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As storms intensify in our warming world, recovery no longer feels permanent in places at risk of disasters. Instead, it’s too often a temporary reprieve before the next disaster hits. Recognizing community disaster fatigue is an important step toward building resilient recovery systems.

The Public Lands Action Network is a free tool that finds every public lands decision open for comment and helps you write the one comment the law makes them answer.

Sowing flowers in spring may have a surprising effect on the inner lives of bees.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which became law in 2022, was the first and largest climate bill in the history of the United States. It was also the cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda. The bill offered billions of dollars in tax credits for companies that built solar and wind farms or electric vehicle battery factories, and to consumers who purchased electric cars and heat pumps. These incentives led developers to build enough solar and wind to power millions of homes and spurred the construction of hundreds of new factories, helping trigger a surge of new American manufacturing investment for the first time in decades.

The law lasted less than three years. Last July, President Donald Trump signed what he called the “Big Beautiful Bill,” a sweeping tax reform that repealed almost all the main subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. Even though around two dozen Republicans in Congress said they wanted to preserve clean energy incentives, almost all of them voted to pass the law. In signing the bill, Trump said it would end what he called the “Green New Scam.” 

A year after the repeal, the outlook for the climate is mixed. Most significantly, the IRA’s path toward sharply lowering emissions has been derailed. The IRA would have led the U.S. to cut its carbon emissions 50 percent from peak levels by 2035, but that goal is now out of reach. A series of studies have found that the repeal puts the U.S. back on track for the 30 percent reduction it was on track to achieve even before the IRA, and that emissions will likely remain more or less flat through the end of the decade. The repeal has also succeeded in slowing the clean energy buildout. Manufacturers and energy developers have scrapped dozens of solar farms and battery plants.

But the transition has not come to a complete halt. Most solar and wind projects that relied on Biden-era tax credits are still moving forward because they can make a profit even without subsidies. The electricity sector in particular is edging away from fossil fuels as renewables offer a cheap and fast alternative in many parts of the country. And some nixed projects may make a comeback despite Trump’s efforts to kill them.

Even now, a year after the repeal, its full effects are difficult to measure. It’s also hard to separate the effect of the IRA repeal from the Trump administration’s other policies. The president has canceled federal grants for clean energy projects, blocked the development of offshore wind, used executive authority to prevent the retirement of coal plants, and repealed dozens of agency rules that were meant to crack down on emissions. It’s unclear how many of these efforts will survive in court or how long they will last, which also makes it difficult to know how damaging the loss of tax credits for renewable energy and electric vehicles might be. That’s all without factoring in the AI boom, which has triggered more development of renewable energy and fossil fuels.

“There are all of these broader uncertainties and heterogeneity as well, where it’s really hard to be definitive about what are the effects of the repeal,” said Erin Mayfield, a climate modeling expert at Dartmouth who also served as a climate consultant to the Biden administration. She added, though, that the transition is likely to be rockier without the IRA. “With the Inflation Reduction Act, the idea was that you’re building this kind of foundation for future change, you’re trying to structurally change our economy,” she said. That foundation is now gone.

Then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic lawmakers hold up the Inflation Reduction Act during a signing ceremony at the Capitol in August 2022. The bill was the largest climate investment in U.S. history. Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

A report released earlier this month by the pro-climate business group E2 found that the Big Beautiful Bill and other Trump actions have caused an economic downturn in the clean energy sector. The group’s analysis found that the IRA repeal likely wiped out some $53 billion in wages and $20 billion in tax revenue that would have come from construction of new energy projects alone. That doesn’t even account for the annual revenue and wages that battery factories and other projects would have produced every year. These projects would have created around $55 billion in annual output, larger than the gross domestic product of the entire state of Vermont.

“Businesses rely on market certainty, and the clean energy industry had that until the Big Beautiful Bill, and it doesn’t anymore,” said Bob Keefe, the executive director of E2, which produced the report.

Read Next Moderate Republicans defended Biden’s climate law — then voted to repeal it Zoya Teirstein

The economic carnage is worst in the electric vehicle industry. Even before the Big Beautiful Bill became law, major auto manufacturers pulled back on their plans to build new electric vehicle factories across the United States, and many startups that were planning large EV battery plants scrapped those proposals as well. The automakers cited soft demand for electric cars among American consumers, but many experts believe that the contraction was also driven by an expectation that Trump would repeal the EV credits in the IRA. (E2’s analysis considers cancellations beginning on January 1, 2025, before Trump even took office.)

“This didn’t start with the bill,” said Keefe. “It started with the raft of executive orders that the president issued the day he took office. It started probably actually on the campaign trail. It’s been pretty clear where the market has been headed.”

The wave of closures and cancellations has erased more than 250,000 jobs in the electric vehicle sector, according to the analysis from E2, accounting for around half of all job losses from the repeal. These high-wage manufacturing jobs would have been long-term jobs, not temporary construction roles. Even so, not every canceled project on E2’s list is gone for good. Last year, Ford closed down an electric vehicle battery plant it owned with the company BlueOvalSK. A few months ago, it began retooling the plant to create utility-scale batteries that can store solar energy during times when the sun isn’t shining.

An aerial view of the Ford BlueOval Battery Park under construction in Marshall, Michigan. The plant was built to produce lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

But when it comes to the electricity that lights our homes and buildings, other experts argue that the picture is not as dire. The IRA provided a rebate to developers who built new solar and wind farms, but losing that rebate hasn’t destroyed the clean power sector altogether. A new paper from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, published last week, argues that “the glass is half full” when it comes to solar and wind. By comparing two models of the power grid, one from before the repeal and one from after, the paper concludes that around 75 percent of new clean power expected under the IRA will still come online despite the loss of the tax credits.

“The wind and solar tax credits … certainly accelerated deployments and investments when they were in place,” said Lily Bermel, the author of the report, who is now a visiting fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy. “But without them, what you see is the baseline of market momentum that is still adding this energy to the grid.”

Solar has proven especially resilient, according to Bermel. More than 80 percent of large-scale solar power plants and almost all rooftop solar that were projected under the IRA will still come online. The picture is much worse for onshore wind farms, which are more expensive and take longer to build. These projects are also facing roadblocks from Trump’s Pentagon. Roughly 50 percent of those projects will vanish without tax credits to support them. 

In an ironic twist, the boom in artificial intelligence data centers could blunt the economic impact of these losses, even as their power usage encourages further consumption of coal and natural gas. While Trump’s repeal has wiped out an estimated 125,000 construction jobs in clean energy, the data center boom has created tens of thousands of jobs that no one was expecting when the bill became law. As of late last year, the construction industry was short almost half a million workers. By the same token, tech giants are now paying top dollar for renewable energy to power data centers. Despite the broader struggles in the onshore wind industry, Google just inked a billion-dollar deal to build around 1.4 gigawatts of wind power in Minnesota, enough for around half a million homes. Tech companies also promise investments in transmission and batteries, which will make it easier to build more renewables that can displace legacy coal and gas.

“Demand being that big sends a huge signal to investors and developers to do more in this space,” said Ray Long, the president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, which represents solar and wind developers. “There still remains a lot of interest in investing in clean energy infrastructure in the United States.”

