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There are many ways to enjoy the outdoors, but thrill-seekers visiting the nation’s national forests often turn to motorized recreation. They might ride ATVs along dirt trails, snowmobile down winding tracks, or go off-roading in 4x4s. The United States Forest Service’s approach to all such forms of recreation on trails can be summed up in four words: closed unless designated open. 

Unless a trail is explicitly designated as open to off-highway vehicles, such as side-by-sides and dirt bikes, it can only be used for nonmotorized recreation. Most national forests have travel-management plans that outline when a trail is open for nonmotorized use like mountain biking, horseback riding, or hiking, and when it’s open to off-highway vehicles. These plans tend to be exhaustive and list which types of motorized or nonmotorized access are allowed on every trail, two-track, and road. The strict guidelines are a result of a Forest Service policy called the travel-management rule. 

But the Trump administration wants to turn the current rule on its head. In late August, the Forest Service announced its plan to revise the rule so that trails are open unless designated closed. It would mean forest managers would be expected to prioritize motorized access on service roads, trails, and even backcountry airfields. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service is a part, has said that the move will increase recreation access and “simplify regulatory requirements.” The change is being opposed by sportsmen, backcountry horsemen, conservation organizations, and nonmotorized recreation groups. They say opening up all Forest Service trails to motorized access could have devastating consequences for the ecosystems and wildlife that rely on these lands. Healthy, intact forest ecosystems are also critical for sequestering carbon in a warming world.

Hillary Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, a public lands advocacy organization, said everyone who uses forest lands, from recreationists and ranchers with grazing leases to those in the timber industry, relies on the clarity provided by travel-management plans. The Forest Service’s formal announcement to revise the rule is “vague,” “somewhat poorly written,” and “difficult to follow,” Eisen said. Without clear guidelines in place, she fears motorized users could end up anywhere on the landscape. 

“Any sort of feature that you could interpret to be a trail or a road would be open to every type of use, unless closed,” she said. “That could mean if you can get your side-by-side on there, have at it.” 

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Chris Edgington, a watershed project manager with Montana Trout Unlimited, witnessed firsthand the environmental damage that can happen from off-highway vehicle use on the Middle Fork of the Judith River, which runs through the Little Belt Mountains of central Montana.

Prior to 2023, there were more than 80 entrances and 27 shallow spots along a 6-mile stretch of the river, where various types of vehicles, including cars and side-by-sides, crossed. As these vehicles cut across, they caused erosion and an influx of sediment that coats rocks along the riverbed, suppressing insect life and the ability for fish to successfully spawn. By 2020, the sediment runoff had gotten so bad it was choking out nearly all the fish, Edgington said. 

“The fish population was estimated to be less than 10 percent of what we’d expect of a river that size and character,” Edgington said. “The river had become over-widened and shallow, creating unusual riffles, and the river couldn’t manage its sediment load.” 

So Edgington brought together a diverse coalition of groups, including the off-highway vehicle community and the Great Falls Trail Bike Riders Association, environmental groups, and federal and local government agencies to address the issue. They rebuilt 1,000 feet of riverbank, reduced the number of crossings by 80 percent, and built a new section of the off-highway vehicle and jeep trail so the area could still be used for recreation, without harming the river. It’s been a huge success, Edgington says, and the work is already paying off.

“Fish numbers are up,” he explained. “The work we did to remove the sediment is restoring water quality and the fish population in that incredible backcountry setting.”

The vehicles crossing the river weren’t breaking any rules; the Forest Service had designated the area open for motorized recreation, but the number of stream crossings degraded the health of the river and the threatened species that lived there, including the cutthroat trout. “I’m totally OK with appropriate machine use in the forest,” Edgington said. “But there are just places where the ecosystem is too sensitive to use this equipment.” 

The travel-management plan, written by the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, recognized this impact to the river and the need to reroute the road out of the river corridor. Parts of the Middle Fork are protected as a Wilderness Study Area and an Inventoried Roadless Area. Edgington said that because of those protections and the travel-management plan, it was worth investing in this restoration; he knew the conservation work would last. 

Before and after photos of restoration work on the Middle Fork of the Judith River. Courtesy of Montana Trout Unlimited

He said a full repeal of the travel-management rule would create more problems than it intends to solve. A change of this magnitude, he said, could be a devastating blow to river health and restoration projects like the Middle Fork Judith. 

“Whether that’s off-highway vehicles in the river or motorcycles on horse trails, it’s going to create a lot of conflict and confusion and animosity between different user groups.”

The process to change a federal rule is a long one. The Forest Service is accepting public comments on the plan to revise the rule, which is the first step in the process, through September 23.  

These proposed revisions to travel management aren’t occurring in a vacuum. They are one of several widespread policy changes that could take effect across the 193 million acres of land the Forest Service manages, including more than 19 million acres in Montana alone. Last month, just before the travel management revision, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the USDA was moving forward with rescinding the roadless rule, a policy that prevents road building and commercial logging on 45 million acres of Forest Service land. The Forest Service and other scientists have conducted extensive research showing how roads fragment habitat, disturb wildlife, introduce noxious weeds, and increase human-caused wildfires. In the first round of public comment, 99 percent of commenters opposed removing roadless protections. 

The short public comment periods have received public backlash. On September 11, the Forest Service announced it was adding 15 days to the comment period for the roadless rule; it is now open until October 6. In a statement about the decision, the agency wrote the extension was “to provide interested persons additional time to review the proposed rule and supporting materials.” 

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Eisen, the federal policy director for Wild Montana, said the roadless rule and travel-management rule help uphold the purpose of public lands.

“The intent in Congress is that they support current generations,” she said. “That they are also available for future generations, that’s the sustained yield, conservation piece of it. And the regulations we have that connect to public lands all tie in to that in one way or another.” 

