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By Ismail Wolff

On 26 May, investors, government representatives and financial actors gathered in Rotterdam to discuss the future of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a controversial forest finance proposal that continues to raise serious concerns among Indigenous Peoples, forest-dependent communities and civil society organisations worldwide.

Yet despite the significance of the meeting, very little public information has emerged about what was actually discussed, proposed or agreed behind closed doors.

What commitments were made to investors? What governance arrangements are being negotiated? What safeguards for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and community land tenure were discussed? Were civil society concerns meaningfully addressed? And why do affected communities continue to remain largely outside these conversations?

The lack of transparency surrounding the Rotterdam meeting reflects a broader problem that has characterised the development of the TFFF from the beginning.

A recent roundup by REDD-Monitor, “Tomorrow’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility”, provides an important overview of the growing debates surrounding the mechanism and the increasing involvement of financial actors. As the TFFF gains traction in international finance circles, independent scrutiny and public oversight become increasingly essential.

Can the TFFF actually deliver on its promises?

While promoters of the TFFF present it as an innovative mechanism capable of mobilising billions for tropical forest conservation, serious doubts remain over whether the proposal can realistically deliver the funding it promises.

In recent months, even analysts broadly supportive of market-based forest finance approaches have begun acknowledging major weaknesses and uncertainties surrounding the initiative.

A recent article published by the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), while generally supportive of the TFFF concept, nevertheless raises significant concerns about the mechanism’s financial architecture, political feasibility and long-term viability. The article openly questions whether the facility will actually be able to mobilise the scale of donor and investor funding required and warns that the model depends heavily on uncertain financial market conditions. This is a crucial point.

The TFFF has repeatedly been promoted as capable of mobilising up to USD 125 billion in combined public and private finance, generating billions annually for tropical forest countries. Yet concrete commitments remain far below these figures, and it remains unclear whether governments and investors are genuinely willing to provide funding at the scale required.

Even supporters of the initiative now acknowledge this challenge. The IDOS analysis notes that it remains uncertain whether the targeted donor contributions can realistically be mobilised and concludes that, because of the TFFF’s “design flaws” and “inadequate donor commitments,” it is doubtful the mechanism will deliver the “quantum leap” in tropical forest protection that its promoters promise.

Other commentators have also warned that the TFFF’s promised forest payments ultimately depend on volatile financial markets and complex investment structures that may fail to generate the expected returns.

This raises a fundamental question: why should the future of the world’s tropical forests, and the livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples and forest-dependent communities, especially women and youth, depend on the confidence of private investors and the performance of global financial markets?

The danger is not only that the TFFF could create new risks and inequalities. It is also that the initiative could consume enormous political attention, institutional energy and public resources while ultimately failing to deliver meaningful protection for forests at all.

Another false solution for forests?

The Global Forest Coalition (GFC) and many allied organisations have repeatedly warned that the TFFF risks becoming yet another false solution, one that allows governments and corporations to continue destructive economic models while packaging forests as financial assets for investors.

For decades, forest peoples and civil society have witnessed a succession of market-based forest schemes promoted as “win-win” solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss. From carbon offsetting to REDD+, these initiatives have often failed to address the structural drivers of deforestation while creating new pressures and conflicts for Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women, and youth.

In many cases, they have enabled continued pollution elsewhere, commodified forests and nature, weakened customary governance systems and concentrated power and decision making in the hands of financial institutions and corporate actors.

The TFFF appears to follow many of these same dangerous pathways.

One of the central concerns is that the mechanism could further entrench the financialisation of forests by transforming standing forests into investment vehicles linked to financial returns. Rather than supporting systemic transformation and direct rights-based and gender-responsive support for forest peoples, the TFFF risks prioritising investor confidence and market logic over ecological integrity, justice and community governance.

Who is the TFFF really designed to serve?

The growing role of private investors in shaping the TFFF raises urgent questions about whose interests are driving the initiative.

Is the priority to support forest peoples and address the root causes of deforestation? Or is the mechanism increasingly being designed around the expectations of international investors seeking new “green” financial opportunities?

GFC and allied organisations have also warned that the TFFF lacks sufficient guarantees regarding Indigenous Peoples’ rights, land tenure, participation, decision-making, and free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). Forest conservation cannot succeed without securing collective territorial rights and supporting the leadership of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women, and youth who have consistently proven to be the most effective guardians of forests worldwide.