Read Next One year in, the Inflation Reduction Act is working — kind of Zoya Teirstein

In addition to her argument that clean energy has survived the repeal of the IRA tax credits, Bermel’s paper makes another provocative argument. She writes that Biden’s climate subsidies weren’t working all that well even before they were repealed. That’s because there were still constraints to building the amount of solar and wind that the market was demanding — the U.S. has a shortage of transmission lines that carry power from region to region, and federal law requires lengthy environmental and historic preservation reviews for new construction projects.  

Even when the Inflation Reduction Act passed, many experts warned that it would fail unless the United States built more new transmission: A projection from the REPEAT Project at Princeton University found that 80 percent of the law’s potential climate benefits depended on that. Yet those lines never appeared. 

Congress has been trying this year to pass a “permitting reform” law that would incentivize new transmission lines and cut down on environmental reviews. The idea has bipartisan support in the House and the Senate because it would boost clean energy while also cutting down on regulations. Bermel argues that passing this package would be better for the climate than restoring the energy tax credits that Trump repealed, as Democrats and even some Republicans have proposed to do after the midterms.

“The point of the IRA was that it made clean [energy] cheaper, and in being successful at doing that, what we did was reveal how big and how scary a monster under the bed permitting is,” said Bermel. 

Solar panels and wind turbines in southern Arizona generate electricity for the city of Tucson. Both solar and wind have seen continued investment despite the repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act. Getty Images

The clean energy industry is trying to look beyond the Inflation Reduction Act and the subsidies that came with it. Long of the American Council on Renewable Energy was lukewarm about restoring the tax credits. He instead focused on permitting reform and the need to liberate wind and solar projects that the Trump administration is blocking.

“What we’ve got out there, irrespective of policy, is a functioning market,” he said. “The holdup is action and inaction by government. If we’re going to have a discussion about tax credits … we need to have durability, it really needs to be bipartisan.” 

Even so, there are roadblocks: The lead Democrats behind the effort have said they won’t endorse a deal until the Trump administration stops using executive authority to block solar and wind projects on federal lands and waters. And not everyone wants to weaken environmental laws — many climate nonprofits, community groups, and tribal nations say that rolling them back to simplify and speed up permitting would allow developers to bulldoze sensitive species and sacred territory.

A case in point for both sides is SunZia, a 550-mile transmission line that carries electricity from a wind farm in New Mexico to the cities of Southern California. The new electricity from this $11 billion project will help the metropolis plug in more electric vehicles and wean itself off gasoline. It is the largest wind project in the United States, and it only happened thanks to the wind tax credits, which provide a rebate for every watt of electricity that the project’s wind turbines generate. But despite these incentives, the line still took more than a decade to build. First, it had to go through multiple state regulatory approvals, and it had to be rerouted to avoid a wildlife refuge and a missile testing site. Then, in 2024, the Tohono O’odham and San Carlos Apache tribal nations sued to stop the project, arguing that the government had failed to account for its impacts on important ancestral territory and a pristine desert valley. 

Even if Congress passes a permitting reform bill, that won’t set the United States on a path toward meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement, the worldwide pact that sought to limit climate change to 2 degrees Celsius. But the Inflation Reduction Act didn’t either. The Biden-era law made it more lucrative to build solar panels, manufacture high-powered batteries, and buy electric vehicles, but it didn’t make it easier to do those things. The law didn’t provide for power lines that could carry that new electricity around, and it didn’t clear legal hurdles for companies that wanted to build large-scale clean power.

The best that climate advocates can hope for out of the Trump administration is an inversion of that reality. If Trump presides over the repeal of the IRA and the passage of a major permitting package, he will have made all the above climate actions easier but less lucrative.

The hope in that case is that clean power and gas-free cars will become cheap and reliable enough to outcompete fossil fuels on their own merits. The question is how long that will take. We don’t know how long it would have taken if Trump had not repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, but we know it will take longer now.

Correction: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect title for Dartmouth.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s climate law is dead. The energy transition might not be. on Jul 17, 2026.

'Cosy games' have grown in popularity in recent years but can they be more than mere escapism? Dr Stephanie Farnsworth investigates

The post Pokopia, cosy games and the problem of escapism appeared first on Red Pepper.

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• Not only is speeding wasteful and dangerous, it only saves the average driver less than a minute off their commute. (Yahoo!)
• The U.S. DOT has removed bike lanes and speed cameras from its list of best practices that have been shown to reduce crashes and save lives. (NPR)
• A long article in tech magazine Noema argues that driverless cars save lives even if most people don’t perceive them as safe.
• People who work from home one day a week drive more than full-time commuters, while those who work from home at least three days a week drive less. (Science Direct)
• A Democratic bill would provide $205 billion over five years for high-speed rail projects. (Streetsblog USA)
• Distracted driving declined 14 percent after Iowa passed a law banning the use of mobile devices while driving. (Government Technology)
• A new depot is essential to the success of Austin’s light rail line. (Metro Magazine)
• Video of police stopping a Black Pennsylvania teen for jaywalking went viral. (Patriot-News)
• The last streetcar bridge in Washington, D.C. will be torn down, allowing the National Park Service to reopen a trail that’s been closed due to falling debris. (WTOP)
• Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava wants to slash bus service and future transit projects to close a budget cap. (Herald; paywall)
• The Milwaukee County Transit System is facing 25 percent bus service cuts. (Urban Milwaukee)
• Bike traffic in Paris increased by 240 percent between 2018 and 2023. (Momentum Mag)
• Some Southeast Asian cities are organized around rivers rather than roads. (Arch Daily)
• Toronto is integrating bikeshare and public transit. (Cities Today)

Nearly half a century after the Iranian Revolution, its outcome is still widely treated as inevitable. The Shah fell, the story goes, and a deeply religious society naturally produced an Islamic state. Clerical rule appears, in hindsight, as history fulfilling cultural destiny. This interpretation is politically convenient and historically wrong.

The Islamic Republic did not emerge because Iranian society was inherently predisposed toward theocracy. Nor was the victory of the clerical leadership preordained. The Revolution was a profoundly social upheaval shaped by competing class forces, organisational strengths, political miscalculations, and strategic struggles within the revolutionary camp itself.

The Revolution did not have to end with clerical rule. Its outcome was fought over and decided.

The Revolution contained democratic and egalitarian possibilities that were defeated through political struggle rather than cultural destiny.

Understanding why matters urgently today, not only for interpreting Iran’s past, but also for understanding why opposition to imperial aggression against Iran cannot be confused with political support for the regime that ultimately consolidated power.

A social revolution, not a religious eruption

The overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah was the culmination of decades of uneven capitalist transformation imposed from above. Oil revenues financed industrialisation, urban expansion and state-led modernisation, yet political participation remained tightly controlled. Rural displacement accelerated, inequality widened, and millions were pushed into precarious urban existence.

By 1978, dissent had escaped elite circles and become mass rebellion. Demonstrations paralysed major cities, but it was the strike movement,

particularly among oil workers, that fatally undermined the monarchy. Production halted, state income collapsed, and the regime’s coercive apparatus began to fracture.

Across factories and workplaces, workers established councils known as shoras. These bodies supervised hiring, challenged management authority and, in some cases, exercised direct control over production. They emerged organically from struggle rather than religious mobilisation. For a brief historical moment, power was fragmented between a collapsing state and newly created popular institutions.

