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Trees ― living, dead, and transformed ― play roles in the lives of three communities in New Haven, CT. Because trees themselves have life cycles, interact with other living and non-living actors, and have material and symbolic significance, they are central to the lives, livelihoods, wellbeing, and creation of meaning in various communities of people. […]

Struck by boats, choked by plastic and starved by pollution.

Four Ugandan farmers filed a case with London’s High Court on Tuesday, aiming to stop the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from starting to operate by asking the court to apply Uganda’s laws against the project’s UK-registered company.

The controversial 1,443-kilometre (897-mile) pipeline, majority-owned by French energy company ​TotalEnergies, aims to carry crude from Ugandan fields for export through neighbouring Tanzania. About 80% has been built so far, according to its developers.

The pipeline’s first oil exports are expected as soon as October, according to its developers, and the campaign group Avaaz, which is backing the farmers’ crowdfunded lawsuit, called it “one final chance to stop one of the worst oil pipelines on the planet”.

The claim, filed by London law firm Leigh Day, argues that EACOP Ltd’s role in developing and operating the pipeline breaches Ugandan laws that protect citizens’ right to a clean and healthy environment.

• Mar 26, 2026 Justice Ugandan farmers use British court to try to stop East Africa oil pipeline The farmers and their lawyers will argue that a UK-based entity linked to the East African Crude Oil Pipeline has breached Ugandan law and construction should halt Read more
• Jun 26, 2026 News French court rules Total must revise climate plan to account for all emissions Oil and gas giant TotalEnergies has been given six months by a court to publish a more robust climate plan Read more
• Mar 2, 2026 News Uganda cites contentious IEA fossil fuel scenario backed by Trump administration Critics of the African nation’s oil ambitions say referencing the International Energy Agency’s most pessimistic scenario for climate action is a risky policy Read more

One of the claimants, Racheal Tugume, told a press conference she had been displaced from her land due to the pipeline’s construction, which she said had damaged local rivers, wildlife and ecosystems that communities depend on for their livelihoods just as erratic weather linked to climate change takes an increasing toll. 

“I am very happy that there are people in countries like the UK who are listening to us, who are behind us and who have come to support us,” Tugume said, adding that she hoped the case would bring justice to communities affected by the pipeline.

Ugandan law in UK court

While the pipeline is a joint venture led by TotalEnergies, with smaller stakes owned by Ugandan, Tanzanian and Chinese national oil firms, it is operated by EACOP Ltd, a company registered to an office in London’s Canary Wharf financial district.  

EACOP Ltd did not respond to a request for comment. 

The claim appears to be the first attempt to have Uganda’s climate and environmental protections enforced in a foreign court, partly reflecting concerns over whether cases challenging the multibillion-dollar pipeline would get a fair trial in Uganda.

Ugandans living near new oil pipeline let down by compensation programmes

Concerns about access to a fair hearing are among the issues the court will consider when deciding if it should take on the case, said Matthew Renshaw, partner at Leigh Day.

Renshaw said that precedents including the Nigerian oil pollution case against Shell have shown that claims against British-registered companies for harms overseas can be successfully fought in UK courts. 

“We are proud to represent the four brave principled individuals,” Renshaw said.

Constitutional protections

The pipeline project has already been subject to repeated lawsuits in several countries, none of which have succeeded. A climate lawsuit filed in Uganda more than a decade ago by a group of young people has yet to conclude. Another at the East African Court of Justice, brought by campaign groups against Uganda and Tanzania, was rejected on procedural grounds last November. 

A separate ongoing lawsuit in TotalEnergies’ home country of France – a refiled version of an earlier failed claim – cannot stop EACOP going ahead, but it does seek damages from TotalEnergies for affected communities.

With the newly launched case, Leigh Day’s legal adviser Marc Willers said the claim draws on specific Ugandan laws in a bid to stop EACOP’s operations. 

Uganda may see lower oil revenues than expected as costs rise and demand falls

These include the Ugandan constitution, a 2019 environmental law and the National Climate Change Act 2021, which gives Ugandans the right to bring a case before a court in circumstances where anyone or any entity threatens the country’s ability to mitigate climate change.  

In response to the legal case in Britain, the African Energy Chamber – which represents and promotes the continent’s oil and gas industry – said Ugandans should decide the energy future of their country rather than the UK courts.

“This is colonialism 2.0,” said the chamber’s executive chairman NJ Ayuk. “For generations, Africa was told what resources it could exploit and how it should develop. Today, some of those same pressures are being repackaged through foreign-funded litigation and ideological campaigns that seek to dictate Africa’s energy choices from thousands of kilometres away.”

Stopping a “carbon bomb”

The pipeline, which will link Uganda’s Lake Albert oil fields to Africa’s east coast in Tanzania, has already displaced thousands of people and cuts through the Lake Victoria basin, one of East Africa’s major freshwater systems and a critical water source for around 40 million people. 

According to the BankTrack non-profit, when the pipeline is at peak production, it will carry 216,000 barrels of crude oil per day and release over 33 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year. Over its full lifetime of 25 years, it is estimated to release about 379 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions across its value chain including construction, refining and product use.

A May 2026 report from Earth Insight also warns that the pipeline and related infrastructure could affect 158 wetlands in Uganda, 11 rivers, 44 protected areas and seven key biodiversity areas while disrupting about 2,000 square km of protected wildlife habitats. 

This is why the primary focus of the UK court case is to stop the operation of the pipeline in its tracks, Leigh Day’s Willers said, calling it a “carbon bomb” that would worsen the world’s climate crisis.

Long wait for first hearing 

While the purpose of the case is to stop the pipeline from launching operations, Renshaw said it could take about 12 months before the case gets a first hearing and about 18 months before it goes to trial. 

Billions unlocked as Green Climate Fund agrees to spend more and save less

The farmers are, however, seeking an injunction to stop EACOP Ltd from proceeding with operations. In the event that shipments begin, the lawsuit will still seek to stop the pipeline from then on, Renshaw said.

“We will be doing what we can to expedite matters but it is possible that EACOP will have started operating the pipeline before the claim is heard. If that is the case, the claim would intend to halt operations from that point. For example, the pipeline may operate for just one year rather than 30-plus, resulting in far less harm,” he said.

This story was updated after publication to include comment from the African Energy Chamber, an oil and gas lobby group.

The post Ugandan farmers launch UK court case against East African oil pipeline appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is rushing forward on travel management plans for two very different but spectacular areas: Trail Canyon, east of Zion National Park, and Dinosaur North, near Dinosaur National Monument. These travel plans will determine where off-road vehicles (ORVs) are allowed to travel in these areas for decades to come.

These wild landscapes highlight the beauty and diversity of public lands in Utah, from redrock canyons and forested plateaus in Trail Canyon to high plateaus that offer dramatic panoramic views of the Green River in Dinosaur North. Both areas are home to irreplaceable cultural sites and historic resources, spectacular recreation opportunities, and important habitat for elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and other species. 

Tell the BLM to Protect
Trail Canyon 
Tell the BLM to Protect
Dinosaur North 

Trail Canyon includes places like Moquith Mountain, Orderville Canyon, and the east and north forks of the Virgin River. Dinosaur North encompasses the John Wesley Powell National Conservation Area, Browns Park, and the B and C sections of the Green River (well known to river runners).

The BLM is currently accepting public comments on the draft travel management plans, each of which analyzes the varying impacts of four different off-road vehicle travel networks. For both travel plans, only Alternative B—modified by additional route closures—would comply with the BLM’s duties to protect natural and cultural resources and balance conflicts between motorized and non-motorized recreationists. In both cases Alternative B would remove redundant and particularly damaging routes while helping preserve wilderness study areas and other wilderness-quality lands.

Unfortunately, with both plans the BLM has signaled that it intends to prioritize ORVs at the expense of natural and cultural resources and to the detriment of hikers, bikers, hunters, paddlers, and other non-motorized recreationists.

The agency is accepting public comments through Wednesday, July 22. As a redrock advocate, it’s critical that you participate and make your voice heard. While the deadline is the same for each plan, they are being analyzed separately. Please click the links below to comment on each plan.

>> Click here to submit comments on Trail Canyon

>> Click here to submit comments on Dinosaur North

Do you know the Trail Canyon or Dinosaur North area especially well? Comments that draw from firsthand knowledge and experiences in these areas are the most effective. If you have a personal affinity for these landscapes and know them well, you may want to submit your comments directly through the BLM comment portal (found using the links above). Have questions? Send an email to our Utah Organizer Mimi Ortega and she’ll be happy to help guide you through the process. 

Thank you!