Another major concern is the lack of transparency and democratic oversight surrounding the development of the facility. Key decisions continue to be discussed primarily among governments, multilateral banks and private financial actors, while civil society participation remains limited and many affected communities remain excluded from meaningful engagement.

The Rotterdam meeting only deepens these concerns. If governments and financial institutions genuinely believe the TFFF represents a positive and transformative proposal, why is there still so little publicly available information about its negotiations, investor expectations and potential impacts?

What solutions are being ignored?

At the same time, the TFFF debate risks diverting political attention and public resources away from solutions that are already proven to work.

Around the world, Indigenous Peoples, peasant communities, women’s rights groups and grassroots organisations are already protecting forests through collective governance systems, agroecology, territorial defence and biodiversity-based livelihoods. Yet these approaches remain chronically underfunded compared to large-scale financial schemes and market-based mechanisms.

Real solutions to deforestation do not lie in creating new speculative financial instruments. They lie in recognising and securing rights, ending extractivism and industrial agriculture, reducing overconsumption, transforming food and energy systems, cancelling unjust debt burdens driving systemic change in sectors that heavily contribute to biodiversity destruction and directly supporting community-led forest conservation and restoration, including women and youth.

If governments truly wanted to protect tropical forests, these measures could already be scaled up today, without creating another global financial mechanism dependent on investor confidence, debt markets and speculative returns.

Forests are not financial assets

As the TFFF continues to evolve through investor meetings and high-level negotiations, continued public oversight is essential. Civil society organisations, journalists, researchers, women’s rights groups, and social movements must continue closely monitoring developments, asking difficult questions and challenging attempts to present the TFFF as a simple or inevitable solution. Forests are not financial assets. They are living territories, homes, cultures and ecosystems that cannot be reduced to investment portfolios or payment mechanisms.

At a time of accelerating climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and escalating attacks on environmental defenders, the world cannot afford another false solution that protects investors’ profits while failing forests and forest peoples. Instead of repeating the mistakes of past market-based mechanisms, governments and international institutions must prioritise approaches grounded in rights, gender and all forms of justice, territorial governance and systemic transformation. The future of the world’s forests depends on it.

Further reading

• “Tomorrow’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility” by REDD-Monitor
• “No to TFFF, Yes to Forest Rights” – Global Forest Coalition
• “The Tables Turn Against the TFFF” – Global Forest Coalition
• “Tropical Forests Forever or Deforestation Forever?” – Global Forest Coalition
• “New Report on TFFF” – Global Forest Coalition

Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination by Tyler Shipley (2020, Fernwood Press). Tyler A. Shipley’s book Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism...

The post Colonialism, capitalism and Canada  first appeared on Spring.

The latest addition to Seattle’s already impressive public transit system opened to great fanfare this spring when more than 200,000 people rode the Crosslake Connection light rail line.

Its March 28 debut was second only to the parade that followed the Seahawks’ Super Bowl victory as Sound Transit’s busiest day ever. Trains now glide across Lake Washington on what is believed to be the world’s first electric rail line that spans a floating bridge, linking the city with Bellevue and Redmond, and doubling the frequency of stops in the heart of Emerald City.

Those same tracks will carry tens of thousands of fans downtown to Lumen Field for the six World Cup matches the city will host between June 15 and July 6. Kirk Hovenkotter, who leads the transit advocacy organization Transportation Choices Coalition, has no doubt that Seattle’s sustained commitment to public transit helped it become a host city.

This summer’s spotlight follows an earlier snub. When the World Cup came to the United States in 1994, Seattle hoped to host matches at Husky Stadium but came away empty-handed.

In the 32 years since, the metropolitan area has grown from 2.5 million people to more than four million. Its transportation infrastructure has boomed as well. Steady investment that began with voter approval of the Sound Move transit package in 1996 helped launch light rail in 2008 and turn Seattle into one of the country’s most ambitious builders of public transit. This summer’s World Cup became the deadline for opening the Crosslake Connection.

“Our region hasn’t been preparing for the World Cup for 18 months,” Hovenkotter said. “It’s been preparing for 18 years.” 