The Revolution opened a vacuum. What followed was not the automatic triumph of Islamism but a struggle over who would fill that space.

Genuine emancipation, in Iran as elsewhere, can only be the work of those struggling within society itself.

Islamist networks entered this struggle with decisive advantages. Decades of repression had shattered secular parties, socialist organisations, and independent unions. Mosques, religious charities, and clerical networks, however, survived as nationwide infrastructures embedded in everyday social life.

Religious discourse also translated diverse grievances into a shared moral language. Economic injustice, political repression and national humiliation could all be framed as symptoms of moral corruption. This allowed bazaar merchants, students, professionals and the recently urbanised poor to imagine themselves united within a single revolutionary community. Yet this unity concealed deep contradictions.

Islamist leadership mobilised popular anger against dictatorship and foreign domination while defending private property and social hierarchy. It invoked justice for the oppressed while opposing independent working-class organisations and women’s emancipation. Its strength lay precisely in bridging incompatible social interests under a common ideological umbrella.

The decisive question was not whether alliances with such forces should exist. Revolutions make alliances unavoidable. The question was how those alliances were conducted.

The alliance dilemma

Opposition to the Shah necessarily brought together secular radicals, nationalists, liberals, and religious activists. Cooperation during the struggle against dictatorship was both inevitable and legitimate. No single force could defeat the regime alone. The catastrophe emerged after victory.

For a brief historical moment, power was fragmented between a collapsing state and newly created popular institutions.

Large sections of the Iranian Left interpreted the clerical leadership primarily through its anti-imperialist rhetoric. Because it opposed U.S. influence and denounced the monarchy’s Western alignment, it was treated as a progressive partner whose authority should not be challenged during a supposedly transitional stage. Alliance gradually became political subordination.

Instead of maintaining organisational independence while cooperating in struggle, major left currents endorsed referendums legitimising clerical authority, muted criticism of repression and accepted restrictions imposed in the name of revolutionary unity. Independent criticism was postponed precisely when power was being consolidated.

The problem was not cooperation itself. Refusing a united struggle would have isolated the Left from the revolutionary masses. The disaster lay in abandoning political autonomy.

Revolutionary alliances require clarity about divergent social projects. In Iran, shared opposition to the Shah was mistaken for shared visions of the future.

The weakness of the workers’ movement deepened this imbalance. Although factory councils proliferated rapidly, they remained locally rooted and politically fragmented. No national structure emerged capable of transforming workplace militancy into an alternative centre of authority.

As analysed in studies of Iranian labour movements, workers possessed immense disruptive power but lacked durable institutions linking factories across sectors and regions. Without coordination, economic control could not become political power.

Clerical leaders moved swiftly to contain this threat. Strikes were denounced as harmful to national recovery. Appeals to Islamic unity reframed labour demands as selfish disruptions of the Revolution. Workers who had paralysed the monarchy were encouraged, and increasingly pressured, to restore production. Gradually, leverage evaporated.

Counterrevolution from within

The consolidation of clerical rule unfolded not simply through repression but through political struggle inside revolutionary institutions themselves.

Professional and managerial layers anxious about workplace democracy aligned with efforts to restore discipline. Islamic activists reshaped councils into structures loyal to the emerging state. Revolutionary committees increasingly functioned as mechanisms of central authority rather than grassroots power.

Counterrevolution did not restore the Shah’s order. It emerged from within the victorious coalition itself.

By the early 1980s, independent organisations were marginalised or destroyed. Repression followed political isolation rather than preceding it. The revolutionary opening narrowed step by step until clerical monopoly became reality.

Subsequent interpretations often fall into opposing simplifications. One portrays Islamist movements as inherently fascistic enemies, justifying alliances with authoritarian states or liberal elites. The other romanticises them as authentic anti-imperialist forces. Iran demonstrates the inadequacy of both views.

Movements rooted in social dislocation can simultaneously challenge domination and impose new forms of hierarchy. Cooperation in struggle may be necessary, but political independence is indispensable. Without it, the most organised force captures revolutionary energy and reshapes it to its own ends. The Iranian Left’s tragedy was an uncritical alliance.

Iran under attack

These historical lessons acquire renewed urgency amid ongoing military threats and attacks against Iran today.

The Islamic Republic is an authoritarian state that has repressed workers, jailed dissidents and crushed democratic movements. None of this should be minimised. Yet opposition to that regime cannot translate into support for external aggression.

Imperial intervention has never delivered emancipation in the Middle East. From Iraq to Libya, military assaults carried out in the language of liberation have destroyed societies while strengthening reactionary forces. Foreign bombardment does not empower democratic movements. It devastates the very social actors capable of producing internal change. Deliverance cannot come from imperialism.

External attack strengthens authoritarian rule by allowing regimes to present themselves as defenders of national sovereignty. It sidelines internal dissent, militarises politics and fractures civil society. Those who suffer first are workers, students and ordinary civilians, not ruling elites.

Defending Iran against imperial aggression, therefore, does not mean endorsing its rulers. It means recognising that social transformation can only emerge from struggles within society itself.

The same principle applies today as in 1979. Liberation cannot be imposed from above, whether by clerics or by foreign powers.

The endurance of the Islamic Republic should not obscure the contingency of its origins. The Revolution contained democratic and egalitarian possibilities that were defeated through political struggle rather than cultural destiny.

Recurring protest waves in Iran, labour strikes, women-led uprisings and youth mobilisation reveal tensions rooted in that unfinished revolutionary moment. The demands remain familiar: dignity, economic justice and political freedom.

Remembering that the Revolution did not have to end in clerical rule restores historical agency. Outcomes are shaped by organisation, leadership and strategy.

Iran’s experience shows that alliances are unavoidable in revolutionary moments. But whether they liberate or suffocate depends on maintaining independence, clarity, and the capacity to challenge allies once victory reshapes the terrain.

And it reminds us of something equally essential today. Authoritarian rule cannot be overthrown by bombs, sanctions or foreign intervention. Genuine emancipation, in Iran as elsewhere, can only be the work of those struggling within society itself.

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

The post Iran’s Revolution was not destined to end in clerical rule appeared first on Tempest.

Today, multiple news outlets reported that President Trump’s teleprompter operator has been placing profitable bets on Kalshi regarding the content of Trump’s forthcoming speeches. Public Citizen has repeatedly appealed to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees the prediction markets, to investigate and enforce the laws against insider trading. On March 5, 2026, Public Citizen filed an insider trading complaint with the CFTC following highly suspicious trades on the timing and developments of the American invasion of Iran. On April 30, 2026, Public Citizen and Better Markets urged the CFTC to conduct rulemaking on prediction markets trading activity.

Craig Holman, Ph.D., government affairs lobbyist with Public Citizen issued the following statement:

“Betting on political events on the prediction markets has become highly profitable for a small handful of anonymous bettors. Ever since the American invasion of Venezuela and Iran, a few people have been placing very large bets moments before the events take place, and scoring millions in profits. The timing and accuracy of these bets strongly suggest insider trading, probably by a few individuals in the know within the Trump administration.

“News just broke that Trump’s teleprompter operator has been placing such bets on the content of Trump’s upcoming speeches. This is further evidence of illegal insider trading on the prediction markets – an industry that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has let operate like the Wild West.