The post Take Action to Protect Trail Canyon & Dinosaur North appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Even as the war grinds on, Ukraine continues to expand its civilian nuclear ambitions. Britain has tightened sanctions on Russia’s nuclear sector, while Western dependence on Rosatom remains stubbornly difficult to unwind. Meanwhile, Russia is deepening its strategic nuclear partnership with China as sanctions steadily narrow its options elsewhere. These are among the trends highlighted in Bellona’s May 2026 Nuclear Digest.

Ukraine builds for the future, even under fire

Despite the ongoing war and the continued occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Ukraine is pressing ahead with an ambitious program to strengthen its nuclear sector.

In May, Energoatom launched domestic production of Westinghouse fuel components, another step toward ending its dependence on Russian nuclear fuel. Ukraine also secured an operating license for its centralized spent nuclear fuel storage facility, allowing it to permanently end shipments of spent fuel to Russia for storage. At the same time, discussions continue over construction of additional nuclear generating capacity.

Yet these advances come amid persistent military threats and renewed concerns over governance.

Throughout May, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported increased military activity around Ukrainian nuclear facilities, particularly the occupied Zaporizhzhia plant. Drone strikes, damage to infrastructure, repeated losses of external power, and competing narratives from Moscow and Kyiv continued to underscore the vulnerability of Europe’s largest nuclear station.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s anti-corruption authorities launched new investigations involving Energoatom officials, prompting corporate reforms and another reshuffling of the company’s supervisory board.

Bellona nuclear expert Alexander Nikitin argues that both realities must be considered together.

“Despite the ongoing war and the situation surrounding the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and Ukraine’s other nuclear facilities, Energoatom—with the support of the country’s leadership—continues implementing projects aimed at supporting and developing nuclear energy,” he writes. Such efforts, he says, deserve international backing. But at the same time, “support should be accompanied by a careful assessment of their strategic necessity, economic justification, timeliness, and transparency in the use of allocated funds.”

Britain sanctions Russian uranium—but Western contradictions remain

Britain took another step toward reducing its reliance on Russia’s nuclear industry in May, introducing sanctions that prohibit imports of Russian uranium as well as related financial and technical services. The move expands London’s effort to eliminate Russian nuclear fuel from Britain’s energy system by 2028. Yet the practical impact is likely to be modest.

“Britain’s dependence on Russian uranium supplies is relatively small,” Bellona nuclear analyst Dmitry Gorchakov writes. Only one British reactor—Sizewell B—currently uses fuel incorporating Russian nuclear material, and Britain already possesses ample enrichment capacity through Urenco to replace those imports.

The sanctions nevertheless represent another symbolic tightening of Western pressure on Rosatom. At almost the same moment, however, Washington illustrated just how complicated disentangling from Russia’s nuclear supply chain remains.

Earlier in May, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved licenses allowing American companies to export natural uranium to Russia for enrichment before the material is returned for use in U.S. nuclear reactors. The approvals fall under exemptions included in last year’s U.S. ban on Russian enriched uranium imports, which allows waivers when alternative supplies are unavailable or national interests require them.

Taken together, the British sanctions and the U.S. licenses illustrate the contradictory position facing Western governments. Political pressure continues to increase, but decades of integration with Russia’s nuclear fuel cycle continue to make for a difficult divorce.

China becomes Rosatom’s indispensable partner

If sanctions are gradually shrinking Rosatom’s opportunities in Europe and North America, they appear to be pushing the Russian nuclear giant closer toward China.

During President Vladimir Putin’s May state visit to Beijing, Rosatom signed three new memoranda covering workforce development, fusion research, and broader scientific cooperation. The two governments also pledged to deepen cooperation on fast reactors, closed fuel cycles, and future nuclear construction projects.

For our experts, perhaps the most notable element was language calling for joint work on future nuclear power plant construction.

“The provision concerning joint work on nuclear power plant construction deserves particular attention,” Gorchakov writes. “We have repeatedly noted, including in our recently published report on Rosatom in 2025, that Rosatom’s relationship with China’s nuclear industry is strengthening.”

The reasons are clear.

“Given Rosatom’s increasingly difficult position on international markets due to Western sanctions, financial restrictions and the refusal of a number of Western suppliers to provide equipment, Rosatom is being forced to cooperate more closely with China,” Gorchakov concludes.

That cooperation is already extending beyond research. Chinese firms are supplying major components for Russia’s planned floating nuclear power plants, while discussions continue over using Chinese equipment in projects both inside Russia and abroad.

Taken together, the developments illustrate a nuclear industry increasingly shaped less by engineering than by geopolitics. Ukraine is trying to build an independent nuclear future while fighting a war. Western governments continue searching for ways to reduce their dependence on Rosatom without disrupting their own fuel supplies. And Russia, finding many traditional markets more difficult to navigate, is steadily deepening a strategic partnership with China that could reshape the global nuclear landscape for years to come.

The post Ukraine Pushes Ahead, the West Sends Mixed Signals, and China Draws Closer: Rosatom’s Uneasy Month appeared first on Bellona.org.

In 2026, the American Civil Liberties Union will make its largest-ever investment in down ballot races, marking a historic escalation in its “Firewall for Freedom” strategy to protect civil liberties across the country. As part of this new campaign, the ACLU will spend $25.5 million across underfunded but critical state-level campaigns with an outsized impact on American’s rights and freedoms, from key ballot initiatives to state Supreme Court races, secretaries of state races, and state legislative races.

“The ACLU and our millions of supporters across the country have been at the forefront of the fight to protect Americans’ civil rights and liberties, but these freedoms remain under attack both at the federal level and in the states. We need to fight back,” said Deirdre Schifeling, ACLU chief political and advocacy officer. “The Firewall for Freedom campaign will allow the ACLU to stop efforts to restrict reproductive and voting rights and protect our democracy at every level of the ballot. We see where the threats are emerging, and we and our supporters are ready to respond. This is our largest-ever down ballot effort with plans to contact hundreds of thousands of voters across our key states to help protect our fundamental rights and freedoms.”

In recent campaign cycles, the ACLU and ACLU Foundation together have emerged as the largest institutional player in the ballot measure space on issues of reproductive freedom and democracy, with notable victories in Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Michigan, Montana, and Ohio.

The ACLU and ACLU Voter Education Fund together have also become one of the biggest spenders in state Supreme Court races. Meanwhile state and local offices have proven increasingly decisive in determining the future of key rights and liberties, including voting rights, abortion access, and LGBTQ rights.

This new $25.5 million campaign is a response to the new threats to civil liberties emerging at every level of the ballot and will be complemented by the ACLU’s national organizing infrastructure that helps educate voters and mobilize communities. Working with the ACLU’s 54 affiliates, the ACLU and the ACLU Foundation will work to beat back ballot measures aimed at overturning hard-fought victories to protect abortion rights and overturning the will of the people, as well as investing in initiatives to protect state courts from politicized judicial selections. The ACLU and ACLU Voter Education Fund will educate voters about important state Supreme Court races that impact civil rights and freedoms and equip them with information about how supermajorities in state legislatures can impact civil liberties across the country.

The Firewall for Freedom effort will target the following races, ensuring they have the resources to educate voters to make informed decisions when so many resources are flooding into federal campaigns:

• Seven ballot measures addressing civil liberties in Montana, Kansas, Missouri, and Virginia.
• Supreme Court races in Michigan, Montana, and North Carolina.
• State legislative races in Georgia, Michigan, Montana and North Carolina.
• Secretary of state races in Arizona and Nevada.

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Justice for Sinhue Garcia Safer roads and support for migrant workers now.

Sinhue Garcia, a migrant farmworker from Mexico, was killed while riding his bicycle in rural Niagara-on-the-Lake. He leaves behind a wife, two children, and many loved ones. He is not the first. At least six other migrant farmworkers have been killed or seriously injured on Niagara roads in recent years.

Send the email now

We grieve with Sinhue’s family, friends, co-workers, and the migrant worker community. But his death is not an isolated tragedy.

Migrant farmworkers keep Niagara’s farms, greenhouses, wineries, restaurants, and food system running. Too many have no choice but to travel long rural roads by bike or on foot, often at night, without safe transportation, wide shoulders, bike lanes, proper lighting, or access to public transit.

This is a public safety crisis and a serious gap in planning, infrastructure, and political responsibility.

We are calling for a migrant worker safety and support plan for Niagara.

• Safe transportation for migrant workers.
• Urgent road safety improvements.
• Emergency support for workers and families after injuries or deaths.
• Permanent funding for legal support, health services, and community spaces.
• Permanent resident status so migrant workers can speak up without fear.