Seattle is one of 16 cities, 11 of them in the U.S., that will host matches in a tournament FIFA, the sports’ sanctioning body, expects to draw more than five million fans. Several are using the event as an opportunity to open rail lines, redesign bus networks, and make other changes that will benefit residents long after the final match. Some cities used the tournament as a deadline. In others, it helped build support for projects or push delayed efforts over the goal line. 

These investments come as rail and bus systems nationwide continue recovering from the steep ridership decline sparked by the pandemic while confronting aging infrastructure and a dire financial outlook. In a country that is less supportive of mass transit than other nations, the World Cup has become an unusual catalyst for change.

Plenty of stadiums remain disconnected from public transportation, of course. But what’s happening in places like Seattle and Atlanta shows that a mega-event like the World Cup can strengthen transit systems — if the investment starts long before kick-off.

The World Cup’s infrastructure legacy has often been more cautionary than celebratory. Past tournaments have raised questions not only about human rights violations and environmental harm, but about whether host cities deliver the public benefits they promise. Brazil and South Africa, for example, failed to fulfill the mass transit commitments they made.

Such disappointments often reflect a broader problem: Host cities plan first for the event, then for the people who live there, said Simon Kuper, who wrote World Cup Fever and has attended nine World Cups. He likens it to hosting a wedding. “Let’s say it’s at the house,” he said. “You paint the house, you fix the toilet, you fix the door that wasn’t working, you redo the kitchen.” 

But the transit needs of 80,000 fans differ from those of residents. “You risk overinvesting in the route to the stadium and not in what makes residents’ lives better every day.”

Seattle followed a different plan. The $1 billion Crosslake Connection was not built for the World Cup –– the money came from a funding package voters approved in 2008, 14 years before Seattle’s selection as host city ––  but Sound Transit used it as a deadline for finishing a project that was three years behind schedule.

“It was like, ‘We’re going to do everything. We’re going to move heaven and earth. We’re going to be working every shift to make sure that when the world is here, our flagship bridge and our double capacity are ready to run passengers,’ and they were,” said Henry Bendon, a public information officer with the agency. 

The $1 billion Crosslake Connection was not built for the World Cup, but Sound Transit used it as a deadline for finishing a project that was three years behind schedule. Courtesy of Sound Transit

Building infrastructure matters, but so does helping people use it. Brian McCullough, who lived in Seattle from 2014 until 2020 and is now an associate professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, said communication will be key to the system’s success. 

Here, too, Seattle has a blueprint. When it hosted the 2018 Special Olympics USA Games, McCullough helped with a campaign encouraging athletes, coaches, and caretakers to use alternative transportation. The plan included providing them with free rides on the city’s expansive light rail system. It worked: Initially, 78 percent of participants planned to rent a car, but in the end, only 7 percent did. Sound Transit has an extensive messaging campaign geared toward soccer fans, including signage in the languages of the countries playing in Seattle.

That lesson is shaping preparations for the World Cup that could further benefit residents, too. Sound Transit expanded its airport bus service to provide 24-hour rides to and from Seattle. The Legislature funded an intercity bus between Pasco, a city in the state’s rapidly growing southwestern corner that is hosting a tournament event, and Spokane, which is hosting an Egyptian team with one of the sport’s biggest stars. It also increased frequency on other routes throughout the state. Hovenkotter hopes those improvements are here to stay. 

“It’s going to be hard to disinvest in this once these start running and people start benefiting from it,” he said.

Some 2,600 miles to the southeast, another city is preparing for an influx of soccer fans. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, or MARTA, is rolling out a major redesign of its bus network and preparing new railcars with expanded capacity, moves that will move more people more often during the event — and long after it.

Like Seattle, Atlanta did not make the list of 1994 World Cup host cities. But two years later, it faced a bigger transportation challenge: the 1996 Summer Olympics. MARTA added 7 miles of rail to ensure everyone got around efficiently. 

Today, the system, which typically carries more than 5 million passengers per month, has 48 miles of track and more than 1,500 miles of bus network.

Soccer fans will discover a system overhauled first and foremost to serve residents. Beginning in 2021, MARTA started working with the community on the first revamp in 40 years. The remake launched in April, and although it cut the number of bus lines from 113 to 81, the agency said the change increased the number of residents who live within a quarter mile of a stop. It also nearly tripled the number of residents living near a route with buses that arrive every 15 minutes, according to MARTA.