The roadless rule, she said, ensures intact habitat remains for clean water and wildlife, but the travel-management rule affects far more people every time they visit a national forest.  

“Anytime you go anywhere on national forest land outside of wilderness, the travel-management rule is part of your experience,” she said. “And your experience is not an accident.”

Supporters of these changes, like Kerry White, who runs the Bozeman-based nonprofit Citizens for Balanced Use, say making trails open unless designated closed would create more opportunities for recreation. Citizens for Balanced Use is an organization that advocates for motorized access on public lands. 

“Without roads and trails, people can’t get out in the woods,” said White, who represented a section of Bozeman in the state legislature from 2013 to 2021. This is public land, and people with disabilities, the elderly, need some sort of transportation to get out there.” 

Karla Gagby, above, rides through the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwestern Montana on July Fourth. Gagby cannot hike because of a lung injury.
Gary Friedman / Getty Images

White said these new changes will allow for better access and clarity for visitors on ATVs, e-bikes, and other motorized vehicles. “By making everything open unless posted closed,” he said, “it puts a bit more onus on the Forest Service to do due diligence and, if a trail is closed, make sure those signs are posted and maintained and kept in place.”

White also believes these changes won’t have negative environmental impacts. “People are freaking out [that] we’ll have strip malls and open-pit mining in these areas, and that’s simply not the case,” he said. “There’s a lot of regulation that has to be done to do any kind of projects in these areas.”

But Eisen with Wild Montana said these changes are occurring alongside the Trump administration’s rollback of a myriad of the nation’s bedrock environmental protections, including changes to the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

“This administration does not appear to value what our public-land system is rooted in,” she said. “It’s more about, ‘How can I make a quick buck off of this for my benefit?’ I think it gets back into that interest in privatizing.”

To Edgington, these changes are a concerning pile-on. “Many of these rules were created with a thoughtful balance of forest use,” he said. “And there are probably areas where we could improve these rules, but a full repeal would be devastating to fish and wildlife resources beyond our comprehension.” 

He spent years overseeing restoration work and conservation for some of Montana’s most beloved trout fisheries. “Cold, clean water is a finite resource,” he said, “and we need to do whatever we can to protect it.”

While Edgington is proud of the work he and partners did to restore the Middle Fork of the Judith River, he doesn’t know how work like that happens without policies like the roadless and travel-management rules.

“This project was funded by three federal sources,” Edgington said. “If protections are possibly lifted and those investments are diminished? It is pretty counterintuitive to the responsible use of taxpayer dollars.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump wants to open nearly all national forest trails to dirt bikes and ATVs on Sep 22, 2026.

A landowner-led wind farm is seeking state and federal environmental approvals, but could struggle to proceed if a hotly contested transmission line doesn't go ahead.

The post Huge landowner-led wind project seeks green tick, despite looming threat to transmission link appeared first on Renew Economy.

Local TV promised to platform grassroots politics and marginal voices, but weak regulation and a broken business model let the sector thin out. Andy Brain surveys the survivors and asks how communities might reclaim local video

The post The people’s airwaves: saving local TV appeared first on Red Pepper.

Canada is not on track to meet its 2030 climate target. The latest federal data shows national emissions are just 10.3 percent below 2005 levels, which is the weakest performance in the G7, and the Prime Minister has acknowledged the 2030 goal is out...

This primer introduces solar radiation modification (SRM) to Canadian environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and policymakers, situating the topic in the context of accelerating climate timelines, Canada's own emissions shortfall, and...

With parts of the feminist movement drifting towards personal empowerment and green actors emphasising cost of living issues, few voices remain connecting the dots between ecological and feminist struggles. Yet studies show that rising temperatures increase domestic violence, and women are more heavily impacted by food scarcity during draughts and floods. How to build counterpower at times of gender and climate backlash? Ros Taylor spoke with the author of Feminism for a World on Fire. 

When I meet Natasha Walter towards the end of August, Britain’s arid summer is at last beginning to ebb. A few drops of rain have fallen on the yellow, desiccated parks, but not enough to revive them. In the past eight weeks, north London has had just two millimetres of rain.

But the drought and wildfires barely impinge on the political round. Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, belatedly sends a text message to Britons urging them not to light unnecessary fires. His new secretary for energy security and net zero, Miatta Fahnbulleh, will open up a North Sea gas field for drilling. Her Conservative shadow, Andrew Bowie, declares himself the “energy security secretary”, dropping any reference to net zero.

As temperature records are broken, the fight seems to have gone out of Britain’s environmental movement. Perhaps they expected the proof of global heating and multiple energy crises to concentrate politicians’ minds on the green transition. If so, they were very wrong. Instead, the talk now is almost exclusively of adaptation and how to generate enough electricity for air conditioning. Even the Green Party now mainly focuses on the cost of living and overheated workplaces. This has helped them in the polls, but it has done little to keep up the pressure to phase out fossil fuels.

Climate of repression

For activists like Walter, who was arrested in 2019 at a climate protest, the sense of powerlessness is distressing. Even as the Labour party made progress on decarbonising the grid and expanded wind and solar energy, it continued to crack down hard on environmental protesters. Judges imposed long prison sentences on people blocking roads and prevented them from mentioning their motives in court, so as not to sway a jury. In 2024, nine people who were arrested on their way to a planned action at Heathrow Airport spent ten months on remand before they appeared in court. The harsh sentences have significantly reduced climate protests in the UK. The government has also designated the pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, meaning that anyone who expresses support for it is liable to be prosecuted for a criminal offence.

