah’s carbon emissions by 64 percent. Although it’s still unclear how much water the facility would need, the project’s developers have said they’re working to secure 13,000 acre-feet in Hansel Valley and the surrounding area, which is mostly agricultural. That’s enough water to meet the needs of more than 20,000 households in Utah.

The north end of the Great Salt Lake and Hansel Valley, the planned site for the Stratos Project. Trent Nelson / The Salt Lake Tribune

Opposition to the proposal has been intense. A water right filed to support the data center and power plant received nearly 4,000 letters of protest this month. Opponents held a rally at Utah’s Capitol last week and delivered a letter to Cox with more than 6,000 signatures urging him to take “binding action” to preserve the Great Salt Lake instead of issuing platitudes over social media.

During a news conference on Wednesday announcing a geothermal partnership with the neighboring states of Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, Cox acknowledged problems with the rollout of the Stratos Project in Box Elder County, saying future decisions like it should involve his office and elected representatives.

“There’s no question, the process was not good,” Cox told reporters. “It’s something I’ve worried about for a long time with that entity that made that decision.” 

Cox appeared to be referring to MIDA, a development authority ostensibly meant to fund projects to support the military. Its biggest developments in recent years, however, include a hotel at the Deer Valley luxury ski resort and a swanky ski village. MIDA officials and other Stratos supporters have called the project a matter of national security.

“That was not a decision that was made by me or the Legislature,” Cox said. “In the future, those are decisions that should be made by us, so that we can do these types of things ahead of time to make sure people understand what’s actually happening out there. That did not happen, and it should happen.”

When he made his comments, Cox was hosting the final workshop in his “Energy Superabundance” initiative as chair of the Western Governors Association, part of a broader push that complements his “Operation Gigawatt” goal to more than double Utah’s energy production over the next decade.

Electricity use across the country has held relatively steady for decades, but a surge in demand for artificial intelligence computing and data centers is putting a strain on the electric grid. That’s left Western states scrambling to build new energy supplies.

At the same time, public skepticism toward large data center developments appears to be growing, particularly over concerns involving water use, noise, energy costs, and pollution.

“It feels like the future is here,” Cox said during his opening remarks at the workshop. “It’s coming quicker than people asked for, and there are so many amazing things that can come from that future, and some pretty awful ones as well.”

Read Next Utah’s fragile desert could feel like the Sahara if America’s biggest data center gets built Leia Larsen

Cox has also pushed for faster permitting timelines for large energy and infrastructure projects, arguing that environmental review processes often take too long. “This whole idea of being rushed — I’m so tired of our country taking years to get stuff done,” he said in April. “It’s the dumbest thing ever. We think that taking time makes things better or safer. It absolutely does not.”

Last week, Cox struck a more measured tone as criticism of the project continued to mount. “One of the things people are worried about, and rightfully so, is air quality,” he said in a brief interview as he left the workshop. “That’s a yearlong [permitting] process. … We’re not speeding those up. Those are really important, and we want to make sure that things are done the right way.”

Earlier this month, O’Leary, who was featured on the reality show “Shark Tank,” also seemed to suggest that renewables could help power the Stratos Project. He described other technological advances — such as turbines cooled with air rather than water — before turning to the natural gas power causing a stir.

“We can also put a percentage of the power generation through solar, wind, and batteries, because the battery technology is 10x more efficient than it was just five years ago,” O’Leary posted on X on May 5. “So that’s very helpful, because it makes the cost of energy lower.”

But he stopped short of fully endorsing renewables for his project.

Logan Mitchell, a climate scientist and analyst with Utah Clean Energy, calculated that a 9-gigawatt natural gas power plant will produce around 35 million metric tons of carbon emissions each year. By comparison, the entire state of Utah generates 55 million metric tons annually, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. So the Stratos Project could raise Utah’s emissions by about 64 percent.

“That’s massive,” Mitchell said. But it could be even more, because his estimate didn’t account for “any additional methane leakage” from piping and using the natural gas, he said.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world’s largest data center was supposed to run on 100% natural gas. Utah’s Republican governor says ‘never.’ on May 28, 2026.