Migrant workers are not disposable. They are our neighbours, co-workers, friends, and community members. They deserve to live with dignity.

Send an email now to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada, and election candidates.

This petition is co-hosted by Niagara Community Legal Clinic, Migrant Workers Alliance for Change and other local migrant worker organizations.

Send the email

Add your name. You can edit the message before sending.

One message goes to all listed decision-makers. It takes less than two minutes. Every message increases public pressure. Migrant workers feed our communities, care for our families, and keep the economy running. Safety, support and permanent resident status cannot wait.

The post Petition: Justice for Sinhue Garcia. Safer roads and support for migrant workers now. first appeared on Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.

The post Petition: Justice for Sinhue Garcia. Safer roads and support for migrant workers now. appeared first on Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.

Michigan (July 3, 2026) – Michigan’s FY27 Budget includes $2 million for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to acquire and conserve wetlands throughout the state, a critical...

Registered nurses at two Ascension hospitals in Wichita, Kansas, are outraged today as Ascension management has locked them out for days following nurses’ one-day strike on July 6. The nurses at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis and St. Joseph hospitals say the move is an obvious retaliatory punishment for striking.

Fair Food Nation! We’re kicking off our Summer Sustainer Drive!

For the next month, we’ll be spotlighting what makes the Fair Food Program (FFP) so extraordinarily effective, taking a look back at our achievements, and charting out the path ahead as we aim to expand the FFP’s best-in-class human rights protections to millions of workers not yet covered by the Program.  

And most importantly, over the next four weeks, we’ll be highlighting the vital role played by our Fair Food Program Sustainers, thousands of consumers like you, without whom the Fair Food Program would never have been possible.  

A few weeks ago, the CIW’s Greg Asbed and Gerardo Reyes Chavez sat down with Dave Chapman from the Real Organic Podcast, a nationally recognized weekly podcast from the farmer-led Real Organic Project, to reflect on the transformative power of the Fair Food Program and what it took to get it off the ground. Here’s the intro to their episode from iTunes:

Join us again for a deeper look at how the Coalition of Immokalee Workers turned one of the most exploited sectors of the food system into a model for change. They trace the path from wage theft, sexual violence, and modern-day slavery in the fields of Florida to a proven system of prevention that is now influencing labor protections across the globe and challenging the empty promises of corporate social responsibility to show what real accountability can look like.

Click on the short video below to see a few quick highlights from their podcast, or watch their full talk here. 

To expand the reach of the FFP, we’re asking everyone who can to become a Fair Food Program Sustainer with a monthly gift.

Even $10 a month can make a meaningful impact — helping prevent wage theft, sexual harassment and assault, and modern-day slavery for some of our country’s hardest workers, while protecting those who harvest our fruits and vegetables from unsafe — and all too often deadly — working conditions, from extreme heat exposure to pesticide poisoning. 

Already a Sustainer? Thank you. Your support helped us double the number of FFP participating growers and add new states to the FFP map, and help the CIW partner with worker and human rights organizations across the world seeking to bring the FFP’s protections to new industries! We ask that you continue your monthly donation — or, if possible, increase it! — so your support can grow with the Program and the broader Worker-driven Social Responsibility model.

Stay tuned next week as we dive deeper into how the Fair Food Program has grown over the years— and how your support powers this groundbreaking model.

National Nurses United has rescinded our endorsement of Graham Platner. As a union of registered nurses that advocates for the dignity of all human beings and represents a predominantly female profession, we cannot support a candidate when there is any question about whether that person has harmed, harassed, or assaulted another individual.

Millions of low- and middle-income Americans are losing health coverage because the Trump administration allowed the subsidies that made it affordable to lapse, according to a new Public Citizen analysis of government data. The analysis contradicts claims by Trump administration health officials that removal of fraudulent enrollees is responsible for declining Obamacare enrollment.

Enrollment in the Affordable Care Act marketplace decreased from 22.3 million people in 2025 to an estimated 17.5 million in 2026. Administration officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, have attributed the decline to the removal of fraudulent enrollees. Public Citizen’s analysis, which uses the government’s own enrollment data, has found that explanation to be almost entirely wrong.

“The people losing coverage are concentrated at incomes well above the poverty line – exactly the opposite of what the administration’s fraud theory would predict,” said Peter Whoriskey, Health Research Group research director for Public Citizen and author of the report. “These are low- and middle-income families whose premiums doubled after subsidies were cut. They didn’t cheat their way in. They simply can’t afford to stay.”

The administration’s fraud theory – which originated with the Paragon Health Institute, a think tank aligned with the Trump administration – holds that millions of enrollees misreported income just above the federal poverty level to qualify for subsidies. If the theory were correct, the sharpest enrollment declines would appear at that income level.

Instead, enrollment in that bracket has grown. Nearly half of all enrollment losses are among people earning more than four times the poverty level – families whose subsidies were cut when congressional Republicans allowed the enhanced premium tax credits to expire.

A household-scale “nanogrid” with direct current (DC) wiring could trim electricity use by almost a tenth compared to a conventional alternating current (AC) household system, according to a new analysis. The study combines computer simulation, laboratory testing, and rare real-life field data to provide some initial clues about the best opportunities to use DC power in a decarbonized energy system.

The power grid that connects homes and businesses to electricity is built on AC wiring, the result of infrastructure decisions made about a century ago. But most household electrical items, from lighting to computers to kitchen appliances, run on DC.

“This setup requires many conversions between DC and AC, all of which lose some energy,” says study team member Kevin Kircher, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana. They also require additional devices such as inverters and rectifiers with the attendant use of critical materials like copper and aluminum.

As the push to “electrify everything” proceeds, those inefficiencies add up, prompting a growing number of researchers to analyze the potential of a streamlined all-DC setup. “We investigated the alternative of connecting natively DC devices through DC wiring,” Kircher says.

One of the most important such devices is a heat pump, a heating and cooling system that represents a big chunk of energy use in all-electric households. “I was surprised by how hard it was to find an off-the-shelf heat pump that could run on DC right out of the box. It was impossible, actually!” Kircher says. “While many heat pumps use DC under the hood, manufacturers configure them to plug into conventional AC outlets.”

So the researchers retrofitted a commercially available household heat pump, which they tested under controlled laboratory conditions. They also installed a retrofitted heat pump in an all-DC “test house” inhabited by a trio of Purdue graduate students. The researchers say it is the first laboratory test of the heating function of a DC-based household heat pump, and the first field test of such a device.

 

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Both laboratory and field test data show that a conventional off-the-shelf heat pump can be retrofit to run on DC without loss of performance. The researchers then fed their laboratory and field test data into a model of a DC-based household nanogrid consisting of a rooftop solar array, a storage battery, and a heat pump. With a retrofitted DC heat pump, the system would use 8% less energy over the course of a year compared the same setup with an off-the-shelf, AC-configured heat pump. A heat pump designed to run on DC wiring would yield 9.2% annual energy savings.

These savings correspond to 12.5% and 16.7% lower annual energy costs, respectively, according to the model.

“With a relatively simple retrofit, homeowners with solar power could better utilize their system’s generated power,” and save on their electric bill—just by switching their heat pump to DC, says study team member and Purdue graduate student Aaron Farha.

In monetary terms, however, the savings work out to only about $60 per year. At those rates, it probably wouldn’t make financial sense for people to retrofit individual homes or heat pumps to run on DC power. Nor are we likely to be uprooting the whole AC-based distribution grid anytime soon.

“The important part is that in some ways these systems can live in tandem to each other over the long term,” Farha says. “AC power lines are still an efficient way to transmit power over long distances, and DC power works best when paired with on-site photovoltaics and electric batteries.”

And the energy savings identified in the study could be persuasive for installing DC in new construction or pursuing retrofits of bigger buildings. “There’s a global community working on DC technologies at various scales,” Kircher says. “In my mind the most important direction for work right now is to identify applications where DC makes economic sense.”

Source: Farha A.H.P. et al. “Laboratory and field testing of a residential heat pump retrofit for a DC solar nanogrid.” Applied Energy 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.

A vast system of Atlantic currents that delivers warmth to northern Europe is at risk of collapse, according to a growing body of research. The latest study to warn of its demise finds there is at least a 10 percent chance that a collapse may already be “locked in.”

Read more on E360 →

In June 2026, a record-breaking heatwave swept across Europe, with France among the first and hardest hit countries. 

In a new analysis, we estimate that the extreme conditions caused more than 2,700 heat-related deaths in France.

We also show how France’s extreme temperatures in June exceeded projections from climate models.

Our findings illustrate the human toll of extreme weather as the world warms.