“I feel so angry about it,” Walter says. “I really feel that there was a possibility when the first wave of climate activism was happening. You know, around 2018, a lot of people were taking to the streets. It was disruptive, [though] it wasn’t terribly disruptive to most people’s everyday lives. And I think it brought a lot of people together. It coalesced a sort of sense of urgency, and the community around that urgency.”

“And I think that some mainstream political parties on the left or towards the left could have done a lot more to connect with that energy, to learn from why people were coming out, and actually to support that energy and work with those desires to find ways forward. I find it really so baffling. And I feel so angry with this Labour government.”

She admits some of the actions “weren’t brilliantly planned or executed” – Just Stop Oil activists throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery in 2022, for instance – “but that’s OK. These sorts of movements are messy. But I just find it insane, the level of repression, and how little mainstream liberals and conservatives, left and right, have stepped up to this.”

Time for ecofeminism

Walter came relatively late to climate activism. In The New Feminism (1998), she argued that women needed to stop policing each other’s behaviour and focus on securing political power and equality. Living Dolls (2010) tackled the sexualisation of culture and what it meant for women. Her latest book, Feminism for a World on Fire, imagines a feminism that acknowledges what the climate crisis means for women, especially but not exclusively in the Global South. Feminism, she argues, has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political. She wrote Feminism for a World on Fire partly out of a sense of frustration that the environmental movement in the UK seemed to have no space for ecofeminism.

“When I was in Extinction Rebellion, I was really struggling to get women together to talk about feminist ideas in the environmental movement.” There was an emphasis on care, she says, and feminist principles guided the movement, but somehow it did not quite come together. Yet, for Walter, the movements are meaningless without each other. “Environmentalism without feminism is a patriarchy in the forest, but the women’s movement without environmentalism is a women’s centre on a dead planet.”

Bringing the two movements together is all the more important when mainstream feminism has become a marketable commodity to which the big tech companies pay lip service, and where women must climb over each other to reach the top. She says “this rhetoric of Lean In, ‘You go girl, give zero fucks, keep moving on, keep moving up’” reached an apogee in 2025, when Amazon’s chairman Jeff Bezos launched six women into sub-orbit to promote his Blue Origin space programme.

Feminism has let itself be subsumed by the consumer society and dreams of personal empowerment. It has stopped being political.

“The interests of capitalism feed off that kind of self-empowerment. It suits capitalism. You can sell women more goods, more stuff with the message that you can liberate yourself just through shopping, through constant makeovers and renewal… I was quite shocked when I started using Instagram by how many women that I thought of as feminists are engaged there in just selling stuff.”

Platforms have enabled some women to establish vast personal brands, but have also fed a form of apolitical narcissism. In the past decade, Walter says, the women’s movement has atomised, with “less and less empathy and solidarity between women from different parts of the world and different backgrounds.”

As director of the charity Women for Refugee Women, she found herself increasingly frustrated by performative, celebrity-driven events that felt very distant from the lives of ordinary women. At the same time, charities working with vulnerable women became more professional. There is more transparency and clearer guidance about how to act, but something has been lost. In the 1980s, one activist told her, women who reported domestic abuse would be supported, driven to a refuge, and hugged. “Now I see my colleagues taking that same call. They are polite. They go through the safeguarding checklist. They give her another number to call…” Grassroots work is vital because it is “where women find the tools for survival”.

In the UK, the Rochdale child sexual abuse scandal, where girls were raped by groups of men of mainly Pakistani origin between the 1990s and 2010s, has become a rallying point for the far-right Reform UK and Restore parties. They claim that the failure to prosecute the rapists for years shows that feminists did not protect girls for fear of being seen as racist. Walter, however, argues that the scandal persisted because the police did not listen to women working in frontline organisations.

She has spent time with women’s groups in the Middle East, and Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water. Feminism for a World on Fire reminds readers that however frightening global heating seems in Europe and the US, it has even worse consequences for the Global South. The impact specifically on women is under-researched, but the work we do have shows that women are more likely to die than men when food is scarce and during droughts and floods. Domestic violence rises during climate crises. A UN study found that it increases by 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature. Another study on heatwaves in Kenya found that pregnant women were vulnerable to cardiovascular problems in high temperatures and were still expected to collect water.

Domestic violence rises during climate crises, 4.7 per cent for every 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature.

“When societies are stressed, men are often taking out that stress and that precarity on women … It’s here, it’s now. You know, women’s crops are already failing because of the droughts and then the cyclones in Malawi. The girls living in the areas affected by floods in Bangladesh, they’re already missing out on school, they’re already being married off early. Their future is gone.”

Involvement at all levels

How to conclude a book that sets out the scale of the crisis and the misery to come? Walter admits it was difficult. She feels the least satisfactory sections of her previous two books about feminism were her efforts to direct people to organisations that were doing good work. Instead, “We need to have more faith in the idea that we can get involved in our community,” and organise to achieve a particular goal.

How to conclude a book that sets out the scale of the crisis and the misery to come? Walter admits it was difficult. She feels the least satisfactory sections of her previous two books about feminism were her efforts to direct people to organisations that were doing good work. Instead, “We need to have more faith in the idea that we can get involved in our community,” and organise to achieve a particular goal.

She is drawn to local activism, partly as an antidote to the sense of powerlessness that has seized the environmental movement, but also as an alternative to the endless scroll of digital “engagement”, a “relentless roll call of pain” – and because, as 1980s activists knew, only by meeting people face-to-face do we come to understand the messy complexity of their lives.

Walter acknowledges that the kinds of frustrations and compromises involved in unglamorous, local activism are by no means easy. “I’m not romanticising it, but I think it’s the only way to rebuild in the face of what we’re facing now.” Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book End Times Fascism offers a similar vision for local activism in the face of Big Tech dominance and the rise of the far right.