Gene edited meat 'on dinner plates soon' Channel News brendan 28th May 2026 Teaser Media

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

Listen to the audio version >>

From the day of his inauguration until long after the closing of the Straits of Hormuz, President Donald Trump and his fossil fuel supporters have conducted an unrelenting war against the Greentech revolution and fossil free energy.

President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA) into law on July 4, 2025. The law rolls back many parts of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act by ending tax credits for wind and solar energy, removing incentives for electric vehicles and home energy efficiency, and increasing support for fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and traditional agriculture. Photo credit: The White House, Public Domain

The Greentech revolution includes ways of producing energy like solar and wind power; ways of distributing it in time and space like energy storage and energy grids; and ways of using it like electric vehicles (EVs) and carbon neutral buildings. The Greentech revolution is a dagger pointed at the heart of the fossil fuel industry and the political, social, and economic ecosystem in which it is embedded. Donald Trump, MAGA, and the fossil fuel industry are conducting a systematic counter-revolution to halt and destroy the Greentech revolution in all its forms.

The roots of opposition to climate protection and fossil free energy in particular run deep. The fossil fuel industry has spent large sums trying to debunk the reality of climate change and fossil fuel burning as its leading cause. Political forces – left, right, and center — have long seen the expansion of fossil fuel extraction and burning as a key to prosperity and national power. With the rise of fascist-style movements, parties, and governments around the world, denial of climate change and attacks on climate protection became ubiquitous, promulgated by forces far beyond the fossil fuel interests. Trump’s anti-Greentech campaign is backed by an army of economic and ideological allies who are attempting to block the Greentech revolution at every level, from municipalities and states to corporations and the public mind.

While Donald Trump vacillates on many fronts, his personal climate denialism and hostility to fossil free energy have been consistent for much of his career. In his first term, Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris climate change agreement; authorized leasing federal land for new coal mines; unblocked nearly the entire American continental shelf for offshore drilling; and opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and national monuments such as Bears Ears in Utah to fossil fuel extraction. By the end of 2018, Trump had eliminated 76 environmental regulations, most related to climate.

The second Trump administration represented a new phase in the attack on climate safety and fossil free energy. Of course, like most presidents before him, Trump is trying to increase fossil fuel extraction and burning. But beyond that he is trying to restrict and if possible, abolish Greentech industry. Trump portrays his energy policy as a search for energy dominance for the US. But the facts belie that claim. In fact, Trump’s efforts to destroy Greentech energy are systematically reducing America’s energy resources and thereby decreasing US power.

Trump’s intent is not primarily to augment US power, but to reverse the Greentech revolution and the global transition to fossil-free energy. It is first and foremost devoted to eliminating the existential threat that the Greentech revolution poses to the fossil fuel industry and the entire economic, political, and social ecosystem that depends on it and on which it depends. If the Greentech revolution is a dagger pointed at their heart, then it is a matter of survival for these forces to attempt in turn to stab it to death. That is the attempt we are seeing from MAGA, the Trump administration, and their allies.

(Left to Right) Chris Wright, U.S. Secretary of Energy (Photo credit: Donica Payne, United States Department of Energy, Public Domain); Jessica Kramer, head of the EPA’s Office of Water (Photo credit: Congress.gov, Public Domain); Audrey Robertson, head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (Photo credit: Energy.gov, Public Domain)

While Trump often seems to be flying wild, it would be a mistake to think that his administration doesn’t know what it is doing. Its key energy and climate related positions are held by top fossil fuel executives and lobbyists who are well aware of the Greentech threat to their industry. Trump’s energy secretary Chris Wright is a longtime fossil fuel executive and a former director of an oil-industry lobbying group. Jessica Kramer, head of the EPA’s Office of Water, previously represented major energy companies, mining companies, and a water trade group working against regulations under the Clean Water Act. Audrey Robertson, head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, was the co-founder of fracking company Franklin Mountain Energy and served on the board of three other fossil fuel companies, including Liberty Energy, founded by Energy Secretary Chris Wright. As Matthew Davis of the League of Conservation Voters put it, “Nominating another oil and gas executive continues the Trump administration’s actions to effectively ban clean energy like wind and solar, and advance dirty energy only policies across the board.”