MARTA also added a rapid transit line in downtown Atlanta and introduced 12 on-demand “microtransit zones” in which vans provide short rides within each zone.

Among other things, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority overhauled its bus system in a makeover that nearly tripled the number of residents living near a route with buses that arrive every 15 minutes. Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority

The rail system saw similar changes. MARTA plans to update all 224 train cars, some of which have been in service since the 1980s, with more spacious interiors starting in June. Each four-car train will carry 752 passengers, a 13 percent increase. That will be a boon during the tournament, given that four stations are within walking distance of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. 

The World Cup provided an incentive to move quickly. “Folks around here figured out if I want to get my projects some priority … I need to say ‘I want to do this for the World Cup,’” said Rhonda Allen, the agency’s deputy general manager. 

Not everyone is convinced these projects will benefit the community, however. Bakari Height, co-founder of the transit advocacy group MARTA Army, said transit has stagnated since the Olympics, with only two stations added. He called the new trains a “subtle upgrade” and the bus redesign a “sour point” because it cut routes. He doubts the system will handle the World Cup. 

“I don’t know if they’re really ready,” he said, “and for sure, not ready for these crowds.”

In some cities, the changes are smaller, but still practical.

The Massachusetts Bay Transit Agency will open an expanded station near Gillette Stadium in Foxboro this month. The $35 million project adds an additional platform that improves accessibility and allows the station to handle more cars. Caitlin Allen-Connelly, executive director of the advocacy group Transit Matters, said the upgrades will benefit people headed to New England Patriots games and concerts long after the tournament ends. “There was definitely a need to make beautification and accessibility standards to be able to accommodate this level of service for the World Cup,” she said.

That said, moving all those soccer fans around will impact residents.  The MBTA is also reducing commuter rail service on most lines during the tournament. The transit agency said it has “made some minor reductions and adjustments” to service on non-game days to account for the need to reconfigure trains and make other changes to suit the influx of riders to the stadium to watch matches.

Kansas City Streetcar extended its southern service by 3.5 miles last fall and opened a 0.7-mile northern extension in May. While the line does not reach Arrowhead Stadium, it will help soccer fans reach the “Fan Fest” events that accompany matches. Shuttle buses will carry fans from there to the stadium. Tom Gerend, executive director of the Kansas City Streetcar Authority, said the city highlighted the growing system in its host-city bid and that the tournament provided additional pressure to finish projects. “We’re certainly using the World Cup as motivation to make progress and to have these services up and running in time,” he said.

Whether transit projects for the World Cup provide lasting gains often depends on who pays for them — and whether cities keep investing after the tournament ends.

So far, the federal government has done little to help host cities with this. The Department of Transportation allocated $100 million in March, or roughly $10 million per city — far too little to transform most transit systems. FIFA does not contribute anything toward transportation costs. That’s forced cities to seek funding elsewhere, including the fare box. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority plans to charge $80 for round-trip train tickets to each World Cup match in Boston, while NJ Transit will charge $98 for round-trip tickets to games in New York.

Balsam Nehme, director of sustainability at Sidara Collaborative, a firm that advises on large-scale infrastructure and sustainability projects, said the World Cup can bolster greener transit if cities use it to test new ideas and accelerate existing plans. That can mean short-term fixes like shuttle buses or long-term investments like light rail, she said, so long as they fit broader sustainability goals. The priority, she said, should be “long-term system-level thinking.”

For Gerend, the most important question was what would be useful after the fans left. Kansas City, he said, avoided spending big on permanent event services with little long-term value. That meant using the World Cup as a deadline, not a blueprint. “Let’s invest our resources in permanent solutions that are part of a long-standing, regional plan that will have staying power.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US host cities made transit improvements a World Cup goooooooal on Jun 1, 2026.

Power lines across the country weren’t designed for a changing climate, with much of the nation’s grid built more than half a century ago. Today, stronger storms and heavier precipitation cause hundreds of outages a year, many because of trees falling on above-ground power lines.

In northern Michigan, some utilities want to change that.