“Public Citizen again calls on the CFTC to wake up and do its job of overseeing the prediction market industry and enforcing the insider trading laws.”

This panel conversation from June 18 in Broadview brought together energy experts, health professionals, and local leaders to discuss the latest developments of Quantica’s 5,100-acre data center in Yellowstone County and the actions Montanans can take to protect our communities. — Panelists: Anne Hedges, MEIC Dr. Lori Byron, Montana Health & Climate (formerly Montana Health …

The post Recording of Panel — Broadview: Montana’s Largest Data Center Proposal appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.

EWG mourns the passing of David Baker, longtime board member and environmental justice leader Anthony Lacey July 16, 2026

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Working Group is deeply saddened by the death of David Baker, the second longest-serving member of its current board of directors. 

In his role – a position he held for more than two decades – he provided wise counsel, principled leadership and a constant reminder that environmental protection is fundamentally about protecting people. 

Baker was also a leader in the environmental justice movement. His unwavering commitment to equity, public health and community advocacy helped shape EWG.

As founder and executive director of Community Against Pollution, in Anniston, Ala., Baker dedicated his life to holding powerful polluters accountable. He fought for families whose communities had been burdened by toxic contamination. 

His work became a model for grassroots environmental justice advocacy nationally and inspired generations of advocates to stand up for clean air, clean water and healthy communities.

“David never let us lose sight of who this work is really about,” said EWG President and co-founder Ken Cook. “He brought the voices of communities living with pollution into every board meeting and every conversation. 

“His courage and wisdom made EWG a stronger organization and all of us better advocates,” Cook added.

Advocate for the unheard

Throughout his life, Baker was a fearless ally of people who too often went unheard. 

His leadership in Anniston exposed the devastating legacy of the chemical giant Monsanto polluting the small community with PCB contamination from the company’s chemical plant there. His work helped bring environmental justice into the national conversation. 

Baker understood that low-income communities and communities of color too often bear the greatest burden of pollution. He spent his life demanding accountability, transparency and justice.

“David was a force of nature – courageous, compassionate and deeply committed to doing what was right,” Cook said. 

Beliefs that guided his life’s work 

“He never sought the spotlight. He simply believed that people deserve clean air, clean water and a fair chance at a healthy life. That belief guided his life’s work and inspired everyone who had the privilege of knowing him,” Cook added.

Baker was a longtime member of the NAACP and the Coalition for Black Trade Unionists. 

Baker earned a degree in labor management from Cornell University. He received an honorary doctorate from the Alabama Legislature, in 2003. 

He was recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency with awards for outstanding leadership and contributions to the advancement of environmental justice. 

His work was also featured in Dennis Love’s book, “My City Was Gone.” 

“The Environmental Working Group extends its deepest condolences to David’s family and all who loved him. We are profoundly grateful for his decades of service, his friendship and the example he set for all of us,” said Cook.

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The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action. Visit www.ewg.org for more information.

Areas of Focus Family Health Toxic Chemicals Press Contact Alex Formuzis alex@ewg.org (202) 667-6982 July 16, 2026

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) today published an authoritative report, Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts, that validates the science connecting individual weather disasters and their lethal societal impacts directly to human-caused fossil fuel pollution. In response, Stephanie Brancaforte, climate accountability campaign director with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, issued the following statement:

“For decades, Big Oil knowingly poisoned our atmosphere and deceived the public about the impacts of burning fossil fuels —all the while lining executives’ pockets as communities continue to suffer from extreme heat, floods and fires.

“The science is clear: the extreme heat killing thousands of people in the northern hemisphere this summer is neither an unpredictable event nor an accident—it is the result of corporate crime. With the backing of the National Academies, survivors of climate catastrophes now have strong evidence to pursue justice against fossil fuel polluters to pay for the devastation they have unleashed.”

The Aral Sea sits between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and was once the fourth-largest inland body of water on Earth. For the past 60 years, though, humans have bled it nearly dry irrigating cotton crops, leaving behind a salty plain the size of Ireland. Its loss has long been seen as an ecological and humanitarian problem, but new research shows that it has also been a significant driver of climate change.

The Aral Sea is technically a lake. But when nearly any body of water is full and works as it should, organic matter collects on the bottom, where it remains trapped, often for centuries or millennia. “They accumulate carbon in the sediment,” explained Rafael Marcé, a research scientist at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Blanes, Spain, and the lead author of the study, which was published today in the journal Science. “They are carbon sinks.”

If the water dries up, however, stored carbon is released, turning sinks into sources. It’s something that Marcé has seen in smaller lakes he’s studied, but even he was surprised by what his team found during its 2022 expedition to Central Asia. “We didn’t go to the Aral Sea blind. We had some previous evidence,” he said. “We had no idea about the potential magnitude.” 

The Aral Sea has left behind a timeline of sorts. The edges dried out decades back, while some areas were wet until just a few years ago. Marcé and his colleagues collected samples along this gradation. The technique allowed them to reconstruct how much carbon the lake had emitted as it evaporated. The figure is staggering. Between 1960 and 2022, they found, the Aral Sea had pumped a remarkable 748 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s three times the annual emissions of Spain. 

“At the beginning it goes pretty fast, then it slowly decays,” said Marcé, noting that about half of the carbon dioxide is released in the first 15 years after a section of the lake is exposed. The paper also found that nearly a fifth of emissions came from wind blowing sediment away, an aspect of drying that experts say hadn’t been adequately studied before. 

“This dust is a really big issue,” said Sarian Kosten, an aquatic ecologist and professor at Radboud University who was not involved in this research. She called the overall science fascinating and sound, yet the trend disheartening. “I always find it very sad to see these pictures of the declining water surface there.”

Oneof the study’s limitations, said Marcé, is that scientists could bring only relatively light-duty equipment to the Aral Sea. That meant that their sediment cores were capped at 50 centimeters — about 20 inches — even though the lake bed is many feet thick. The researchers aren’t sure what is happening further down “It could be that all these degradation effects are contained in the first layers,” he said. Or, “all these carbon calculations we did could be a gross underestimate.” 

The group plans to return with bigger drills next year to learn more. The paper also highlights the many other places around the world that are in the midst of this “dry flux” phenomenon. That includes Lake Chad in western Africa, Bolivia’s Lake Poopó, and the Caspian Sea, which is the world’s largest inland body of water and is expected to shrink by more than the entire area of the Aral Sea by the end of the century. The Salton Sea in California is also mentioned, as is Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which another recent study found is releasing over 4 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. 

“There is a whole bunch of CO2 coming out of the ground that no one was counting,” said Soren Brothers, the author of the Great Salt Lake paper, a limnologist at the University of Toronto, and the climate curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada. But researchers are increasingly putting numbers to that “huge blind spot” and he’s impressed by the latest Aral Sea study, which he wasn’t involved in. “This is adding to the story of these inland waters.” 

The mounting evidence around these emissions is particularly worrying because it could be a sign of a climate tipping point from which it would become difficult, if not impossible, to recover. “If we keep on doing this kind of stuff, where we are drying up lakes,” said Brothers, ”those could take over driving climate change.” 