I ask Walter why so few women, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez excepted, are leading the charge against Trumpian politics and environmental destruction. Zohran Mamdani is the great hope of socialists in the US, and the figureheads of the British left are men: Zack Polanski leads the Greens in England and Wales, while Labour has never had a female leader in its entire history. The European far right, by contrast, has cultivated several charismatic women leaders, including Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, and Marine Le Pen.

“I think women who try and emerge on the left as leaders just feel too disruptive,” Walter says. “They break the mould of what our societies want to see in women too much, and they’re not valued. They face such a barrage of misogyny from their enemies. It just makes them unviable as leaders, as we saw with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. I’m not saying they were particularly charismatic or progressive leaders. Very problematic, I think, in many ways.” Both the former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and Finland’s Sanna Marin left frontline politics before middle age also because of intense backlash.

But the fact that female leadership is lacking should not deter women from getting involved. “We need more women climate leaders. But I also think we need more good followership. I think we need, as women, to get involved in stuff.”

“And you can make a change by contributing whatever you contribute. I really like telling stories and drawing out threads. But I also like doing the other stuff, just standing at the stalls at the eco-fair or going along and helping in the community garden or with the drop-in at the women’s centre.”

Stepping up

An earlier generation of radical feminists might observe that this is what middle-class British women like Walter have done for centuries – volunteered in their communities, unpaid and largely unnoticed, meeting the needs that the state will not. Is this a flight from catastrophe into the private sphere, a 21st-century version of Voltaire’s il faut cultiver notre jardin? But Walter’s feminism is anchored in the city, in the marches and demonstrations she still regularly attends. “I’m not much of a hippy. I’m living quite a normal urban life. People see ecofeminism in a maybe more radical and hippy box than that, and I’d like to say no, this is for everyone.”

Walter’s feminism is alive to the cruelties that emerge when people compete for scarce resources. As a charity leader, she saw “such divisions between women, hardening borders, that dehumanisation that creeps into people’s rhetoric”. In the UK, where groups of black-clad, balaclava-wearing men have been gathering to block roads and demand Britain “stop the boats”, the sense of fracture is acute. The Left observes bitterly that when climate protesters – some of them elderly women – lay down in the street, they were put in jail: the men of the far right, on the other hand, have been allowed to disperse without being arrested.

Towards the end of the book, Walter recounts seeing on her phone images of “the body of a female fighter being thrown from a building” in north-east Syria, where she had visited a group of women planning a better future. She tries to apply the lessons she learnt there about female solidarity in London, too. “When I feel really lost about the way forward it’s often the women around me who keep me going,” she writes. None of them “only spend their time asking other people to do things… They use their own talents and courage, and put them to work.”

The biggest wind project to begin construction in Australia this past year faced multiple hurdles. And perhaps the most difficult of all is the cost of capital.

The post “Like spinning 42 plates in the air at the same time:” How this impossible project broke Australia’s wind drought appeared first on Renew Economy.

With private-sector power and resources, major food brands can help spearhead significant food system transformations—but only if they embrace transparency and long-term thinking, leaders said. At Food Tank’s annual “Mission Driven Brands Sustainability Summit” at Climate Week NYC, founders and corporate sustainability officers had candid conversations about building trust in the food system.

“We’re making food, so there’s nothing more important than trust,” says Peter McGuinness, CEO of Bel North America. “If we’re making healthy food with real, simple ingredients, we are respecting the planet.”  

The event was hosted in partnership with Mission Driven Brands: Bel US, Northstar Recycling, Global Traceability Framework for Beef and Leather, and Bonterra Organic Estates. You can watch the livestream recording on Food Tank’s YouTube channel. 

As a surprise guest for a fireside chat, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, First Partner of California, grounded the audience in discussing the beneficiaries of better food-industry practices: The next generation.

“As a mother of four, I was trying to feed my own children local and organic,” she told the packed crowd. “I thought, ‘I can’t just be nourishing my own children, but all California children need to have this.’ … It’s a shame that we’ve been feeding kids such horrible food for so long.”

So how do we steer the ship? Trust is one of the most powerful resources a food business has—and also one that requires constant work to maintain, leaders said. This means both trust in individual companies and trust in broader institutions, like the food system at large. 

“Consumers more than ever want transparency, but they also want to know that they’re eating real food,” says Ann Marie Hourigan, Head of Quality Standards for Whole Foods Market. “There’s a lot of distrust in what’s been allowed in the food system over time.”

Building trust means focusing on transparent supply chains and traceable ingredients.

“[Traceability] makes companies accountable for what they’re doing and where they’re sourcing their products from,” says Diana Hanus, Senior Executive Vice President of Commercial & Business Development at Sovereign Seas. “It’s good for business; it’s not just good for the consumers. What traceability does is it puts a face to where your products are coming from.”

The solution is information: Not just more information, but better information, communicated more effectively to the shoppers and eaters who consume the companies’ products.

“If you can’t see it, you can’t really make claims and verify what’s in that supply chain,” says Mark Kaplan, Chief Marketing and Sustainability Officer at Wholechain. “In the future, I see labels on pretty much everything—policy and the world is asking for it.”

Across the food business landscape, several of the companies leading the charge toward more transparent, regenerative, transformative practices are not exactly food businesses at all—they’re beverage producers and sellers.

“At the end of the day, my team and myself are stewards of this type of farming and we are there to guide people,” says Elaina Leibee, Wine Director at Erewhon. “There really is not a lot of transparency in winemaking and what is in the bottle. Some people don’t know you can add up to 300 different additives in the wine, and it doesn’t have to be listed on the label.”

So what do better beverage business practices look like?

At Bonterra Organic Estates, Sustainability Manager Beatrix Scolari says, “We are cultivating our vineyards as a living, thriving ecosystem. Nearly every wine grower is facing some sort of climate pressure. But wine growers are extremely resilient.”