In March 2025, a devastating ice storm hit the region, knocking down trees and snapping utility poles. Thousands of people lost power for weeks.

During the blackout, Lewiston, Michigan, resident Wanda Whiting suddenly had to get her husband, Dave, to the hospital. He was having heart trouble. The side of the highway was littered with downed wires and broken poles. The streets were so dark, she said, that she got lost on familiar roads.

“I still can’t get over how astonished I was, how much we rely on street lights,” Whiting said.

At one point, she had to drive over thick cables that had fallen across the road. Downed wires are dangerous; they can still be live even if the power is out. The couple made it to the hospital and Dave Whiting recovered. But the power in the area didn’t come back on for another two weeks.

Wanda and Dave Whiting stand outside their home in Lewiston, Michigan.
Vivian La / IPR News

For Michiganders, the ice storm was a reminder of the power grid’s vulnerabilities during severe weather. The state already sees some of the longest power outages in the country.

Climate change could make that worse. Research suggests northern Michigan will see more freezing rain instead of snow and possibly more destructive ice storms. Communities need to plan for a different future, said Richard B. Rood, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies climate change adaptation.

“You can’t think of what we’re experiencing as, ‘This is how it used to be, and this is where it will be,'” Rood said. “You are right in the middle of the change here.”

The biggest challenge to undergrounding power lines is cost. Consumers Energy, one of the largest utilities in Michigan, says it hears from customers “consistently” about burying more lines. The company estimates that undergrounding 1 mile of line in the state can cost $400,000. In some urban areas that cost can swell, with estimates ranging from $2 million to 3 million per mile, according to a report from the Michigan Public Service Commission.

In contrast, installing overhead lines is typically a fraction of that cost.

Instead of undergrounding existing wires, burying new lines during construction is generally easier and cheaper, because crews can install power lines alongside other utilities like water or gas.

Tony Chartrand, director of electric engineering and operations for Traverse City Light & Power, which serves around 42,000 people, said utilities face a balancing act. “Part of that solution is undergrounding lines,” he said. “But it’s not necessarily undergrounding everything.”

Tony Chartrand, director of electric engineering and operations for Traverse City Light & Power, stands next to a conduit containing an underground wire in Traverse City. Vivian La / IPR News

Great Lakes Energy, the state’s largest electric co-op serving 26 counties across northern Michigan, has announced plans to bury all new power lines. The new policy came in response to last year’s ice storm, which caused more than 66,000 power outages for the electric co-op and cost about $150 million in damages.

Even so, burying new lines will be expensive, said Shari Culver, chief operating officer for Great Lakes Energy. It can cost 3 to 5 times more than putting up an overhead line, and costs will be passed onto ratepayers. But, she said, “I think there’s reliability benefits for our membership, because it’s going to help prevent outages over the long term.”

The utility isn’t planning on burying all its existing overhead lines. That’s when expenses for construction, labor, and materials can add up quickly.

Besides the cost, there are other challenges with burying power lines. Any problem often requires digging up sidewalks to reach wires, Chartrand said. For utilities, that can be a balancing act.

“Part of that solution is undergrounding lines. But it’s not necessarily undergrounding everything,” he said. “It’s trying to balance that cost with the benefit.”

Michigan utilities aren’t alone in addressing the problem of downed lines during intense storms. Across the country, Americans are experiencing longer and more frequent power outages due to severe weather.

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Utilities nationwide are looking to bury more lines, said Andrew Phillips, vice president of transmission and distribution infrastructure at the Electric Power Research Institute.

But expensive electricity bills are another concern, as utilities balance upgrades to an aging grid and increasing demand.

“If the utility wants to make any investment, this money doesn’t come from nowhere,” said Tao Sun, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University who studies the impact of extreme weather on power systems. “They have to pass on those costs to their customers.”

That can be a hard sell.

Sun said utilities need to plan ahead, identify the areas that would see the most benefit from undergrounding, and get buy-in from local communities for rate increases — ideally before any major disaster.

Right now, he said, those changes typically happen after disaster strikes.

Electric poles and wires along M-32 near Gaylord, Michigan. Wanda Whiting recalls that poles like this were snapped in half during the March 2025 ice storm.
Vivian La / IPR News

“We will only take actions after local customers feel or experience those events that are really severe or disrupt their lives,” Sun said.