The Aral Sea paper also examined how much carbon dioxide has yet to be released from the lake, and pegged the number at about 605 million metric tons. While that makes the salt flat a ticking climate bomb, Marcé and his co-authors argue that this also means there’s an opportunity to reverse course. “We want to spotlight the fact that we have all this carbon that can be protected,” said Marce. “It’s offering a solution. Or a conversation at least.” 

Keeping that amount of carbon dioxide in the ground would be equivalent to about $18 billion worth of carbon credits, the paper estimates. Brothers thinks this attention to potential paths forward is among the most interesting parts of the paper. “That’s a new contribution,” said Brothers, and the logic could apply to any body of water that’s storing carbon, from reservoirs like Lake Mead on the Colorado River to urban ponds. 

”I see all of this shaping into a conversation of how do we improve things,” he said, adding that there has been plenty of research on the human, climate, and economic harms of letting lakes dry out. “We need to start researching what is the path forward.”

Marcé acknowledges that there are no easy answers for the Aral Sea. The problem began in the 1960s when the Soviet Union diverted water from the rivers that feed it for cotton crops. Many of those irrigation systems remain outdated, and improving them would save water. Even then, though, getting the water back in the sea would require convincing multiple jurisdictions not to just reuse it for other purposes. Still, fixes like this aren’t impossible, said Marcé, and linking the issue to carbon credits could provide incentives to find them. 

“If we have this kind of program, there could be a hope for the Aral Sea,” he said. “It’s at least a chance.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Aral Sea isn’t just an ecological nightmare — it’s a carbon bomb on Jul 16, 2026.

Utility-scale solar’s levelized cost of electricity ranges between $40/MWh and $98/MWh, while combined cycle gas ranges between $51/MWh and $129/MWh, said a report from Lazard.

The National Academies of Sciences released a report today that puts the full weight of the country's most respected scientific institution behind extreme weather attribution science, affirming that the field can reliably connect specific disasters to fossil fuel pollution. The three-year review comes as nearly two dozen states and municipalities sue fossil fuel companies for climate damages, while roughly a dozen states advance climate superfund legislation that would force the industry to help pay for climate-related damage. Legal experts say the report could significantly strengthen both efforts.

Fossil fuel companies aren't waiting to find out. Congress is weighing legislation, and several states have already passed laws that would shield oil and gas companies from climate liability altogether — including model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council for other states to adopt. In response to the report, the Make Polluters Pay campaign released the following statement.

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

"The National Academies just gave courts, cities, and communities something they've long needed: the full weight of the country's most authoritative scientific body behind attribution science. It affirms what researchers and international bodies like the IPCC have long recognized — that we can say, with real confidence, which extreme weather events were made worse by fossil fuel pollution, and how much damage that pollution caused.

The fossil fuel industry understands exactly what this means. That's why they've spent years trying to discredit attribution science as a field, and why they and their allies in Congress and state legislatures are racing right now to pass liability shield laws. They can't out-argue hundreds of peer-reviewed studies backed by the country's most respected scientific institution, so instead they're trying to make the law immune to the science. They know this research doesn't just describe a hotter world, but draws a line from their products to specific floods, heat waves, and deaths, and from there to who should pay for the damage.

Attribution science now underpins how cities plan for disaster, how insurers price risk, how public health officials prepare for heat deaths, and how courts weigh accountability. The only people with an interest in pretending otherwise are the ones being asked to pay for the damage they caused."

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by SFMTA’s Director of Transportation, Julie Kirschbaum, who oversees San Francisco’s public transit system, Muni. She discusses system improvements, rising customer satisfaction, lessons from the pandemic on ridership and operations as well as Muni’s cultural connection to the city.

Listeners can enjoy the audio with the player embedded below, scroll a little further for a partial edited transcript or peruse an AI-generated transcript of the entire episode.

Jeff Wood: Muni was at the front of a lot of innovation during the pandemic across the country, and I’m curious, since you were on the front lines of that, if there’s anything that you or your agency learned specifically from that time period, about what transit agencies can do, what they can’t do — or what we tell ourselves that we can or can’t do.

I’m interested in that kind of story because it’s interesting to think about then and now, and this is different than that ridership discussion. It’s more about operations and thinking about what agencies are set up to do well — or what is harder for us just generally.

Julie Kirschbaum: We learned to learn, I think. COVID allowed us the space to try a lot of different things. Some worked better than others, and being willing to stick with what was working and walk away from — or have some clear parameters for calling it — things that were not working, was a big part of our success. We really used the fact that we had to so significantly change the way our system looked during COVID, to bring service back in a much more deliberate way.

Prior to COVID, we really had more service on paper than we were set up to deliver every day, and that essentially represented a broken trust with our customers because if we could fill all the trips on a route each day, you might have a 20-minute wait time. But on a bad day, you might wait 40 or 50 minutes. But if, if you have to get to your job or an appointment or school, you’re planning that extra time whether you end up needing it or not, and so it can be really frustrating. So it was hard, and we had a lot of really strong policymaker support.

But bringing back the service only at the pace where we could hire operators to deliver every single trip was a huge key to our success, and then trying new things like new transit lanes, using technology instead of a traditional paper schedule to deliver the service, shutting down the subway early one week every quarter so that we could do all the hard maintenance jobs, all proved to be key to our success. But underlying all of that was just not being overextended.

Jeff Wood: Can you tell me a little bit more about that maintenance? The system is old. It’s been around a long time. There’s a lot of little things that can go wrong or need fixing before they do go wrong, and so I’m curious about that process of going in and making sure the system is maintained so you’re not having a computer that could operate Pong on it operating the subway.

Julie Kirschbaum: In a typical weekday night, our window to do maintenance is only about two and a half to three hours long. And then, if you add into that the amount of time it takes to safely power down the system so you can do the work and then have time to power it back up, that two and a half to three hours becomes 45 minutes to an hour, and 45 minutes to an hour is not a lot of time to do deep maintenance work.

We found, through our Fix It Week program, that we could take that same concept of overnight work, but instead of having 45 minutes to an hour of work time, we could get hundreds of labor hours in just a very short time period by having an eight-hour work window instead of a three-hour work window by bringing all of our day crews to work overnight.

And by planning out the work so that every part of the tunnel, and the stations, and the fan rooms all have work going on simultaneously. It’s been a great opportunity for us to do proactive maintenance work on our infrastructure, which mirrors what we do on our buses. But because our buses are modular, it’s always been a little bit easier to plan that.

Meteorologists warn that this year’s El Niño may be one of the strongest on record. As communities around the world brace for more extreme weather events, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is helping farmers build resilience.

Every two to seven years, El Niño causes widespread disruptions around the world, from drought to heavy rains. Past ones “have left economies devastated,” Sara Mbago-Bhunu, Director of East and Southern Africa Division at IFAD, tells Food Tank. 

The U.N. agency works with governments and development partners to put prevention measures in place before a crisis hits. Seasonal climate forecasts and early warning systems can inform planning, identify vulnerable areas, and establish preparedness measures.

“All regions really should be willing to prepare for this,” Mbago-Bhunu says. Because El Niño will look different across geographies, mapping helps IFAD understand the likely impacts and how to adapt accordingly.

Ethiopia, northern Uganda, Zambia, and Mozambique, for example, are likely to see less rain during their main growing season. In these regions, water capture technologies must be scaled up. Meanwhile in Tanzania and coastal Kenya—likely to experience higher-than-average rainfall—flood-resistant roads, warehouses, and markets are needed.