Practices like these mean that “you can eat and drink your way out of climate change with regenerative organic,” according to Stephen Cronk, Co-Founder and Trustee of the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation and the Co-Founder and CEO of Maison Mirabeau. 

As Rob Samuels, Eighth-Generation Whisky Maker and Managing Director at Maker’s Mark, reminded us, “Whisky is grown. Whisky is an agricultural product.” 

When you focus on that, it only makes sense for businesses to think and act sustainably, he said. 

“When you’re in the whisky business, you have to think long-term,” he says. “Oftentimes family companies have a sense of responsibility to the community. We want to be in business thriving all over the world for the next 100 years—of course we should be investing in this.”

We also have to remember that circular food systems of the future can’t just be accomplished by switching a plastic fork for a compostable one—the changes we need are truly systemic.

“Waste isn’t the problem; how it’s managed is,” says Shawna Laczko, Chief Revenue Officer at Northstar Recycling. “A material that’s compostable in theory needs the infrastructure at the right scale and in the right place.”

As Jordan Catalana, Senior Manager for Social Impact at the Tapestry Foundation, reminded us, “Scalability and adoption matter. That’s how we’re going to achieve anything.”

“It’s not about what we’re striving for; confidence and transparency are the only way we can prove any of it,” she says. 

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

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

Photo by Ryan Rose for Food Tank.

The post Industry Leaders Talk Transparency And Trust At Annual Climate Week Brand Sustainability Summit appeared first on Food Tank.

As the PM calls for climate "bravery" at a global summit in New York, NSW regulators prepare to sign off on a major new coal mine extension described as a "carbon bomb."

The post Biggest coal project lines up for approval as Albanese calls for “bravery” in climate action appeared first on Renew Economy.

Like the interstate system before it, a network of massive, hyper-scale AI data centers is cropping up across America. And much like highways, they’re spewing air, water, and noise pollution across our communities, unleashing more surveillance tech and police on our sidewalks, and erasing the climate gains of every bike or a bus trip we take — all for the supposed “benefit” of communities that many advocates doubt. 

Today, The Brake is back from hiatus with Saul Levin, veteran transit advocate and host of one of our favorite new podcasts, The Hum, where he interviews the leading voices in the data center resistance movement. And along the way, he helps us understand not just why these two types of fossil fuel infrastructure have so much in common, but how the same playbook can help defeat them both — especially if we band together. 

For a transcript of this conversation with AI typos (yes, we recognize the irony): click here.

The following is an adapted excerpt from The Peach: A Memoir of Trauma, Survival, and Forgiveness. It explores the author’s experience as a survivor of an infamous 2003 crash which claimed the lives of ten people.

I glance at my wristwatch. It’s 1:43 p.m. The Santa Monica Farmers’ Market closes at two. People scurry past me in search of the last berries, tomatoes, artisan cheeses, and tropical fruits. 

Through the crowd of shoppers and maze of reds, greens, and purples, I spot a pyramid of peaches that makes my mouth water. Summertime gifts you with at least one juicy peach that rewards you with peach sweetness. I walk to the other side of Arizona Avenue and carefully pick up a perfect one. I roll it in my hand, its downy fuzz tickling my fingers. I bring the peach to my nose. It smells like orchard sugar. I anticipate the first bite – the squirt, the pulp, the tang. 

I hear a pop. The peach flies out of my hand.

I do not remember a Buick sedan heading toward me as its eighty-six-year-old driver pressed his foot to the accelerator, believing he is pressing the brake. 

It would take me years to begin to trust the world enough to cross an intersection again. It would take years before I could see an older driver behind the wheel of a car and not shudder.

Our deepest fears can rule our lives. But sometimes we choose to study our fear, to examine its causes and learn how to protect ourselves and others from getting hurt. 

Eventually, I’d become a student of the little-understood phenomenon known as “pedal error,” an oddly sanitized and trivializing label for something that begins with a moment of confusion yet ends with blood on concrete. I learned that what had happened to me had happened to so many others, and would continue happening, because little was being done to tackle the root causes or prevent its recurrence.

The coming decades would be marred by a global vehicle-ramming epidemic. Vehicle-ramming incidents have become a disturbing worldwide trend. If you type in “vehicle-ramming” you’ll find a Wikipedia entry listing one attack after the next: Charlottesville, New York City, Ohio State University, Ontario, London and Berlin.

How easy it is, despite intention, age, or experience of the driver, for a vehicle to become a lethal weapon – a means of inflicting mass casualties. “The city is safe,” the Toronto police chief said in response to the deadliest rampage involving a vehicle in Canada in April 2018. Ten people were killed, mostly women, and another sixteen injured. A troubled loner deliberately drove a rental Ryder van along Toronto’s main artery for one-and-a-half miles during a busy lunch hour. The driver – Alek Minassian – intentionally struck one pedestrian after the other, tossing people into the street, crushing others in crosswalks, pinning a woman beneath the van. 

How does such pure madness, a gross act of outrage, affect the safety and well-being of Toronto residents? Does the bystander who rushed to help a pedestrian struck while crossing the street feel safe? And what about the injured, or the families of the dead? 

Recommended What is ‘Traffic Violence’ and Why Do We Need To Talk About It? Streetsblog May 3, 2021

I knew they would never feel safe again. Some will forever mistrust walk signals, traffic lights, all cars, all drivers. I imagine their feet coming to a cold stop at the edge of a curb, refusing to move into the crosswalk each time they see a white Ryder van waiting for a traffic light to turn green. Just as my feet freeze solid whenever I see a Buick Le Sabre idling at a stop light.