Smashing Greentech energy production

On day one of his presidency, Trump issued an Executive Order freezing unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It aimed to halt every form of Greentech, from production of solar and wind energy to domestic manufacture of EVs. In February 2025, the Army Corps of Engineers halted approval of renewable energy projects on private land; out of about 11,000 pending permits it singled out the 168 that focused on renewable energy. In March, Trump signed an executive order rescinding a Biden-era proclamation permitting the Department of Energy to fund production of renewable technologies through the Defense Production Act.

There followed a series of actions specifically designed to block solar and wind energy production. The Treasury Department issued new guidance limiting wind and solar energy projects’ eligibility for federal tax credits. Then the Interior Department issued a new “project density” policy requiring wind and solar energy projects on federal land to match the energy output per acre of fossil fuels, disqualifying many renewable projects from receiving permits. In June, Trump signed an executive order directing the Treasury to severely restrict the eligibility of wind and solar projects to qualify for tax credits. According to Bloomberg NEF, the removal of federal subsidies means that over the next five years new wind energy will be 50% lower and new solar energy 23% lower than previously projected.

The attack on Greentech energy mobilized departments across the government and obscure opportunities for bureaucratic obstruction. On August 7, the New York Times reported,

“The Trump administration has sharply escalated its attacks on wind and solar power in recent days, issuing a barrage of policies that could halt the construction of renewable energy projects on public and private lands across the country. The Interior Department is now requiring dozens of formerly routine consultations and approvals for wind and solar projects to undergo new layers of political review by the interior secretary’s office, a policy that is causing significant permitting delays. The agency is also opening investigations into bird deaths caused by wind farms and withdrawing millions of acres of federal waters previously available for leasing by offshore wind companies.

At the same time, the Transportation Department is recommending minimum setback requirements for wind farms near federal highways and railroads, requiring them to be placed 1.2 miles away. And it ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to re-evaluate whether wind farms pose a danger to aviation, a potentially momentous step since nearly every wind farm in the country requires height clearance approvals from the agency. Taken together, the policies amount to a far-reaching crackdown on wind and solar power.”

Bureaucratic obstruction has become ubiquitous for solar projects. Late in 2025, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) revealed that more than 500 solar projects in the pipeline across the country are in danger of delays or cancellation “as a result of political attacks.” One planned solar facility on private land in the Upper Midwest is currently delayed because federal agencies have halted all discussions over a needed water permit. Another large solar farm on private land in the West is being held up because it must now undergo three layers of political review.

Trump says ‘We don’t allow windmills’ after cancelling nearly complete offshore wind project. Video: PBS News

Donald Trump’s well-known personal antagonism to wind power goes back to the time he unsuccessfully tried to stop an offshore wind farm from being built in view of one of his Scottish golf courses. On a recent trip to Scotland, he called wind turbines “ugly monsters” that “destroy the beauty of your fields, your plains and your waterways.” On inauguration day, he issued a sweeping executive order halting all leasing for new wind farms on federal lands and waters. On July 30, the Interior Department revoked over 3.5 million acres of federal waters previously designated for offshore wind development, effectively eliminating federal offshore wind leasing. Then the Trump administration ordered a halt to Revolution Wind, a nearly-completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island.

But that was just a love tap. Just before Christmas, the Trump administration announced that it would “pause” leases for five East Coast wind farms, “essentially gutting the country’s nascent offshore wind industry.” Together the projects were expected to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses across the Eastern United States. The reason given was national security concerns, but those concerns were never stated. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement that “the prime duty of the United States government is to protect the American people.” He said the decision “addresses emerging national security risks” as well as “vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our East Coast population centers.” Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman described Trump’s wind policy as “an effort to shut down 10 percent of U.S. electricity production — even as electricity prices are soaring.”

The overall objective of the Trump administration is clear – to reverse the Greentech revolution. As the New York Times summed up with considerable understatement, “Instead of simply lifting restrictions on fossil-fuel development and removing subsidies for renewable energy, the Trump administration is creating new roadblocks for wind and solar projects.”

Smashing Greentech energy consumption

CATL batteries power many electric vehicles in China and internationally. Photo Credit: Matti Blume, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Trump’s attack on Greentech does not just aim to dismantle fossil free energy; it also aims to undermine the innovations that are making energy consumption greener and more efficient.

The rapid development of energy storage technology has been central to the Greentech revolution. Trump has taken direct aim at the attempt to develop a domestic battery industry in the US.