Mbago-Bhunu says that governments across the continent understand the importance of building more resilient systems, not only to respond to El Niño, but also to the broader effects of the climate crisis.

“They understand if they don’t invest in their water tables, in their water towers, they will not be able to have productive capacities to feed their populations in the future,” she tells Food Tank. “They also understand that supporting soil fertility might not see immediate gains, but will definitely have future returns.”

But funding for climate adaptation in Africa remains inadequate. “We get a fraction of global funding as it is,” Mbago-Bhunu says. “So [governments] have to mobilize cheaper sources of financing domestically and then…channel those into longer term solutions.”

This approach pays off, Mbago-Bhunu argues. She points to the last El Niño in 2023, which affected more than 1 million Zambian households. Around US$900 was required to provide life-saving aid and early recovery assistance—far more than the cost of preventative measures.

“Investing in resilience is cheaper than responding to disaster.”

Listen to the full conversation with Sara Mbago-Bhunu to hear about the unique vulnerabilities women and girls face from extreme weather events, how IFAD leverages resources from its projects to respond to urgent needs, and what the private sector can do to support farmers and governments.

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 Richard Nyoni, Unsplash

The post Investing in Resilience Will Help Farmers Weather the Super El Niño appeared first on Food Tank.

With a target completion date of 2029, the project is expected to deliver 2.5 GW of generation and 2.9 GWh of battery storage to the regional grid, the tech giant said.

The June 18 show cause orders finally take aim at the load interconnection mess. But the customers who get power faster will be the ones who show up ready to flex, writes Shalin Savalia, a senior electrical engineer.

Horne 5: A Sword of Damocles Hanging Over a Heavily Polluted Urban Area Quebec, Canada

Abstract

The Cultural Landscape of Rouyn-Noranda

Horne 5 – A Sword of Damocles

Timeline of Resistance

The turning point

Portraits of the activists

The systemic oppression of extraction

And to what end?

Endnotes

Download

Image: Horne 5. Credit: Ressources Falco Ltée, Rouyn-Noranda. (1)

Abstract

Our emblematic case of resistance to extractivism concerns the reopening of a mine in the city of Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec (Canada). Falco Resources Ltd’s Horne 5 mining project aims to extract a polymetallic deposit whose primary economic value lies in gold. The project is located in the Notre-Dame neighborhood and beneath Glencore’s Horne Smelter, which, since its opening in 1927, has drastically polluted the air in Rouyn-Noranda. The Horne 5 project ranks among the most dangerous, unacceptable, and harmful mining projects in Quebec in recent decades. In addition to posing significant psychosocial risks, this project entails catastrophic dangers for public safety, socioeconomic stability, and environmental protection.

Image: The Horne Smelter – A symbol of pollution in Rouyn-Noranda, 1978. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. (2)

 

Image: Workers at the Noranda Mine—photo taken between 1962 and 1978. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Noranda Mine workers on the picket line during the 1946–1947 strike. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Anti-pollution march organized by the Théâtre de Coppe, themed around the “burial” of Lake Osisko, 1985. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Glencore’s Horne Smelter under snow and toxic waste, photo taken between 1962 and 1978. Credit: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Glencore’s Horne Smelter continues to pollute to this day. Credit: Guillaume Proulx, 2019. Rouyn-Noranda.

 

The Cultural Landscape of Rouyn-Noranda

Rouyn-Noranda is a city of 42,000 residents, located on Nitakinan, Anicinape Aki, unceded Anishinaabe territory. The political context of Rouyn-Noranda has been marked by critical social and legal struggles and including a long legacy of tensions with extractive industries. This city is an island of culture (music, visual arts, performing arts, theater, etc.) within the boreal forest. Rouyn-Noranda is the home of a multicultural, resilient, activist, and family-oriented community. The Horne 5 project is located notably on the ancestral territory of the Long Point First Nation. Industrial activities have been a central part of Rouyn-Noranda’s development since the city’s founding 100 years ago this year.

Image: Facebook page of Collectif 33 (3) , Rouyn-Noranda.

If approved, the Horne 5 mining project would be situated at the very heart of this dynamic city, in a vibrant residential area, beneath an area already weakened by numerous abandoned mine tunnels. The literature also reflects a lack of data on mining in urban areas, as there are few such case studies.

Horne 5 – A Sword of Damocles

Image: Falco Resources Ltée. (4)

The Horne 5 project, which plans to extract 15,500 tons of ore per day from depths of up to 2,000 meters and generate 80 million tons of mine tailings, was entrusted to the BAPE (Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement) for a public review in 2024. As is standard procedure when the government grants such a mandate, the BAPE president formed a commission of inquiry to evaluate the project’s impacts. This formal examination brought to light several critical issues including:

1. Land subsidence and induced seismicity: Even before considering the risks associated with ground subsidence and induced seismicity, it is worth noting that the project is located beneath the Horne Smelter—an industrial complex with outdated infrastructure—where ponds of sulfuric acid and other toxic substances could cause major environmental disasters and pose significant risks of fatalities to workers as well as the general population. Rouyn-Noranda has, in fact, already witnessed a sudden ground subsidence in 2013, right in the heart of Mouska Park—a family recreation and playground area. The hole, over 3 meters wide, was located above the site of the former Chadbourne Mine, one of the many abandoned mines beneath the city. (5)

2. Ancestral Rights: The apparent violation of the ancestral rights of Long Point First Nation is a major issue in this mining project. Indeed, during the commission of inquiry, the government’s responses raised “reasonable doubts that the constitutional obligation to consult Indigenous peoples holding ancestral rights was not respected for all communities whose territory is affected by the Horne 5 mining project, starting with the Long Point First Nation.” (6)

3. Water Protection: In addition to threatening the integrity of numerous water bodies through the installation of freshwater intake pipelines, the Horne 5 project poses numerous risks of serious contamination of Lake Dufault, the lake that supplies the sole pumping station in the drinking water supply of the city of Rouyn-Noranda. This contamination could result from leaks in the 17-kilometer pipelines transporting mine tailings or from leaks in the tailings pond dams.

4. Greenwashing: The company uses greenwashing rhetoric regarding actions related to its project’s mining liability management plan, even though its plan for handling mine tailings poses a serious threat to the environment and human health. Indeed, after selecting an unreclaimed site to store the planned tailings, the developer is trying to convince the community that adding acid-generating, leachable, and cyanide-containing materials to the environment could be a beneficial option.

5. Air Quality: The industrial activities carried out by Glencore’s Horne Smelter in the city of Rouyn-Noranda generate alarming levels of heavy metals (arsenic, barium, cadmium, copper, nickel, and lead). The company’s unacceptable levels of air pollution from the smelter and the government’s complicity in allowing it are one the most persistent and controversial environmental scandals in Quebec. The literature shows that the population of Rouyn-Noranda is exposed to an increased incidence of lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, neurological problems, and intra-uterine growth retardation. The Horne Smelter is still authorized to operate by smelting waste from all over the world to extract copper, provided that arsenic levels in the air in Rouyn-Noranda remain below 45 ng/m³. The company was granted an extension until 2030 to meet an interim threshold of 15 ng/m³, notwithstanding the Quebec standard of 3 ng/m³, and may maintain this threshold until 2033. However, the Institut national de santé publique du Québec stated in 2022 that while the 15 ng/m³ threshold protects vulnerable groups (such as children) from certain effects, the only target to be considered safe remains the 3 ng/m³ standard. The Horne 5 project thus seeks to operate in an environment where standards are already being exceeded, violating the enforcement regime of Section 197 of the Clean Air Regulation. Authorizing a new mining project would therefore only exacerbate an illegal situation that has been tolerated for far too long.