The escalation of vehicle-ramming attacks forced cities large and small to wake-up to the threat of out-of-control cars, and to consider solutions in the form of strategically placed barriers that would allow pedestrians to go about their business, free from this new threat. 

In 2018, the San Luis Obispo Farmers’ Market in California fast-tracked their pedestrian safety project; they approved $1.3 million to erect removable steel bollards. The concern for pedestrian safety gained urgency in New York City after a driver, high on PCP, sped three blocks on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk, followed by the vehicle-ramming attack along the Hudson River.

Recommended Commentary: Why do Leaders Only React to Traffic Violence When it Comes from Terrorists? Roger Rudick January 7, 2025

In the wake of these incidents, the city allocated $50 million for better, secure high-risk public spaces. Fifteen hundred metal bollards were installed at locations most visited by tourists. Some might gasp at the price tag attached to these barriers, but compare those figures to the collective medical expenses incurred by all sixty-three injured in the Farmers’ Market crash, plus medical damages incurred by the injured in New York City, Charlottesville, Toronto, Berlin, Nice …. Now that’s sticker-shock. 

The city of Barcelona has taken the lead and gone beyond erecting bollards to create long-term planning that reimagines the urban future as one in which cars are relegated to the fringes, and pedestrians move freely and safely in an urban landscape that is quieter, greener, and safer. In a big and bold move to stop prioritizing cars, Barcelona is constructing so-called “superblocks.” Traffic will be restricted to a few, large collector arteries, while secondary streets are being converted into citizen spaces designated for cultural activities, community gatherings, and leisure. This ambitious citywide plan will transform Barcelona, and may save thousands of lives.

Other cities should consider similar strategies — and start treating all traffic violence as preventable.

• Enforcing traffic laws is all well and good, but when cities rely on ticket revenue to fill the government’s coffers, it erodes trust in police and takes away resources from preventing or solving other crimes. (Governing)
• A rail consultant says that a national railroad infrastructure bank could bring together federal, state and private sector resources to build high-speed rail. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Planner Mark R. Brown argues that most public hearings about transportation are unnecessary or even downright counterproductive — a relic of bad decisions in the 1960s that now allow a vocal minority to kill good projects. (Car Free America)
• One upside of robotaxis is that they would make it a lot easier to implement congestion pricing. (Government Technology)
• Oregon is nowhere near meeting its goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mostly due to the Trump administration’s transportation policies and uncertain funding at the state level. (Capital Chronicle)
• WTSP pinpointed Tampa’s 10 deadliest roads.
• Jacksonville’s Skyway monorail is nearing the end of its useful life. What should replace it? (The Jaxson)
• Complete Streets improvements to Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Drive both reduced crashes and improved travel times. (NACTO)
• Crime dropped by two-thirds and revenue rose by $10 million a year after Bay Area Rapid Transit upgraded fare gates at train stations. (Mass Transit)
• Pittsburgh has started turning downtown’s Smithfield Street into a pedestrian-friendly corridor. (Post-Gazette)
• WUGA interviewed Athens, Georgia’s Vision Zero coordinator about the city’s new safety action plan.
• The Kansas City streetcar will turn into a rolling platform for live music, poetry and public art on Wednesday. (KCTV)
• The Doobie Brothers’ 1974 hit “Black Water” was written on a New Orleans streetcar. (Yahoo)
  
  

Bowen and AEMO celebrate new renewables record - first time above 80 pct in main grid - and the cheaper wholesale prices that came with it.

The post “More cheap, clean sovereign energy:” Bowen and market operator celebrate new renewables record appeared first on Renew Economy.

Victorian Labor says it will adopt the proposed federal Labor mandate and require future data centre developers to bring their own renewable energy and storage if re-elected in November.

The post Victorian Labor toes federal line on BYO renewables for data centres, Coalition still pushing gas appeared first on Renew Economy.

Powerful new wind turbine adds longer blades to reduce costs and boost output, and comes at critical time for the struggling Australian wind industry.

The post Global wind giant expects lower costs from new turbine equipped with extra-long blades appeared first on Renew Economy.

Angka besar, tangkapan layar kemenangan, label RTP, sampai cerita soal pola tertentu dapat terlihat meyakinkan ketika muncul bersamaan di layar. Masalahnya, tidak semua informasi tersebut memiliki bobot sama. Cara Royalgacor membaca informasi game perlu dimulai dengan memisahkan data permainan, materi promosi, serta pendapat komunitas. Langkah sederhana ini membantu pembaca memperoleh konteks sebelum menerima sebuah klaim sebagai fakta.

Kebiasaan tersebut semakin relevan saat informasi bergerak cepat melalui forum, grup komunitas, maupun media sosial. Klaim pemain slot terkadang berasal dari pengalaman pribadi dalam sesi singkat. Pengalaman tersebut tetap dapat menjadi bahan diskusi, tetapi belum cukup untuk menjelaskan cara sebuah game bekerja secara keseluruhan. Pada permainan berbasis peluang, hasil sebelumnya juga tidak membuat hasil berikutnya otomatis lebih mudah diprediksi.

Cara Royalgacor Memisahkan Data Game dari Pendapat Pemain

Membaca informasi game sebaiknya tidak berhenti pada kalimat seperti “sering menang”, “mudah bonus”, atau “sedang panas”. Istilah semacam itu perlu diperiksa kembali karena biasanya tidak menjelaskan periode pengamatan, jumlah putaran, versi permainan, maupun sumber datanya. Royalgacor dapat menempatkan informasi teknis sebagai lapisan pertama. RTP teoretis, volatilitas, aturan fitur, tabel pembayaran, serta mekanisme bonus memiliki fungsi berbeda. RTP, misalnya, merupakan persentase pengembalian teoretis berdasarkan performa jangka panjang. Angka tersebut bukan janji hasil untuk satu pemain atau satu sesi. UK Gambling Commission juga membedakan theoretical RTP dari actual RTP serta menekankan pengaruh volume permainan dan volatilitas saat membaca performa aktual.