We also highlight the challenges in projecting the magnitude of future heatwaves and their impacts on people.

Outpacing projections

For most of this century, Europe has seen summer heat extremes that outpace projections from climate models. 

Several different factors likely explain this trend, including reductions in planet-cooling aerosols as nations have cleaned up their air pollution, as well as changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, which models struggle to represent.   

In June 2026, daily high temperatures averaged across France reached 36.9C, shattering the previous June record set in 2022 by 2.4C.

[For more on the impacts and coverage of Europe’s June heatwave, see Carbon Brief’s explainer.]

The rise in observed temperatures in France has outpaced projections made by climate models, with June maximum temperatures more in line with what was expected for the 2070s.

This is illustrated in the figure below, which shows how France’s average maximum daily high temperature for June recorded in 2026 (black line) compares to climate model projections (blue and orange lines).

Comparison of observed (ERA5, black) and modelled (blue and orange) temperatures across France from 2000 to 2080. Plot shows the maximum daily high temperature recorded in June for each year, after averaging temperatures across France. The model ensembles are bias-corrected CMIP6 model ensembles from the NEX-GDDP (blue) and CIL-GDPCIR (orange) projects. The dashed blue and orange lines are the ensemble averages. Credit: Prof Andrew Dessler. Counting the death toll of climate change

The downstream impacts of these extreme temperatures are lethal. 

Scientists are able to estimate the death toll of high temperatures in many locations, depending on the availability of mortality and climate data. 

There are several ways to do this. 

One option is to examine death certificates to see which deaths have been directly recorded by physicians as related to heat. However, there is strong evidence that this method significantly undercounts heat-related deaths, as most death certificates do not consider environmental factors such as heat when diagnosing the cause of death.

Alternatively, it is possible to calculate the rate of total (“all-cause”) mortality in a given time period relative to previous time periods – for example, by comparing the total number of deaths in June 2026 compared to the average of previous Junes. This “excess deaths” figure can be used as an estimate of the deaths from a heat wave. 

Using this approach, Public Health France attributed around 2,000 deaths in France to the extreme heat in the week of 22-28 June.

Finally, scientists can use long-term data on overall mortality and correlate changes in mortality with changes in temperature to understand the statistical relationship between the two. 

Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025 that used this third approach found that mortality rates in France increase rapidly in cold or hot conditions as daily maximum temperatures depart further from approximately 20C.

This pattern of a U-shaped response of mortality to temperature – shown in the figure below – is very consistent across time periods and regions around the world. 

Relationship between daily high temperature and all-cause mortality rates in France, estimated using data over 2004-19. Credit: Dr Christopher Callahan, based on data and methods in Callahan et al. (2025)

To calculate the death toll of the June 2026 heatwave in France, we compared observed temperatures over 12-29 June to their baseline average over 1980-2025. 

The difference between these two temperatures helps us understand how many more people died than they would have in the absence of such extreme conditions.

Over 12-29 June, we found that France has experienced around 2,700 heat-related deaths above the average baseline. Day-to-day heat-related mortality rates rose from less than 100 to almost 300 on the hottest days of 24 and 25 June.

This is shown in the graph below, which illustrates the cumulative total heat-related deaths seen in France over the two-and-a-half week period. The inset shows how heat-related deaths fluctuated on a day-to-day basis during this time.

Estimated heat-related mortality over 12-29 June, based on a U-shaped response of mortality to temperature. The main plot shows cumulative total deaths and the inset shows daily deaths. Credit: Dr Christopher Callahan, based on data and methods in Callahan et al. (2025)

Recent analysis by World Weather Attribution has already shown that human-caused climate change increased the frequency and intensity of the June heat wave across Europe.

Meanwhile, previous research has shown there is substantial evidence that heat-related mortality in Europe has already been elevated by greenhouse gas emissions. 

As a result, we can be confident that at least some of the more than 2,700 deaths already seen in France are directly due to the burning of fossil fuels.

Calculating climate risk

In April, the UN-led body responsible for coordinating the work of climate modelling centres – the Coupled Modelling Intercomparison Project (CMIP) – unveiled a set of seven new emissions scenarios.

These are designed to replace the previous scenarios that have been used by scientists to understand how the climate might change in the future. They will feed into the upcoming seventh assessment report (AR7) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The range of future emissions in the new CMIP scenarios is smaller, with scenarios of very high or very low emissions no longer on the table.

The retirement of the very-high emissions scenario – known as “RCP8.5” – led to certain commentators in the media and in politics, including US president Donald Trump, arguing that the risks of climate change had been “overstated”.

[For more on false and misleading claims around the new emissions scenarios, see Carbon Brief’s factcheck.]

Our analysis of June’s heat-related deaths in France suggests that, even if the most severe emissions pathways are no longer needed, climate impacts are taking a heavy toll on society. 

Moreover, the temperatures seen in France show that climate models continue to underpredict the magnitude of heatwaves for a particular level of global warming.

This is because greenhouse gas emissions are only a first step in estimating the impacts of climate change.

The second step is converting emissions to changes in the climate at both the global and local levels – or hazards. This includes heatwaves, flash floods and droughts.  

The third step is to determine how changes in the hazards will affect local populations. This can be determined by calculating people’s exposure and vulnerability to hazards.

Substantial uncertainty persists at every stage of this sequence. 

For example, scientists do not know exactly how the global climate will react to ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions – nor the extent to which global temperature increases will drive local climate hazards. We also do not know how climate change at a local level impacts human health outcomes.

Managing the future of heat risk

Almost all heat-related deaths are preventable. 

Adaptation options, such as air conditioning, heat action plans and social support for isolated people, will be crucial as the climate moves away from the typical conditions that people are used to.

Our previous research showed that France made a lot of progress reducing heat-related mortality after the deadly 2003 summer heatwave by taking many of these actions. 

Adaptation can reduce deaths, but it cannot eliminate the risk created by continued warming. 

Without a move away from fossil fuels, future heatwaves will keep testing the limits of public health systems and more people will die.

The post Guest post: France’s June heatwave caused more than 2,700 heat-related deaths appeared first on Carbon Brief.

The fall of 2025 marked an escalation in political repression in the United States, targeting labor organizers, Palestine solidarity activists, and immigrant rights advocates. Two cases—Tom Alter in Texas and John Caravello in California—illustrate how this repression operates and how it can be fought.

This article argues that defense campaigns must treat the courtroom not as a site of justice, but as one terrain within a broader strategy of class struggle. This approach—what we can call revolutionary legalism—rejects both liberal faith in the courts and abstentionist refusal to engage them. Legal tactics must be subordinated to a different goal: building independent working-class power.

Two cases, one moment

Tom Alter, a tenured associate professor of history at Texas State University, labor historian, union member, and socialist activist, was fired in September 2025 after speaking at an online Revolutionary Socialism conference on his own time from his home as a private citizen. A self-described “fascist” YouTuber secretly recorded the event, edited the footage, and launched a smear campaign. Within days, Texas State President Kelly Damphousse announced on social media that Alter was fired for “inciting violence” and “jeopardizing the health and safety of the university community.” There was no hearing, no due process, just a Facebook post.

The response arrived promptly. Students protested for five days. The Texas State Employees Union (CWA Local 6186) mobilized, AAUP provided legal counsel, and major academic organizations issued statements of support. On 26 September, a district judge ordered Alter’s temporary reinstatement with back pay. The university complied formally but kept him out of the classroom and upheld the firing after a pro forma hearing. His lawsuit continues.

But the central story is what followed. Alter did not retreat; he helped launch a broad, public defense campaign.

Defense campaigns must treat the courtroom not as a site of justice, but as one terrain within a broader strategy of class struggle.

John Caravello, a philosophy lecturer at California State University Channel Islands and member of the California Faculty Association, faced a different form of repression. During an ICE raid in July 2025, he removed a tear gas canister from beneath a protester’s wheelchair. Initially charged with a misdemeanor, he was later indicted on a federal felony charge under 18 U.S.C. § 111—assaulting a federal officer with a “deadly weapon”—the very canister agents had deployed. He faced up to twenty years in prison.

The California Faculty Association responded with a public campaign, organizing rallies and condemning the charges. On April 9, 2026, a federal jury acquitted Caravello after two hours of deliberation, finding him not guilty of assault with a deadly or dangerous weapon on a federal officer. His case, however, became a rallying point. When Alter’s speaking tour reached Los Angeles, Caravello joined him on stage linking academic repression to the criminalization of immigrant solidarity.

Two different cases, two legal forms—but a common dynamic: Repression met not with silence, but with organized public resistance.