In 2024, China made 99 percent of the world’s lithium phosphate cells, the kind most often used for energy storage. It also made more than 90 percent of the main battery components like cathodes and anodes and dominated the refining of raw materials like lithium and graphite. Batteries are essential not only for Greentech, but also to provide electricity for AI and to manufacture drones and other weapons of modern warfare.

Soon after coming into office, President Trump froze billions of dollars in Biden-era federal grants for battery manufacturing. His animus to anything he associated with Greentech was such that he lumped batteries in with electric vehicles, solar farms, wind turbines, and other clean energy technologies, notwithstanding their critical role in both military and industrial production. He boasted that by ending the “Green New Scam” his budget cancelled over $15 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act “Green New Deal” funds. That included ending “taxpayer handouts to electric vehicle and battery makers” and canceling $6 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds for “wasteful and ineffective EV charger programs.” So much for an energy policy purported to increase America’s power!

The attack on Greentech also includes blocking transmission lines for renewable energy. For example, the Department of Energy had granted a conditional loan guarantee for an $11 billion transmission line in the Midwest, known as the Grain Belt Express, which would transport electricity generated by wind farms in Kansas to more densely populated regions in Indiana and Illinois. It would have been the largest privately funded transmission line in the country’s history. In July, the DOE cancelled the loan guarantee, halting the project just as it was ready to begin construction.

A particular objective of the war on Greentech consumption is the multifaceted destruction of the electric vehicle industry. Less than a month after Trump’s inauguration, a Transportation Department memo ordered the suspension of $5 billion in federal funding, authorized by Congress under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, for states to build electric vehicle chargers. The budget proposed by congressional Republicans eliminated tax credits of up to $7,500 for electric vehicle buyers, clawed back money for fast chargers, and phased out subsidies for companies that set up battery factories and lithium mines. According to the New York Times, “Killing those programs would endanger more than $200 billion that auto companies, battery makers, mining companies and others have invested to create a U.S. electric vehicle supply chain not dependent on China.” In December, Trump reduced the average gas milage automakers are required to achieve by 3031from 50 miles per gallon to 35 miles per gallon and thereby, as the New York Times wrote, “threw the weight of the federal government behind vehicles that burn gasoline rather than electric cars.”

The attack on Greentech went into many corners of energy production and consumption. For example, agrivoltaics, which combine energy production with agriculture, is an emerging form of Greentech. the US Department of Agriculture issued a report calling for disincentivizing solar development on farms. It then announced that it will stop funding wind and solar energy on farmland.

The Trump administration has particularly targeted Green New Deal-style programs that combine Greentech and social justice goals. For example, in its first month in office, Trump’s EPA halted $7 billion in contractually obligated grants for Solar For All, an Inflation Reduction Act program that delivered clean energy and lower prices to vulnerable communities. Arizona attorney general Kris Mayes, who sued to block cancellation of the program, said it would affect 900,000 low-income households nationwide; 11,000 low-income households in Arizona would face a 20% spike in energy bills. And in June the Department of Agriculture announced the termination of $148.6 million in federal grants related to environmental justice and DEI, including funds for disadvantaged farmers using conservation practices.

Trump has not limited his anti-Greentech counterrevolution to the domestic economy; he has also taken it global. Early in the administration Energy Secretary Wright told an international conference that net zero carbon emissions was a “sinister goal” and criticized a British law to reach net zero by 2050. In his first month as president, Trump ordered tariffs against trading partners, “with severe implications for the supply chains for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles.” Then Trump used tariff threats to demand that US exports be exempt from the EU law requiring that importers report on the carbon footprint of their factories overseas and pay a fine for each unit of carbon emitted before the product gets to the EU. The Trump administration demanded that the EU exempt US companies from a law that requires them to monitor and report methane emissions and to repair methane leaks in their facilities. More recently, the US has demanded that the EU cut back or repeal its new “corporate sustainability due diligence directive” which provides substantial fines for companies exporting gas to the EU unless they show they protect human rights and are cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The damn fool says “push on”

Gas prices in Sonoma, California April 7 2026. Photo credit: Sarah Stierch, Flickr, CC0 1.0.