InformasiCara MembacanyaHal Perlu DiwaspadaiRTPLihat sebagai nilai teoretis jangka panjangJangan dianggap persentase kemenangan per sesiVolatilitasMenggambarkan karakter variasi hasilBukan penentu waktu kemenanganFitur bonusPeriksa aturan resmi gameHindari klaim “pasti aktif” setelah pola tertentuRiwayat hasilGunakan sebagai catatan sesiTidak otomatis memprediksi putaran berikutnyaTestimoni pemainPerlakukan sebagai pengalaman individualJangan disamakan dengan data seluruh pemainScreenshot kemenanganLihat sebagai bukti satu kejadianTidak menunjukkan keseluruhan riwayat permainan Membaca Informasi Game dengan Melihat Sumber Pertama

Salah satu cara paling praktis menghindari informasi menyesatkan ialah mencari sumber awal. Jika sebuah klaim membahas RTP, aturan bonus, multiplier, atau mekanisme simbol, pembaca dapat membandingkannya dengan halaman bantuan game, informasi provider, atau dokumentasi relevan. Cara Royalgacor semacam ini membuat proses verifikasi lebih terarah dengan informasinya tidak dinilai hanya karena sering diulang. Frekuensi sebuah klaim muncul di komunitas tidak otomatis meningkatkan akurasinya. Standar responsible gambling juga menempatkan ketersediaan informasi, literasi permainan, serta komunikasi tanpa klaim menyesatkan sebagai unsur penting agar pengguna dapat mengambil keputusan secara lebih terinformasi.

Bedakan Pengalaman Pribadi dengan Mekanisme Permainan

Kalimat “saya mendapat bonus setelah beberapa putaran” menggambarkan pengalaman. Sebaliknya, pernyataan “bonus selalu muncul setelah jumlah putaran tertentu” sudah berubah menjadi klaim mengenai mekanisme. Perbedaan kecil tersebut sering terlewat. Terjebak klaim pemain slot bisa terjadi saat pengalaman individual berubah menjadi rumus umum setelah dibagikan berulang kali. Padahal permainan berbasis RNG dapat menghasilkan rangkaian hasil berbeda tanpa membentuk pola prediktif sederhana. Informasi dari regulator Gibraltar juga menjelaskan RNG diuji untuk menghasilkan keluaran acak dalam volume permainan sangat besar.

Royalgacor Perlu Memberi Konteks pada Angka

Angka sering terlihat objektif, tetapi angka tanpa konteks tetap dapat menimbulkan kesimpulan keliru. Contohnya, RTP 96% tidak berarti saldo Rp100.000 akan menghasilkan kembali Rp96.000 pada satu sesi. Hal serupa berlaku pada persentase kemenangan komunitas, statistik bonus, atau catatan permainan dalam periode pendek. Jumlah sampel, rentang waktu, volatilitas, serta metode pencatatan perlu diketahui sebelum data dipakai sebagai dasar kesimpulan. Membaca informasi game dengan konteks membantu pembaca memahami batas setiap statistik. Alih-alih mengejar satu angka paling menarik, perhatian dapat diarahkan pada definisi dan cara angka tersebut diperoleh.

Klaim Spektakuler Perlu Pemeriksaan Lebih Ketat

Semakin besar sebuah janji, semakin besar kebutuhan untuk memeriksa dasarnya. Frasa seperti “pasti menang”, “jam kemenangan”, “pola anti kalah”, atau “RTP menjamin profit” patut dipisahkan dari informasi teknis. Cara Royalgacor dapat menggunakan pendekatan sederhana: cari sumber, periksa definisi, lihat periode data, lalu bedakan fakta dari interpretasi. Metode ini tidak membuat informasi menjadi rumit. Justru pembaca memperoleh gambaran lebih bersih tanpa harus menerima setiap narasi komunitas.

Royalgacor Menempatkan Transparansi sebagai Filter Informasi

Kualitas informasi bukan ditentukan oleh seberapa meyakinkan kalimatnya, melainkan seberapa mudah klaim tersebut diperiksa. Royalgacor dapat menampilkan aturan game, penjelasan fitur, istilah teknis, serta batas interpretasi secara jelas agar pengguna tidak bergantung pada rumor. Pendekatan ini membuat proses membaca informasi game lebih rasional. Klaim pemain slot tetap dapat menjadi referensi pengalaman, tetapi posisinya berbeda dari dokumentasi teknis atau data jangka panjang. Pada akhirnya, informasi terbaik bukan informasi dengan janji terbesar. Data dengan sumber jelas, konteks memadai, serta batas klaim transparan jauh lebih berguna. Cara Royalgacor membaca informasi game melalui prinsip tersebut dapat membantu pengguna mengenali perbedaan antara fakta, pengalaman pribadi, promosi, dan asumsi sebelum menarik kesimpulan.

Windlab's John Martin on the project that broke the investment drought for big wind, and what makes the sector so hard. Plus: Victoria's disarray, EV milestones, and more.

The post The “impossible” wind project that broke the investment drought | Energy Insiders appeared first on Renew Economy.

Anne Jellema is executive director of 350.org; Mads Christensen is executive director of Greenpeace International; and Amitabh Behar is executive director of Oxfam International.

On Monday, global petitions with a collective total of more than 2 million signatures were presented to the United Nations, calling on governments to introduce binding mechanisms to make fossil-fuel companies and the super-rich contribute to the costs of the damage they have created.

The petition signatures were received by Selwin Hart, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Action, in New York during the UN General Assembly, sending a clear message to governments: there is no more room for excuses.