Defense campaigns as class strategy

The Committee to Defend Tom Alter (CDTA) illustrates a strategic orientation largely absent from the current U.S. Left: turning an individual grievance into a collective struggle. Instead of treating Alter’s firing as a narrow dispute over academic freedom, the campaign framed it as part of a wider pattern of repression—linking labor rights, political speech and state power.

What distinguishes the CDTA is not its legal strategy but its political one: refusing to withdraw from private litigation and insisting on building a public campaign for free speech and academic freedom. From the outset, the case was treated not as a personal matter but as a collective fight. This orientation is reflected in the committee’s deliberately open and non-sectarian structure. As Alter told Inside Higher Ed, the CDTA “includes whoever chooses to be a part of it for however long they want to be involved.” Organized around a small core of five people who work on the case weekly, participation extends outward to union members, graduate students, faculty, and community activists, with local committees formed across multiple cities—including New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, and Connecticut. This breadth is strategic. By refusing narrow political gatekeeping, the campaign expands its base and situates the case within a wider class context.

By refusing narrow political gatekeeping, the campaign expands its base and situates the [Tom Alter] case within a wider class context.

The resulting coalition is unusually broad: labor unions such as the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU) (CWA), the California Faculty Association, and the AFT; academic bodies including AAUP and major history associations; and civil liberties and Palestine solidarity organizations. This is not a single-issue campaign or a sectarian front. It is a consciously constructed alliance that insists that Alter’s right to speak, organize, and teach is a working-class issue.

Public mobilization is integral to this approach. Rallies accompanied key legal moments—from campus protests in San Marcos to demonstrations at the headquarters of Texas State University System—and unions helped organize a national speaking tour that turned the case into a vehicle for wider organizing. The goal is not just reinstatement, but the construction of networks and capacities that outlast the case itself.

Caravello’s defense followed a similar trajectory, with unions organizing public pressure and now moving toward a cross-union defense council. Together, these efforts point toward the reemergence—still embryonic—of a coordinated, labor-centered approach to political defense. In this respect, they echo the tradition of the International Labor Defense (an initiative of the early Communist International): non-partisan, expansive, and oriented not only toward legal resolution, but toward building the collective power necessary to confront repression.

The speaking tour as organizing tactic

By February 2026, Alter had turned his firing into a three-month national speaking tour (February–April 2026) that quickly expanded beyond its initial scope. What began as a “patchwork” of invitations became a coordinated, coast-to-coast campaign spanning more than nine states with stops at campuses, bookstores, bars, and community venues. He spoke at more than forty venues, including campuses such as Rutgers, Loyola, the University of Ohio, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, San Diego State, Cal State LA, UT Austin, University of Pittsburgh, and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as independent bookstores like Midnight Books in Los Angeles and informal venues like Sean Patrick’s in San Marcos. He shared stages with Sang Hea Kil, John Caravello, members of the CUNY Fired 4, a Prairieland defendant, union activists, and student organizers, linking his case to a wider field of struggle.

The tour had two strategic aims, neither of which was reducible to “raising awareness.” First, CDTA used the case as a lever for organizing. At each stop, attendees were encouraged to join unions, sign petitions, and participate in local defense activities. The tour did not simply draw crowds; it built connections. As Alter told Inside Higher Ed, the events consistently brought together students, faculty, and community members, strengthening campus organizing.

Crucially, the tour fed back into the union strategy. The Texas State Employees Union (TSEU) began bringing Alter to campus not only to speak about his case but also to recruit members, demonstrating in practice that a union is not a transactional service provider but a vehicle for collective struggle. In this sense, the tour served both as political education and organizational development, using a concrete case to reshape workers’ understanding of the role of unions.

The tour deliberately linked academic repression to broader attacks on immigrant communities.

That dynamic points to a broader strategic insight that liberal legalism cannot grasp. The public orientation of the CDTA—the rallies, the tour stops, the joint appearances with local activists—is not window dressing around the “real” work of litigation. It is work. When Alter speaks in a union hall in Connecticut or a bar in San Marcos, he is not just telling his story. He is modelling what resistance looks like. He is showing faculty and staff that a firing need not be tolerated in and that a defense campaign can be a platform for organizing, not just for damage control.

The results bear this out. As Labor Notes reported in November 2025: “Membership in the Texas State chapters of AAUP and the Texas State Employees Union has doubled since Alter’s firing as workers unite to defend academic freedom and democratic rights across the state.” That doubling did not come from a clever legal brief or a favorable ruling. It came because the unions—TSEU and AAUP Texas—moved quickly to help form and support the CDTA and go public, because Alter got on a plane, stood on stages, and asked people to join their unions. The courtroom did not build that membership. The speaking tour did.

Second, the tour deliberately linked academic repression to broader attacks on immigrant communities, Palestine solidarity activists, and labor militancy. When UT Austin canceled his April 22 event, citing “security concerns” just days after hosting Clarence Thomas, the TSEU relocated the event to a nearby bar, turning administrative repression into an organizing opportunity.

This is defense work as class struggle. The objective is not simply to win a legal case, but to build infrastructure—to leave behind stronger unions, more militant organizations, and a network capable of responding collectively when repression strikes again.

A century of revolutionary legalism

The CDTA’s approach is not without precedent. For nearly a century, the U.S. Left has grappled with how to turn legal defense into political power—with varying degrees of success.

Lessons from the ILD

The International Labor Defense, founded in 1925 as a political solidarity and legal arm of the Comintern, remains the most developed model we have for this kind of work. It was not a spontaneous outpouring of outrage. It was an institution—a permanent defense organization with a national office, full-time staff, a monthly magazine (Labor Defender), and a budget. Within a year of its founding, the ILD had 156 branches and 20,000 individual members, with 75,000 more affiliated through union and community endorsements1For ILD membership and structure, see Marxists.org ILD entry and Bryan D. Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1929 (2007), Chapter 9..

The ILD’s principles are worth restating.

Non-partisanship. The ILD did not demand political loyalty. At its founding, James Cannon and Bill Haywood identified 106 “class war prisoners” in U.S. jails—striking miners, Wobblies, anarchists, and anti-fascist immigrants. None were members of the Communist Party, yet the ILD defended them all. This was not ecumenical sentimentality. It was strategic clarity: the enemy is the capitalist class. A historical caveat is necessary: The ILD’s non-partisanship was strongest in its early years, from 1925 to 1927. As Stalinization intensified, the organization became more sectarian—a reminder that all defense work must guard against bureaucratic capture.2On the ILD’s early non-partisanship and later Stalinization, see Palmer (2007) and the Labor Defender archives.

Mass Mobilization. In the Sacco and Vanzetti campaign, Cannon rejected liberal faith in legal appeals. After the Massachusetts Supreme Court denied a new trial in 1927, he wrote in the Labor Defender: “The power of the workers is the court of last resort to which our appeal must be made.”3James P. Cannon, “From the Supreme Court of the capitalists to the Supreme Court of the laboring masses,” Labor Defender, May 1927. He was explicit about what this meant organizationally: not legal briefs, but strikes. “We must confidently proceed at all costs to still further arouse and organize the anger of the working men and women against the slaughter of the two labor fighters and assist it to take the form of huge mass demonstrations and effective strikes.”4James P. Cannon, “A campaign of the mass movement,” Labor Defender, September 1927.

Against the liberal “soft pedal,” Cannon drew a sharp line between class-struggle defense and liberal reformism. He identified two competing policies within the Sacco-Vanzetti movement. The first—his own—puts the center of gravity in the protest movement… puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. The second, which he called “the policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy,” relied primarily on legal proceedings and sought to obscure the issue of class struggle.5James P. Cannon, “Who can save Sacco and Vanzetti?” Labor Defender, January 1927.

Political Education. In his 1949 speech on the trial of the Stalinist leaders—a case he opposed even as he condemned Stalinism—Cannon articulated a revolutionary approach to political trials. The Stalinists, he argued, were indeed criminals, but “they are being tried in the wrong court” for the wrong crime. “The very provision of the Constitution… was designed specifically to prevent Congress from passing laws which would proscribe the ‘advocacy’ of any doctrine. But this indictment under the Smith Act… is an indictment against speaking and writing.”

For Cannon, the purpose of a political trial was never to prove innocence within the framework of the enemy. It was to turn the courtroom into a platform: “We will go in that courtroom not as defendants at all, but as accusers of the prosecutors and the system they represent.” His testimony in the Smith Act trial of 1941, published as Socialism on Trial, is a classic example of this approach.