Credit: Guillaume Proulx, 2019, Rouyn-Noranda.

 6. Multiple social and economic costs: The socioeconomic impacts include, first and foremost, the aggravation of the housing crisis. The arrival of new workers and their families will lead to an increased demand for housing. This demand occurs despite an extremely low vacancy rate of 0,9 % recorded in 2025 (7), which is significantly below the 3% balance threshold recognized in Quebec. In other words, Rouyn-Noranda is already facing a severe housing crisis that will be further exacerbated by the arrival of new workers. “Furthermore, the gradual relocation of residents to create a buffer zone near the Horne Smelter — a measure to be implemented after 2028 — underscores the scale of the environmental and health challenges that the city and its population must (already) contend with.” (8) Added to this are the population’s anxiety and social fatigue, as well as threats to Rouyn-Noranda’s long-term attractiveness and vitality.

Timeline of Resistance

Here is an overview of the timeline of citizen mobilization related to the Horne 5 project.

• May 17, 2024 | Call for citizen mobilization

Release of a press release inviting the residents of Rouyn-Noranda to attend the first information meeting regarding the Horne 5 project. 

• May 21, 2024 | Official letters sent to the Minister of the Environment and the President of the BAPE 

An official letter was sent to the Minister requesting that the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE – Office of Public Hearings on the Environment) hold public hearings regarding the Horne 5 project, along with an official letter to the President of the BAPE requesting a preparatory meeting for the public prior to the public hearing. The preparatory meeting took place on August 13, 2024.

• June 27, 2024 | Invitation to a community engagement planning workshop

Release of a press release inviting citizens to a free workshop on July 7, 2024, on planning participation in the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) hearings for the Horne 5 mining project.

• August 14 and 26, 2024 | Participation in strategic meetings with residents of Rouyn-Noranda

Two strategic meetings just before the start of the public inquiry.

• August 27, 2024 | Start of the BAPE hearings in Rouyn-Noranda: Several crucial questions to ask about the troubling Horne 5 mining project

Release of a press release stating: “Civil society is ready for the process. Despite the case being launched in the middle of summer and the company’s chaotic and unannounced presentation of documentation, the groups managed to study the case in detail by pooling their resources.”

Image: Rouyn-Noranda during the Bureau d’audiences publiques de l’environnement (BAPE) hearing on the Horne 5 project. Credit: Radio-Canada / Lise Millette (9)

• August 27–29, 2024 | Participation in the five sessions of the first part of the BAPE public hearings in Rouyn-Noranda.

Period for providing information and presenting the ins and outs of the project as well as environmental issues. Citizens may, in particular, ask questions of the proponent.

Image : BAPE in the works, café-bar L’Abstracto, Rouyn-Noranda. Credit: Guy Leclerc 

• September 16–26, 2024 | Period set aside for the submission of views orally, via a brief, through comments, or via annotated images.

September 26 was the deadline for submitting briefs. The Coalition Québec Meilleure Mine and MiningWatch Canada submitted a joint brief regarding Falco Resources Ltd.’s Horne 5 mining project. 

• September 30 to October 3, 2024 | Second part of the BAPE public hearing for Falco Resources’ Horne 5 mining project.

This second part allows individuals to speak on the subject. It is an opportunity to, for example, make recommendations or even present one’s brief orally. 

• Fall 2024 | Recommendation by regional health authorities to commission a seismic risk analysis.

Regional health authorities (the CISSS-AT) recommended that the ministry require in-depth studies on the risks of earthquakes caused by the mine. The primary concern is the radiation oncology center—also located in the Notre-Dame neighborhood—in Rouyn-Noranda, where vibrations could damage medical equipment.]
 

• December 23, 2024 | Submission of the BAPE report to the minister

The turning point

It was through the process of the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) that the Commission of Inquiry officially concluded, on January 7, 2025, that the Horne 5 project is unacceptable. The report states that the project does not meet minimum requirements for safety, public health, and environmental protection. A large network of organizations came together to stand up to Ressource Falco Ltd. before and during the BAPE-led Commission of Inquiry.

Image: Large demonstration in Rouyn-Noranda organized by Mères au front and their allies, October 13, 2024, on 9th Street | Enough is enough. Credit: Williams Nourry

Portraits of the activists

First Nations

• Long Point First Nation (LPFN) : Following the inquiry, the First Nation has raised concerns about the project’s impact on air and water quality, as well as on the local economy. It is demanding that environmental and socioeconomic studies be conducted directly by the community to protect its ancestral rights. The LPFN spoke at the BAPE hearings, asserted its rights over its traditional unceded territory, and emphasized that the project must obtain the LPFN’s prior and informed consent, as detailed in its press release: “No Consent = No Project”.

 Environmental Groups

• Abitibi-Témiscamingue Regional Environmental Council — A non-profit organization (NPO) dedicated to promoting environmental conservation and improving environmental quality. They submitted 162 recommendations to the BAPE, criticizing the lack of consideration for the project’s cumulative effects. The CREAT highlights the health risks illustrated by the “simple measures” (vacuuming with HEPA filters, specific dietary guidelines to limit lead and cadmium absorption) suggested to the public by provincial public health authorities, reflecting an environment already saturated with contaminants and environmental stressors. 

• Eau Secours — a Montreal-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the protection and responsible management of water in Quebec. Eau Secours has pointed out to the second part of the BAPE the glaring lack of consistency in the company’s proposal to create a mine tailings pond (projected to hold 40 million tons of highly reactive and acid-generating tailings) directly within the watershed of the city’s drinking water source, Lake Dufaut. The organization also points out that the developer has not presented an emergency plan in the event of a facility failure. 

• Action Boréale — a non-profit organization based in Abitibi-Témiscamingue dedicated to promoting the preservation of Quebec’s boreal forests. They have consistently reminded the government, following the release of the BAPE’s scathing report, of its responsibility for the environment. Action Boréale asserts that the project has more negative impacts than benefits for the community. 

• Société pour vaincre la pollution (SVP) — a non-profit organization working to defend citizens’ rights to a healthy environment: Offers support and states that “this is one mine too many for Rouyn-Noranda.” 

• MiningWatch Canada — an Ottawa-based non-governmental organization acting as a watchdog for the mining industry. They continue to call on the government to cease all investment in this harmful project and to publicly confirm its opposition. 

• Regroupement vigilance mines de l’Abitibi et du Témiscamingue (Revimat) — a non-profit organization advocating for improvements to the Mining Act and environmental protection. They have consistently reiterated their opposition to the project in a joint press release, noting in particular that “the possibility of seismic activity could damage the smelter’s structures and release toxic substances into the air.”  