If governments are serious about resilience, energy security and protecting people from an increasingly unstable world, they must make the companies profiting from the fossil-fuel economy pay their fair share. Because the crisis we are facing is no longer some distant threat. It is unfolding in real time, and it is exposing the extraordinary costs of an economy still built around fossil fuels.

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For more than six months, the Strait of Hormuz, the channel through which a fifth of the world’s oil once flowed without a second thought, has been closed, contested or effectively unusable. Tankers sit at anchor. Insurance premiums have gone through the roof. Petrol pumps from Los Angeles to Lagos have felt the tremor. It has taken a war to remind the world just how much of our daily lives still rests on a single, fragile artery of fossil fuels.

At the other end of the same emergency, a glacier came down on the Nepal–China border in the last week of August. A wall of ice, rock and water tore through the Bhote Koshi and Langtang valleys. It has been described as one of the deadliest disasters in the region’s modern history, unfolding in a landscape where the world’s glaciers are retreating and destabilising at a pace scientists have been warning about for years.

And this came only weeks after hundreds of thousands of people were displaced — not by ice, but by fire. Europe has experienced its worst wildfire season in more than a decade. Homes have been lost across Spain, Portugal, France, Greece and the UK. Firefighters and civilians have been killed battling the blazes, while damage and reconstruction costs continue to reach extraordinary levels.

These are not separate crises. They are different expressions of a world becoming more volatile, while the fossil-fuel economy continues to generate enormous profits for those at the top and pushes the costs onto everyone else.

Communities absorbing cost

Because the crisis we are facing is no longer some distant threat. It is unfolding in real time, and it is exposing the extraordinary costs of an economy still built around fossil fuels. One thread runs through all of these events: a global economy still organised around the profits of a fossil fuel industry that has known, for decades, exactly what it was doing to the planet.

At a moment when governments are gathering in New York for the UN General Assembly to talk about security, resilience and economic competitiveness, it is worth spelling out what “security” – or the lack of it, driven by our economy’s dependence on oil – actually means this year for ordinary people around the world: 35,000 excess deaths in Europe due to heat; the highest food prices in three and a half years; $700 billion in economic losses, threatening countless jobs and livelihoods, from a war and a closed oil chokepoint whose consequences are nowhere near over.

Meanwhile the companies that extracted, refined, shipped and sold the fuel behind all of this continue to report extraordinary profits. Households are paying more for energy. Governments are spending billions on disaster response, on reconstruction, on emergency deployments of firefighters and aid. Communities are absorbing the cost of a system they didn’t design and don’t control. We pay. They profit.

This is not a coincidence, and it is not inevitable. It is a political choice, repeated year after year, to let the companies most responsible for the climate crisis hoard the wealth they generate while the rest of us carry the risk.

Taxes and fines needed

That is why, together with communities and campaigners in dozens of countries have spent the last three years building the case for a simple, overdue idea: polluters should pay for the damage they have caused. Not through voluntary pledges or distant net-zero promises, but through binding mechanisms, climate damages taxes, surtaxes on fossil fuel profits, and fines ring-fenced for recovery and adaptation that put real money where the harm actually is. This is how we take the profit out of destruction and protect the generations to come.

The response has told us we are not alone in thinking this. Our petitions calling on governments to make polluters pay have now gathered a collective total of over 2 million signatures from people across every region of the world.

The case for making polluters pay has moved into the mainstream

That is not a fringe demand. It is what happens when people watch a choke-point war spike their fuel bill, watch a glacier take a thousand lives, watch their own summer holidays rearranged by fire. They draw the obvious conclusion: the people who caused this should be paying for it – not profiting from it.

We hear the objection already forming: that this is not the moment, with wars underway and economies fragmenting, to burden industry further. We would say the opposite is true. If governments can mobilise trillions for war, for bailouts and for new fossil fuel infrastructure, they can mobilise the political will to tax the companies that caused this crisis.

Money for clean energy and resilience

That money can go straight to the people paying for it, through cheaper, cleaner, more secure energy, and through funding for communities on the frontline of floods, fires and glacial collapse. There isn’t an excuse left. There is only a choice about where power and money go next. Every dollar we don’t spend now on adaptation, resilience and cutting emissions, we burn many times over later: on disasters we could have prevented and economies we scramble to fix too late.

This year’s UNGA should be the moment that choice gets made in public. Governments arriving in New York will talk about resilience, about energy security, about protecting their citizens from an unstable world. Let them explain on the record why a fossil fuel industry that has spent decades profiting from that instability should not be the one paying to fix it so wrecking the planet no longer pays off.

The fires, floods and storms won’t just go away. The system that keeps producing these disasters, and keeps paying the same companies for the privilege, will not change itself unless political leaders step up. It is on all of us to make sure they hear, as loudly as possible, that the time for excuses has run out.

The post After Hormuz, Nepal and wildfires, people want action to make polluters pay appeared first on Climate Home News.

Grupo Temático de Energía y Alternativas Miembros * Carmen Aliaga * Franco Augusto * Rose Benedice Lawaetz * Matthew Burke * Raquel Castillo * Trimita Chakma * Alex Jensen * Madhuresh Kumar (Coord.) * Vasna Ramasar * Rebeca Roysen * Manthan Shripadvs

Energy and Alternatives Thematic Group Members * Carmen Aliaga * Franco Augusto * Rose Benedice Lawaetz * Matthew Burke * Raquel Castillo * Trimita Chakma * Alex Jensen * Madhuresh Kumar (Coord.) * Vasna Ramasar * Rebeca Roysen * Manthan ShripadalternativesalternativesGTAalternativesalternativesalternativesvsalternativesalternativesalternativesGTAweaversendorsersalternatives