Even as Trump’s war on Iran initiated the most severe energy crisis in world history, he continued his war on fossil free energy well into 2026. Consider these examples from April alone:

• Trump released his 2027 budget request proposing tens of billions of dollars in cuts to energy and environmental programs, including everything from electric vehicle chargers to prosecution of environmental crimes. At the same time, he proposed increased funding for oil and gas production, mining, manufacturing, and AI development. A White House fact sheet titled “Ending the New Green Scam” said, “President Trump is committed to eliminating funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production.”
• When several federal judges overruled Trump’s blockage of offshore wind farms, Trump did the almost unimaginable and paid roughly $1.8 billion to companies to abandon leases for four offshore wind farms in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
• The US “Department of War” began blocking more than 150 onshore wind farms across the United States by delaying military reviews that were once considered routine. According to Jason Grumet, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, “The Department of War is currently making it almost impossible to build a new wind project in the United States.” Trump had stated in January that “My goal is to not let any windmill be built.”
• And Donald Trump released a series of memos that doubled down on his support of increased domestic fossil fuel production for purported “defense readiness.” The memos said US-based oil, coal, and natural gas production must expand “to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability.” Invoking the Defense Production Act, the memos authorized “making necessary purchases, commitments, and financial instruments to enable these projects.”

The Greentech revolution can provide enormous benefits to the American people. The US system of fossil fuel energy production and consumption is, conversely, a dead man walking. Trump, MAGA, and the fossil fuel industry are making extraordinary efforts to keep fossil fuels alive by destroying all Greentech alternatives. But, as we will see in subsequent commentaries in this series, this fossil fuel counter-revolution is bound to fail.

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The post Trump’s Anti-Greentech Counter-Revolution first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

• From 1983 to 2022, the number of 18-year-olds with a driver’s license fell from 80 percent to 60 percent. Uber sees this as an opportunity to make ride-hailing (Fortune) and eventually autonomous vehicles (CNN) the standard mode of transportation. Shouldn’t it also an opportunity to get these kids who don’t want to drive acclimated to walking, biking and transit?
• It’s no wonder young people aren’t all that interested in driving, considering that the average car payment is now over $600, not to mention gas, maintenance and insurance. A new car is a luxury item, and a used one will eventually cost you plenty in the repair shop. (Jalopnik)
• The House transportation bill drastically cuts funding for transit and Amtrak, but hey, at least it includes a historic amount for bridges! (Smart Cities Dive)
• Henry Grabar writes more about why suspending the gas tax is a bad idea, any way you look at it. (The Atlantic; paywall)
• The CEO of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority has resigned. Lona Edwards Hankin’s three-year tenure saw a significant uptick in bus ridership, but she faced several controversies as well. (Times-Picayune)
• Despite their efficiency, Denver is abandoning future center-lane bus rapid transit lines due to business complaints. (Denverite)
• $50 million and 25 years after its inception, Greensboro, North Carolina’s downtown greenway opened (The Thread). A couple hundred miles away, on the coast, Wilmington is installing more speed humps to calm traffic (Star News).
• Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson took a bike ride last weekend, joined by hundreds of supporters and a few dozen Nazi protesters, including one with a sign that read, in a play on an antisemitic slogan, “Bikes will not replace us.” (Seattle Bike Blog)
• Seattle protesters turned out ahead of a key Sound Transit vote today on potential cuts to long-range plans for light rail. (KOMO)
• If you listen to Reddit, drivers are getting more abusive toward cyclists because they don’t see them as human beings. (Momentum)
• Dublin officials thought bike-sharing would a flop, but is now looking to replace a private operator with a publicly owned system that would triple the number of bikes. (Irish Cycle)
• The frustration of fighting for safer bike facilities in Australia will be familiar to many readers in the U.S. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

Washington, D.C. is preparing to make the same mistake too many American cities keep making: building a billion-dollar destination without building the transportation system to match it.

The proposed redevelopment of the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium site — the once and potentially future home of the Washington Commanders football team — is being sold as “transit-first.” And that phrase sounds ambitious — until you look at the numbers.

The plan anticipates that roughly 40,000 people — the overwhelming majority of attendees — will arrive by Metro, bus, walking, biking, or other non-car options. Only about 25,000 are expected to arrive by automobile, despite thousands of planned parking spaces.

In other words, the project depends on transit to function.

So why isn’t the city building a new Metro station?