• Comité Arrêt des rejets d’émissions toxiques (ARET) — a citizens’ group advocating for the reduction of air pollutants. They refer to air quality issues in the same press release: “We therefore expect these recommendations to put an end to the project, as the population is already unacceptably overexposed to toxic emissions.” 

Health, Social Justice, and Community Solidarity

• Mères au Front (Rouyn-Noranda) — a local chapter of the pan-Canadian Mères au Front movement, which brings together mothers and grandmothers driven by a desire to act to protect our children’s future and life on Earth in the face of the climate emergency. This group, acting solely out of a duty to protect future generations, places the right to health, safety, and a clean environment at the heart of its struggle. They believe that the mining industry is incompatible with urban areas and oppose the Horne 5 project because it would increase the vulnerability of a population already overexposed to numerous neurotoxic contaminants.

Image: Protest organized by Mères au Front on October 13, 2024, in Rouyn-Noranda to remind the Legault government that the ongoing situation in Rouyn-Noranda is unacceptable. Credit: Maude Desbois (10)

• Centre Entre-Femmes: Active in the community for over 30 years, this organization works to improve women’s living conditions. Its opposition to the Horne 5 project centers on poverty and economic inequalities: since the jobs created are primarily male- , the center condemns the widening wage gaps in industrial regions and calls for a gender-based impact analysis, also fearing an increase in the risk of violence and issues related to alcohol and drug use. 

• Coopérative d’habitation Boréale: Opposing the developer’s 15-year vision, the housing cooperative advocates for a 40-year urban development cycle to secure the neighborhood’s future. Its struggle highlights the invisible social costs: it points out that communities bear the brunt of the hardships (suicides, domestic violence) linked to fluctuations in the price of gold—human tragedies for which no budget provides to absorb the consequences. The Cooperative has received a very high volume of demand in recent years, a demand it cannot meet. 

• The Abitibi-Témiscamingue Tenants’ Association also opposes the Horne 5 project and participated in the BAPE, raising concerns in particular about the pressure this project would place on this “sacrificed zone.” This association considers housing to be “a place where everyone should be safe day and night.” The city of Rouyn-Noranda has been in a housing crisis for nearly 15 years. Their argument also emphasized that, in addition to all the dangers raised by the project, the community more often than not bears the burden of finding solutions and accommodations for the population. This additional pressure is absolutely undesirable for Rouyn-Noranda’s community organizations.

The systemic oppression of extraction

In Quebec, communities affected by mining projects are oppressed by a glaring lack of oversight by the government regarding the massive investments it grants to the mining sector, as well as by the acceleration of mining projects at the expense of communities. 

For its part, Falco Resources Ltd. engages in the constant withholding and distortion of information, in addition to failing to listen to the public’s concerns and to take environmental assessments seriously. The recent filing (released to the media in late May 2026) of the expert report commissioned to analyze the risks associated with seismic activity supports this view. This report, so eagerly awaited by the public, has failed to clarify the uncertainty that persists regarding the safety of people and the radiation oncology center. A freedom of information request yielded only a heavily redacted version of the report, making it impossible to access nearly all of its content. 

At the same time, the community of Rouyn-Noranda is enduring a historic cycle of threats of industrial closure from Glencore, creating deep polarization within families and the population, and placing citizens in a constant false dilemma between economic survival and the protection of the environment and overall health. 

Everyone has been holding their breath for a long time now.

A year and a half after the BAPE report was submitted, the Horne 5 project is entering the final stages of its environmental impact assessment. At this critical juncture preceding potential mining operations, communities are awaiting the final decision regarding the authorization decree, which is reportedly scheduled for June 2026, according to the company’s latest Advisory Committee meeting dated March 18, 2026. The city’s cultural landscape now hinges on this government decree, which will determine whether authorities choose to ignore or respect the BAPE’s finding of unacceptability. The community is sincerely holding out hope that the final decision will serve the best interests of the local population and the Anicinape First Nation, while ensuring the protection of the environment as well as water and air quality.

To date, however, the network of activists remains mobilized. 

Image: Large demonstration in Rouyn-Noranda organized by Mères au front and their allies, October 13, 2024| Enough is enough | NO TO HORNE 5 ! Credit: Williams Nourry

And to what end?

A victory would mean the rejection and permanent stop of the Horne 5 project in order to ensure the safety and health of the citizens of Rouyn-Noranda through a realistic assessment of the project’s cumulative impacts, the carrying capacity of the project site, and the relentless pace of the pro-extractive agenda of companies targeting the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region. In the meantime, we are proud to say that the people of Rouyn-Noranda are a great inspiration to the Coalition Québec meilleure mine, and that their efforts serve as an example to follow for other mining struggles throughout the province. The measures taken by the community to mobilize against all these extractive giants are “admirable on a global scale.”

Image: The Horne Smelter at sunset. Credit: Guillaume Proulx, 2020, Rouyn-Noranda.

Image: Notre-Dame neighborhood at night. Credit: Guillaume Proulx, 2019, Rouyn-Noranda.

Endnotes 

1 – Company Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RessourcesFalco/

 2-  Rivard, J. (December 2021). Démarrage de l’usine d’acide sulfurique de la fonderie Horne – 20 décembre 1989 | Héros sans panache | Société d’histoire de Rouyn-Noranda.http://shrn.ca/des-jours-qui-ont-fait-rouyn-noranda/20-decembre-1989-demarrage-de-lusine-dacide-sulfurique-de-la-fonderie-horne

3 – Collectif 33 Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=122104798005292317&set=pcb.122104801341292317&locale=fr_CA

4 –  Cotnoir, J.-M. (May 25, 2026).Horne 5 : le flou persiste quant aux risques sismiques. Radio-Canada.https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2256119/horne-5-mine-risque-sismique-cisss-at

 5 –  Luneau, A.-C. (2013, February 6). Rouyn-Noranda : le sol s’affaisse au parc Mouska. Radio-Canada.  https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/599141/trou-parc-mouska

 6 –  QMM and MWC. (2024, September 26). Mémoire | BAPE projet minier Horne 5 de Ressources Falco à Rouyn-Noranda | Mining Watch Canada. https://miningwatch.ca/fr/blog/2024/9/26/memoire-bape-projet-minier-horne-5-de-ressources-falco-rouyn-noranda

 7-  OBVAT. (2026, 4 juin). Taux d’inoccupation des logements, Abitibi-Témiscamingue et Québec, 1996 à 2026p – L’Observatoire de l’Abitibi-Témiscamingue. https://www.observat.qc.ca/statistiques/taux-dinoccupation-des-logements-abitibi-temiscamingue-et-quebec-1996-a-2026p/ 

8- BAPE, Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement. (2024).Projet Horne 5 à Rouyn-Noranda par Ressources Falco ltée: rapport d’enquête et d’audience publique. Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement. https://www.bape.gouv.qc.ca/fr/dossiers/mine_horne5/

 9- Millette, L. (2025, March 4). Projet Horne 5 : Québec freine l’élan de Ressources Falco. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2145532/falco-horne-fonderie-rouyn-noranda-mine

 10-  Fortin-Rondeau, I. (2025, November 18). Le Pudding à l’arsenic : une version industrielle signée Fonderie Horne. https://www.meresaufront.org/billets-de-blogue/le-pudding-a-larsenic-une-version-industrielle-signee-fonderie-horne