Material Aid. The ILD sent $5 per month ($95 adjusted to today) to each of more than 100 prisoners and $20 ($380) to dependent families; at Christmas, it sent $50 to families and $25 to prisoners. “It must be recorded to the shame of the labor movement that poverty, hardship, and neglect have too often been the fate of dependent families,” the ILD declared. This was not charity. It was a statement: the working class takes care of its own.6On ILD material aid and financial transparency, see Palmer (2007) and the Labor Defender archives.

The 1960s–70s resurgence of political defense

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a wave of political trials tested the idea that mass defense could transform legal proceedings. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1969–70) saw eight antiwar activists—including Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman—use the courtroom as a platform to indict the Vietnam War rather than to prove their innocence. The defense attorney William Kunstler turned the proceedings into political theater. Although five were initially convicted, the Seventh Circuit reversed all convictions in 1972, citing judicial bias.

The campaign to free Angela Davis (1970–72) went further, systematically integrating legal defense with mass mobilization. Facing capital charges tied to the Marin County courthouse shootout, Davis was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list before her arrest. The defense campaign refused to treat the case as a narrow legal matter. The “Free Angela” movement mobilized worldwide, organizing rallies, fundraisers, and educational events that turned her prosecution into a global referendum on racism and political repression. As Charlene Mitchell, who led the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, concluded: “The major lesson we learned was that the legal and mass defense of political prisoners is an inseparable entity; that you cannot free a political prisoner in the courtroom alone, and you cannot, without a good, political legal defense in the courtroom, make a mass defense.”

Davis herself understood this double orientation. As she later recalled, “the lawyers would have to understand from the outset that what happened in the courtroom would, of necessity, be related and coordinated with the campaign in the streets.” The legal defense was inseparable from mass pressure, which helped frame the trial not as an isolated criminal case, but as a political indictment of the carceral state. Her acquittal in 1972 was widely understood as a victory both inside and outside the courtroom.

The liberal settlement trap

But not every defense campaign maintained this orientation. The most instructive warning story dates back to the mid-1970s. In the wake of Watergate, the FBI and CIA underwent unprecedented public scrutiny. The Carter administration responded not by dismantling the surveillance apparatus, but by restoring its legitimacy. New “guidelines” were introduced, and a secret federal wiretap court was established—one that has never denied a government request in practice. The goal was to convince the public that abuses were over and that the “new FBI” could be trusted.

In this context, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) filed a lawsuit against the FBI alleging a decades-long campaign of infiltration, disruption and frame-ups. The government sought to settle, offering standard terms: modest compensation, a promise to “abide by the law” and an implicit agreement to ratify the legitimacy of the reformed security apparatus. Many accepted similar agreements. Jane Fonda settled her case in 1979.7See Larry Seigle, “Workers’ Rights versus the Secret Police,” in Jayko, ed., FBI on Trial, Pathfinder, 1988, pp. 214-248. The ACLU negotiated settlements that effectively gave political cover to the very institutions it exposed. The price was political, not just financial. As one participant on the SWP’s legal team observed, such agreements helped convince the public that the “new FBI” deserved confidence.

The SWP refused any settlement that would legitimize the state’s narrative. What it sought in court was not mainly financial compensation but a political and constitutional affirmation that advocating socialism and the revolutionary replacement of capitalism was protected under the Bill of Rights. Attorney Leonard Boudin and SWP leaders stressed the fundamental issue: whether individuals and organizations could legally organize for socialism without state surveillance, harassment, or prosecution.

Judge Griesa’s 1986 ruling was a political victory for the entire socialist movement. It declared the FBI’s infiltration and surveillance of the SWP unconstitutional and a violation of First Amendment rights. For the first time, it was established that government informants inside a political organization could themselves constitute a constitutional violation. The court awarded $264,000 in damages to the party and issued an injunction barring the government from using illegally obtained files. The case took fifteen years. Victory required patience, persistence, and a clear political perspective.

Revolutionary legalism as a programmatic alternative

The concept of revolutionary legalism is not new. It was first systematically theorized by Piotr Stutchka, the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Justice, and debated by his younger colleague Evgeny Pashukanis. Drawing on Lenin’s tactical use of tsarist courts and the Duma, Pashukanis argued that a revolutionary party must avoid two errors: fetishizing legal forms (treating courts as neutral arbiters of justice) and the “fetishist denial of legality” (refusing to use legal weapons at all). Pashukanis wrote that Lenin “knew not only how mercilessly to expose tsarist, bourgeois etc. legality, but also how to use it, where it was necessary and when it was necessary.” This is revolutionary legalism: using bourgeois legal forms tactically, without mistaking them for instruments of justice or sources of legitimacy. This dialectical approach has seen a revival in recent years as neoliberal capitalism and the rise of authoritarian populism have drastically eroded democratic rights, forcing socialists to rediscover the Leninist art of fighting on every terrain.8Igor Shoikhedbrod, “Revolution or legality? Confronting the spectre of Marx in Habermas’s legal philosophy,” Contemporary Political Theory 20, no. 1 (2021): 72-95.

The courtroom is a battlefield, not a sanctuary. This distinction defines revolutionary legalism. It does not reject the use of courts, but refuses to treat them as neutral arbitrators or sources of legitimacy. Against liberal legalism, which seeks vindication through procedure, and against forms of movement lawyering, which can drift toward settlement as an endpoint, revolutionary legalism subordinates legal methods to the construction of political power. The question is not simply whether to win, but how and at what political cost.

Private negotiations create settlements. Public fights produce power.

This orientation has concrete consequences. First, discovery is a weapon. Subpoenas, depositions, and document requests should be used to expose how repression is organized, not just to build a case. Second, hearings are organizing opportunities. Every court date should be paired with public mobilization, turning legal proceedings into moments of political confrontation. Third, settlements must be judged politically. A good settlement contains no gag order, admits no legitimacy to the state’s original repressive action, and leaves a public record.

Agreements that restore institutional legitimacy without shifting the balance of power are defeats, regardless of compensation. Transparency, accountability, and structural concessions must be non-negotiable terms.

The Alter case poses these questions in real time. The lesson is to use the state’s own procedures to expose its operations while building power outside the courtroom.

When Texas State offered a post hoc “hearing,” it was an attempt to launder an illegal firing through procedural form. When administrators upheld the decision, they bet that the process itself would exhaust resistance. The response has moved in the opposite direction. Rather than retreat into litigation, the campaign has expanded outward, using the case not only to fight for reinstatement but also to expose the political forces behind the firing and to build the capacity to resist the next attack.

The lesson is obvious. Private negotiations create settlements. Public fights produce power.

The limits of the courtroom

The most persistent illusion social activists face is that “the law” stands above class struggle. It does not. The law codifies existing property relations and is enforced by courts and police, who answer to the same state.

First, the courts are not neutral. They protect property and class privilege. They do not dispense justice; they manage a crisis. A judge may rule for Alter—and that would matter—but it does not mean the courts are on our side. It means that, in this instance, the contradictions of bourgeois democracy worked in our favor.

When Cannon wrote that “the power of the workers is the court of last resort,” he was not dismissing legal tactics.9James P. Cannon, “The power of the workers is the court of last resort,” Labor Defender, September 1927. He insisted that no procedural victory matters unless it is backed by organized capacity outside the courtroom. The rule of law protects the ruled only when the ruled are organized enough to make violations costly. This does not mean refusing to use the courts. It means entering them with clarity: as a tactic, not a strategy; as one front in a struggle that will be decided in unions, workplaces, and the streets.

The rule of law protects the ruled only when the ruled are organized enough to make violations costly.

Second, legal victories do not translate to class power. Even if Alter is reinstated, Texas State remains a capitalist institution. Even if the AAUP secures reforms, administrators will still face donors and political pressure. The point of a defense campaign is not simply to win a better deal, but to build the capacity to fight—and ultimately to challenge the class structure itself.

Third, the state learns and adapts. After the SWP lawsuits of the 1970s, the FBI did not stop spying; it refined its methods. The same will happen here. No defense campaign can permanently restrain repression. At best, it can buy time, create space, and help organize the forces capable of confronting repression and its core roots.

This is why the CDTA’s focus on building infrastructure matters more than the lawsuit’s outcome. If Alter loses his case but leaves behind a functioning cross-union defense council and a network of organizers prepared to respond to repression, the campaign will have succeeded. If he wins but the organization dissolves, the state will return stronger, and the Left will start from zero.

Conclusion: Building the capacity to fight

The ILD slogan—”An injury to one is an injury to all”—is an organizing principle. The fight for immigrant rights, academic freedom, Palestinian solidarity, and union organizing is one and the same.