Recommended Opinion: Adding Parking to Sports Stadiums Makes It Harder for Everyone To Get Around Streetsblog March 23, 2026

Instead, Washington is preparing to funnel tens of thousands of people through the existing Stadium—Armory station and supplement the gap with expanded bus service. That may satisfy transportation modeling spreadsheets. But anyone who has stood shoulder-to-shoulder on an overcrowded platform after a concert, playoff game, or public event already knows what those models often miss: transit systems break down long before they technically fail.

They break down when stations become bottlenecks.

They break down when crowds overwhelm sidewalks, fare gates, escalators, and platforms.

They break down when moving people safely becomes secondary to simply moving them eventually.

And they break down when cities mistake “having transit nearby” for actually designing around transit.

That distinction matters.

Recommended This Chicago Stadium Could Go From a Sea of Sprawling Parking Lots to a Bustling, Walkable Pedestrian District AJ LaTrace January 15, 2025

The RFK redevelopment is not a suburban football stadium surrounded by parking lots. It is being positioned as a dense entertainment and mixed-use district capable of hosting NFL games, concerts, festivals, international events, and potentially World Cup-related activities. This is the kind of project cities spend generations talking about and decades financing.

Yet the transit conversation surrounding it feels stuck in the 1990s.

Globally, cities that build major stadium districts understand a basic truth: transportation is not an accessory to development. It is the development.

Look at London. Paris. Tokyo. Even newer international stadium districts in less transit-rich countries are designed around layered mobility systems, with multiple rail access points and distributed pedestrian circulation. These elements work together with bus integration, dedicated bike infrastructure, and redundancy to prevent one station or corridor from collapsing under pressure.

American cities, by contrast, too often approach mobility like an afterthought. We build first, celebrate renderings second, and only later realize we forgot to ask how 60,000 people are supposed to leave at the same time.

Then comes the predictable cycle. Overcrowded stations. Overwhelmed transit staff. Traffic spillover into neighborhoods. Emergency access concerns. And millions — sometimes billions — spent retrofitting infrastructure that should have been included from the start.

Recommended Can ‘Transit-Oriented Entertainment’ Help End the National Ridership Decline? Terenig Topjian October 1, 2024

The most frustrating part is that Washington already knows what successful high-volume transit design looks like.

Stations like Gallery Place and the Farragut corridor work because they distribute people. Riders can enter and exit from multiple points. Crowds disperse across blocks instead of collapsing into a single choke point. Pressure is absorbed by the system instead of concentrated into one vulnerable node.

That is not just convenience. It is safety infrastructure.

A single overloaded station serving a massive stadium district creates risks that extend far beyond game day inconvenience. That might look like dangerous crowd surges, delayed emergency response, or simple platform overcrowding. It could even result in accessibility failures and ripple effects across the broader transit network.

And those burdens will not fall equally.

Residents east of the Anacostia River — many of whom already rely heavily on public transportation and endure longer commute times — will inherit the operational strain of a project largely marketed toward visitors, tourists, and regional entertainment consumers.

That is why this debate matters beyond football.

Recommended Opinion: Make This Summer’s World Cup A Car-Free Paradise Norman Brown March 12, 2026

The RFK site is ultimately a test of whether American cities are serious about building transit-oriented futures — or whether “transit-first” has simply become another branding phrase used to justify mega-projects without making the hard infrastructure investments required to support them. Because a project cannot claim to be transit-first while treating transit capacity as optional.

If tens of thousands of people are expected to rely on Metro to make the project viable, then Metro infrastructure should expand alongside the project itself — not years later after overcrowding, delays, and public frustration become politically impossible to ignore.

And this is bigger than Washington.

Cities across America are racing to build stadium districts, innovation hubs, entertainment corridors, and waterfront megaprojects. But too many are still planning transportation the way previous generations planned highways: as something engineered around cars first and people second.

The result is infrastructure that looks impressive in renderings but feels dysfunctional in real life.

The RFK redevelopment offers Washington a rare opportunity to do something different:
2to treat mobility as core civic infrastructure, to prioritize long-term public movement over short-term construction savings, and to build a stadium district designed not just to attract crowds — but to handle them.

Because great cities are not judged only by what they build. They are judged by whether people can actually move through them.