For instance, California’s largest utility, PG&E, is in the middle of the country’s largest undergrounding project — in response to destructive wildfires.

A year after the devastating ice storm in northern Michigan, residents like Wanda Whiting are still recovering. There are now new poles and wires near her home. But Whiting can’t help wondering how these power lines will hold up in the next storm — and whether there’s a better solution.

“If it means going underground,” she says, “Then by God, go underground!”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A simple — yet expensive — way to climate-proof the grid: Bury the power lines on Jun 1, 2026.

Leah Atwood was rattled. It was the tail end of March, and for days she and her colleagues at Agroecology Commons had been fielding dozens of emails alerting them to grant terminations targeting a $300 million U.S. Department of Agriculture program. One after another, within a single week, 49 of the 50 grantees received notices from the USDA informing them that their grants were canceled. 

By the end of the month, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t gotten a notice from the USDA. While their peers were figuring out how to pick up the pieces, it seemed as though their $2.5 million grant, structured largely to help farmers of color acquire and sustain land, remained untouched. All they could do was wait. Resignation settled in — after all, they’d been in this position before.

Shortly after President Donald Trump returned to office last January, his administration launched a sweeping campaign to eliminate initiatives it has deemed wasteful or misaligned with its political agenda. At the USDA, that has meant slashing billions in grants and gutting a mix of newer and longstanding federal programs that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly framed as the administration’s attempt to “stop wasteful spending.”

During the administration’s first year, Agroecology Commons lost multiple grants amidst the USDA’s funding purge. In response, the nonprofit filed a joint lawsuit against the agency, claiming that the grants were terminated unlawfully. In August, a judge granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction that restored their access to some of the money until the court makes its final determination based on the merits of the case. 

All 49 other recipients of the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access grants received termination emails from the USDA during that week in March. In their written cancellations, which gave grantees two business days’ notice, Steven Peterson, the associate administrator of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, explained to the grantees that their programming didn’t align with the agency’s priorities and that its funding structure was not in keeping with the intent of Congress. He used the same language about cutting waste and discontinuing DEI efforts that had become routine for the administration. But whereas the administration tended to be vague about its claims of waste and fraud, Peterson’s letter was surprisingly specific. 

“Instances of excessive or frivolous expenditures,” he wrote, “such as purchasing gazebos, massages, a camper/RV, and oversized office supply budgets (in one case, over $130,000) — instead of land are an affront to taxpayers.” 

Through it all, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t heard a thing. 

Questions swirled throughout the grantee network, but no one could explain why Agroecology Commons’ project alone was spared. Atwood’s team presumed their grant wasn’t terminated because of the ongoing litigation. Now, they continue to wait to see whether their funding will abruptly disappear, too. 

“We are trying to accomplish as much as we can in the time that we have, because we don’t know when it’s going to be canceled,” said Atwood. “It’s a strange reality.” 

Read Next Following the USDA’s food and farm funding: Here’s what’s been canceled and frozen, and resources for those affected Ayurella Horn-Muller & Lyndsey Gilpin

Neither Agroecology Commons nor any of the other grant recipients that Grist spoke to seems to know who may have made those expenditures. 

Kavita Koppa helps run RAFI, a farming organization based in North Carolina that was one of the 49 grants that was canceled; they’d been awarded $8.5 million to help agricultural producers in North Carolina, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

Koppa says RAFI was just about halfway through its five-year contract with USDA and had spent roughly $1.1 million when the termination notice came. From the beginning, almost $2.3 million of their total award had been set aside for grants to support farmer land acquisition and market access, with around $400,000 of that set aside for RAFI to acquire land parcels on behalf of farmers. Another $1.9 million was budgeted for project management costs, which included the fees associated with verifying financial compliance in federal audits, attorneys for farmland acquisition, and translation fees; and then $350K for a bucket of miscellaneous project activities, such as paying guest speakers at workshops, contracting report writers, and mass distributing hard copies of farmer resources. The last $3.9 million was budgeted for technical assistance, a figure that encompassed the full budgets of the five subawardees that RAFI was working with on the project. 