The significance of the Alter and Caravello cases lies in the strategies they have generated. They show how defense campaigns can become sites of political recomposition—bringing together unions, activists, and communities in common struggle. The question is not whether repression will continue—it will. The question is whether the Left will be prepared to respond.

Revolutionary legalism rests on a simple premise: the courtroom is only one battlefield. The decisive terrain lies elsewhere—in the working class’s capacity to organize, mobilize, and act collectively. Defense campaigns that grasp this can turn moments of repression into opportunities for growth.

What would it take to build a permanent defense infrastructure today? Not a single centralized organization, but a network: regional defense committees linked through unions, civil liberties groups, and community organizations, with a shared playbook for rapid response. The CDTA’s “patchwork” model—local committees across multiple cities—is a starting point. The next step is to formalize coordination so that when one sector is targeted, others mobilize immediately.

The trial will come. The state will escalate. The university will try to wait out the campaign. But if the networks being built now endure—if unions, academic associations, and community organizations remain active—the outcome of the case will not be the sole measure of success.

The real victory will be the infrastructure that endures when the case is closed. The real victory will be a Left that knows how to defend itself.

The Committee to Defend Tom Alter continues to organize. To sign the statement of support, to request an endorsement from your organization, or to get involved in local organizing, visit defendtomalter.org.

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: Karolus_BR; modified by Tempest.

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Press contact: Hannah Lawrence, press@stay-grounded.org 6th July – The England team will emit about 154 times the average Briton’s yearly carbon footprint if they reach the final, new research shows. The new research, released by Scientists for Global Responsibility, Fossil Free Football and Stay Grounded, gives a glimpse of the huge impact of air traffic emissions associated with…

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THE 23RD FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) Men’s World Cup kicked off on June 11th in Mexico City. The nearly 40-day tournament is being hosted by 16 cities across Turtle Island, including Toronto and Vancouver. 

The tournament’s arrival is being celebrated as a moment of global attention and intra-national pride across the three nations. Yet, beneath the banner of “United as One” lie entrenched colonial logics and practices.

Whether it’s concrete harms advanced on Indigenous lands to secure the 2026 tournament stadiums, or the lack of institutional reckoning with football’s ongoing legacy of systemic racism, corruption, and colonialism, we cannot ignore that football has always been a deeply political terrain. 

Still, while there are countless critiques to make of FIFA and elite sport more generally, we ask: can football be a tool for decolonization and social change?

A Global Celebration, Paid for by Local Communities 

FIFA reported that more than half of the world’s population engaged with the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup across all media platforms, including linear television, digital channels, social media, and FIFA-owned platforms. The final match alone attracted an estimated global audience of 1.42 billion viewers. These figures help explain why Canada chose to spend approximately $1 billion on hosting just 13 of the 104 matches. The sheer size and impact of the World Cup make it synonymous with cultural impact and supposed economic benefits for local businesses (though the true extent of these impacts has also been debated). However, getting host cities “game-ready” often requires the most marginalized to bear the brunt of this development. 

For example, in Vancouver, there were measurable impacts on Indigenous access to health care, even before World Cup matches began. 

Regional health authorities, such as the First Nations Health Authority, which supports more than 200 First Nations in B.C., note that flights and accommodations may be limited or unavailable, even for urgent medical travel. Community leaders warn that rising transport and accommodation costs have forced many First Nations patients to postpone non-urgent medical travel. For communities already navigating systemic health inequities and vast geographic distances between reserves and medical services, postponing care has cascading health consequences. 

Beyond healthcare inequities, marginalized communities bear the cost of high-profile events like the World Cup from the routine patterns of securitization that include increased surveillance, crowd-control measures, and joint law-enforcement operations — measures that disproportionately affect Indigenous, Black, and migrant populations, further deepening existing social inequalities.

Other host communities have also felt the strain of this massive tournament on their vital resources. For instance, in Mexico City, local reporters have argued that the intense influx of tourists has led to many rental units being converted into pricey temporary rentals — an incredible strain on the already dire housing market. As the advocates warn: “Every unit of scarcity becomes a unit of rent inflation, and the inflation does not reverse when the tournament ends — because the landlords who converted for the World Cup will have discovered what their property is worth to the global market.”

Locals in Mexico City have also sounded the alarm over the water supply, which already experiences regular outages, and residents say it will be further threatened by stadium expansion, which will increase demand. 

It is worth noting the climate impact of the 2026 Men’s World Cup, which is projected to generate greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to a small country’s annual carbon footprint — and as we already know, Indigenous people are almost always the “first to face the direct consequences of climate change.”

And to be clear, these World Cup-induced harms are not new. Ten years after Brazil hosted the 2014 World Cup, the stadiums built for the tournament became underused, expensive to maintain, and a financial burden on communities that bore infrastructure costs while reaping little benefit. We have always known who really pays for these spectacles of sport.

Colonial Logics at Play While the disregard for those who most acutely rely on the lands where the World Cup is held is awful, it is not, unfortunately, surprising — colonial legacy and logic are embedded through all elite global football. 

In the Premier League, the world’s most popular football league, over 70% of players come from countries outside England — a significant number from South America, Africa, and Western Asia. In the World Cup, too, the top-contending nations are overwhelmingly European countries with deep colonial legacies that have subsequently had the means to both build up their national football infrastructure and attract talent from their former colonies: players who may hold dual citizenship or connections to other countries through their parents and grandparents.

While playing for these European nations often provides superior pay and professional development, there is a clear expectation for these players to adhere to white, Eurocentric expectations of respectability; otherwise, they will be punished. Mesut Özil, a German-born son of Turkish immigrants, captured this contradiction, saying, “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.”

Beyond the World Cup: Football for Liberation

While many have called for a boycott of the World Cup to pressure FIFA to change its destructive practices, it has so far proven difficult to mount large-scale action. 

Anna Olimpia de Moura Leite, a PhD student at The New School for Social Research and a Director at LCA Consultores in Brazil, writes about why organizing on this issue is so hard, saying,

A true boycott is impossible because of the very people who keep the game’s heart beating. The World Cup is kept alive by the kids in the favelas, the immigrants in Queens, and the families in local bars who refuse to let their sport be stolen.

This is perhaps the heart of the issue: football itself — the game played in streets, on rooftops, in parks, and in community centers — belongs to people, but football is also a business, and FIFA, supported by countries and corporations seeking to get in on that business, have hijacked the people’s sport in the interests of capital. 

Yet, this irony is not inevitable. Globally, countless examples demonstrate how football is a site of struggle, healing, and resistance.

Take in Gaza and the West Bank, amidst Genocide and Athleticide, football operates as a survival mechanism and a form of resistance to settler colonialism and genocide. Palestinian writer and journalist, Mohammed R. Mhawish, describes this survival mechanism: “As long as there is football, there is some hope that somehow, someday, ordinary life might be possible again.” 

Here, football is not a spectacle managed from above; it is a practice of care, resistance, and collective imagining of a different future.

Further proving that football need not be beholden to the colonialist and capitalist logics of recent years, alternative football structures have emerged outside the World Cup’s official channels. 

The CONIFA World Cup, for instance, brings together teams from unrecognized and partially recognized nations and territories, as well as refugees and Indigenous nations, to build solidarity through football. This tournament operates outside FIFA’s hierarchies and represents a radically different vision of what global football could be: one organized around marginalized communities’ own visions of belonging and nationhood.

Similarly, across North America, Left Wing Football Club (L.W.F.C.) and other grassroots groups have created spaces where football is explicitly decoupled from the vision and ideals currently present at the World Cup. Reporter Max Ross writes:

L.W.F.C. ‘s intent is to facilitate an inclusive version of the game, for all ages and skill levels, neither corrupted by FIFA’s corporate and consumerist politics nor tainted by the aggression inherent in sporting competition. The intent, in other words, is to bestow upon the game a carefree and democratic ethos.

Indigenous Football as a Decolonial Practice

Detailing how Indigenous people specifically have taken up football as a mechanism of decolonization and intergenerational healing, Lummi footballer and scholar Temryss MacLean Lane explicitly situates Indigenous football within a broader project of resistance to colonialism. She argues, “Indigenous soccer [football] operates as a mechanism of decolonization and re-membering for Indigenous Peoples who inherit colonial traumas.” 

Lane’s work draws from Indigenous voices to articulate Indigenous football and Indigenous football identities within the framework of Sche’lang’en (shuh-lang-un). Sche’lang’en is a Lummi1 concept that roughly translates to “way of life” but encompasses far more: an integrated philosophy of existence that encompasses kinship systems, values, land relationships, and collective survival. Lane argues that when Indigenous communities play football, they do so not as adherents to a colonial sport, but as practitioners of Sche’lang’en. They embed the game within Indigenous worldviews and use it as a vehicle for cultural continuity.

So while we should be critical of how sports, especially football, have functioned as colonial technologies of assimilation, violent gendering, labour, and militarism, we should also remember that many marginalized people across the globe have long relied on football as a tool for liberation, a fact we can easily forget in the spectacle of the World Cup and in an environment where the story of Indigenous football has remained largely invisible. 

Centring Indigenous football stories in sports culture can advance the goal of making Indigenous football locally accessible as an instrument of decolonial healing for generations of Indigenous Peoples — something more impactful than FIFA’s billion-dollar tournaments could ever hope to be.

Endnotes

1. The Lummi, or Lhaq’temish, are a Coast Salish nation and the original inhabitants of the northernmost coast in Washington and southern British Columbia.

Citation:

Elsharkawy, Omar.”Colonialism On and Off the Pitch: How the 2026 World Cup Reveals Football’s Colonial Legacy,” Yellowhead Institute. July 07 2026. https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2026/colonialism-on-and-off-the-pitch-how-the-2026-world-cup-reveals-footballs-colonial-legacy

Artwork by Ángel Faz / @theFaztastic / angelafaz.com

 

The post Colonialism On and Off the Pitch: How the 2026 World Cup Reveals Football’s Colonial Legacy appeared first on Yellowhead Institute.

La Via Campesina Honduras has emphatically denounced the law which it says not only orders eviction but also legally shields those lands against any future agrarian reform claim.

The post Honduras: Peasant Organizations Denounce 1,000 Eviction Orders appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

When Rebecca Lindsey was fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last February, the first thing she did was stew. Then she worried about what was going to happen to the website she and her team had built over the last decade and a half. Lindsey had long been the lead writer and editor, and more recently the program manager, of Climate.gov, a site that distilled the agency’s research on climate change into easy-to-understand, free resources for the public. 

She was right to be concerned: Within a matter of months, the Trump administration had eliminated the rest of the staff supporting Climate.gov and shut down the website — ironically, to comply with an executive order calling for “restoring gold standard science.”

“I couldn’t stand the thought of it all being thrown away,” Lindsey said of the website, which had been used by teachers, community leaders, and policymakers. It had also given researchers in the government important insight into what everyday Americans needed to know about climate science and how to answer their questions effectively. Members of the former Climate.gov team met periodically to discuss what could be done to preserve the work. By the end of last summer, they’d decided to create an independent version of the site. It launched late last month with a new nongovernmental domain: Climate.us. 

The intent behind Climate.us isn’t just to save what was on the Climate.gov website when it died, but to continue to update it with new visuals, explainers, features, and Q&As, making climate science relevant to people with resources that are vetted by scientists. “We just try to constantly take the pulse of what scientists say is valuable and important and needs to be talked about and explained,” Lindsey said.

Since its launch two weeks ago, the new site has gotten about 800,000 page views — an impressive number, considering that the old NOAA site had been getting about a million views a month, according to Lindsey.

Read Next Why the federal government is making climate data disappear Kate Yoder

After President Donald Trump took office a second time, some of the most easy-to-understand resources to help people understand the warming planet disappeared. The National Climate Assessments, congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into warnings for policymakers and the public, vanished last summer. In December, the Environmental Protection Agency removed at least 80 webpages about the causes, indicators, and effects of climate change. The EPA webpage explaining the causes of climate change no longer lists human activity as a direct driver of global warming. It now emphasizes — misleadingly — natural processes. 

Izzy Pacenza, who monitors government websites for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, called it “an all-out assault on climate information.”

Thousands gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to defend science as a public good and central pillar of social progress in March 2025. Astrid Riecken / The Washington Post via Getty Images Beyond the federal government

As organizations race to fill the gap left by the United States’ attack on its own scientific knowledge, many experts see an opportunity to shield research and data from the shifting winds of politics. The world’s science has relied on massive support from the U.S. government, but experts see a future that disperses some of its responsibilities, including how data is collected, handled, preserved, and used.

“It can’t just be the federal government anymore,” said Janice Lachance, executive director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union, the largest Earth and space organization in the world. “That’s proven to us that that’s unreliable, that there’s too much control in very few hands. And so how do we distribute this to like-minded organizations, civil society, and [nongovernmental organizations] who care about it?

The American Geophysical Union is trying to fill the void where it can. It has launched a global initiative to ensure that environmental datasets are more resilient against threats such as political interference, pulling together a group of about 100 experts around the world. It’s also working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science, hosting an academic network that allows U.S. scientists to participate in key international reports even after the Trump administration withdrew from the group. Along with the American Meteorological Society, it has also released an invitation for climate manuscripts to maintain the research momentum of what would have been the sixth National Climate Assessment, with plans to eventually publish a special climate collection across different peer-reviewed journals.

Read Next Why this NASA climate scientist wants you to stay angry Clayton Aldern

For many former federal researchers like Lindsey, trying to carry on their previous work at nonprofits and through independent initiatives has been challenging. 

Adam Smith, who led a project tracking billion-dollar weather and climate disasters at NOAA before the agency ended the program last year, has taken the work over to the nonprofit Climate Central. The project is now up and running with all the same data and methods, but it took almost a year to get it fully where it was back at NOAA. The research is important, Smith said, because it quantifies the economic effects of extreme weather, helping to communicate the real-world consequences of climate change to businesses, policymakers, and the public. He is working to develop the project further, documenting disasters that cost $100 million or more back to 1980. 

Creating an independent copy of the Climate.gov site wasn’t easy, either. Researchers who had no experience fundraising had to crowdsource money and court philanthropists to back their work, Lindsey said. Web developers had to update all the old links that directed people to the defunct original site. The Climate.us team wanted independent scientific review for their materials, as they had done at NOAA, but some scientists declined to put their names on a defunded federal project because of unwanted publicity or fear of retaliation. 

Lindsey managed to revive the site as one of just three full-time staff, compared to roughly eight people who were running the operation under NOAA full-time. 

“In a lot of ways, I feel I’m back in 2010 when we first started building Climate.gov,” she said. “There are days when I think, ‘What am I doing? Do I have it in me to start this all over again?’”

These efforts to save climate information are crucial, experts said, but it’s tough for a patchwork of nonprofits, universities, and independent initiatives to fill the vacuum left by the federal government removing the most accessible resources about climate change. “No nonprofit is going to have the reach of the federal government, and so I think that there’s a massive gap in terms of people learning about where they can find these resources,” said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental and public information researcher who co-founded the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. Philanthropic funders can be fickle, too, raising questions about financial sustainability. “Truly, all of us are scrambling for funding and underfunded,” she said.

Nonprofits also don’t have the instant recognition that the government does, which can make it harder to earn public trust. When Smith started running the billion-dollar disaster project at Climate Central, for example, he found that some people didn’t know that anyone from NOAA was still involved. Now, the top of the website makes it clear that Climate Central is continuing NOAA’s dataset, with the same methods and the same lead scientist. 

A sign that reads “NOAA Saves Lives” is seen in a corridor of the University of Colorado at Boulder in May. Ulysse Bellier / AFP via Getty Images From rescue to reform

For information and data advocates, the current crisis is a wake-up call. “Guess what? We have really terrible and really insufficient data policies,” Gehrke said. As the Trump administration tests those vulnerabilities, it gives these stakeholders insight into what needs to change to protect government information from the political whims of future administrations. That could include writing specific requirements for agencies into law and building up Congress’ oversight capacity and enforcement mechanisms. 

When public-facing platforms like Climate.gov disappear, people tend to wonder, How can we bring this product back? without examining the structural failures that led it to be vulnerable in the first place. Sonia Wang, senior director at the Data Foundation’s Center for Climate and Environmental Data, uses the metaphor that people usually focus on the fountain — the shiny map or platform — rather than the plumbing behind it. This invisible infrastructure is much more fragile than people realize, Wang said, sometimes relying on one person who’s been maintaining a dataset for decades, or relationships the federal government has built over time. 

“This was always a problem, regardless of administration,” Wang said. “I think we’re just seeing more of the cracks be exposed now with the rapid decline in some of our federal partners being able to actually carry on their work without the staff.” 

As organizations work to shore up the plumbing of the data that helps us understand the world, there’s increasingly a sense that they can’t count on government support like they did in the past. “It happened in the United States last year, and it continues this year, but it could happen anywhere,” Lachance said. “And we just don’t think that critical scientific data should be vulnerable to the political winds of the day.” 

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The plan to make climate science harder to erase on Jul 7, 2026.