“Under the guise of increasing land access for producers, the ILA program included no minimum requirement for direct producer support,” a USDA spokesperson told Civil Eats in March. “Instead, the program permitted the abuse of federal funds, including expenditures on the purchasing of a barbeque smoker, construction of a gazebo, massages, and for one awardee, a $20,000 budget for ink pens alone. To no surprise, a peek behind the curtain of this Biden-era program revealed the egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars to the tune of nearly $300 million dollars.” 

Koppa says she has never seen the budget items that the USDA cited. “The details were shocking,” she said. “We didn’t do those things. Why are we being treated as if we did something unethical or wasteful?”

Breanna Horsey, executive director of Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, who led another land access project working to expand Iowa’s fruit and vegetable farmers ability to secure permanent and affordable land access, is also adamant that her $1.8 million grant had no carve-outs for the expenditures detailed in their termination notice. Viva Farms’ Anna Chotzen, project manager of another ILCMA project that was awarded a $2.5 million grant to help beginning and historically underserved farmers in two Washington counties access farmland, said the same. Her team has no idea where those budget items came from. All she knows is that it wasn’t them.

Gloria Montaño Greene, former Deputy Undersecretary of the USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation in the Biden administration who helped oversee the creation of the ILCMA program, questions the validity of the excessive spending claims. 

“If that dollar amount for $20,000 in pens was put in there, did they show proof of that?” said Montaño Greene. “Show the proof, right?”

Read Next Inside the program cuts, workforce purges, and secretive reorganization of the USDA Ayurella Horn-Muller

Throughout April, at least 45 of the 49 terminated grantees — including two subgrantees — filed appeals against the termination to the National Appeals Division, an independent office of the USDA, Grist has learned. According to Amanda Koehler, a consultant on the land access program, all but two were informed that their award terminations are not appealable because the decision to terminate “was a matter of general applicability and not based on the individual application of specific program criteria.” (The outstanding two, said Koehler, have not heard back yet.) 

That finding by NAD should put the USDA’s justification for cancellation under closer scrutiny, she added, because it “underscores, in my opinion, that terminations were not based on anything the awardees did or didn’t do.” To her knowledge, none of the grantees — including Agroecology Commons — had budgets that included any of the claims USDA has made concerning wasteful or fraudulent spending. 

“This termination doesn’t seem like it was rooted in anything about our conduct with this grant,” said RAFI’s Koppa. “It seems to be part of some sort of larger motivation where we were not being treated fairly.”

JohnElla Holmes, who oversees the Kansas Black Farmers Association, which was awarded a land access grant of $8.4 million to help Black producers acquire farmland across Kansas, Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, says that roughly 62 percent of the organization’s grant was intended to go directly to farmers. She alleges that, following the administration change, the USDA took nearly a year to supply her team with the necessary approvals required by the grant’s built-in budgetary structure to award payments to farmers. Last November, Holmes says they finally heard from FSA staffers who requested changes to their paperwork. Over the next two months, she worked with them to submit all the revisions and additional documentation the agency asked for. Then, after another period of waiting on USDA, the grant was canceled.

Other grantees and sources close to the program also say that the USDA obstructed the distributions of funding to farmers with its scarce and severely delayed communication, lack of institutional support, and, crucially, the absence of necessary budgetary approvals over the last year. 

The USDA declined to comment for this story. 

On Tuesday, 24 other ILCMA grantees joined the lawsuit that Agroecology Commons filed last year. The plaintiffs are seeking another preliminary injunction, with the aim of reversing the grant cancellations and restoring grantees’ access to the funds. 

While it still has its money, Agroecology Commons plans to move forward with the land access grant. Atwood’s team, though, is proceeding cautiously — holding off on making longer-term investments into hiring or programming, and scrambling to fundraise against the possibility of a sudden cutoff. 

“When you talk about wasteful spending — the years and years that went into getting this program to even exist, and then to just terminate it,” Atwood said incredulously. That, to her, “seems like the real waste.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The USDA canceled $300M in farm grants, citing fraud. Did it make up the evidence? on Jun 1, 2026.

Global heating has “fundamentally altered” the climate of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and is exposing millions of hajj pilgrims to extreme and dangerous heat even in months outside summer, a new analysis has found.

Read more on E360 →

The “data-centre boom” is driving a surge in gas investment in the US, pushing its fossil-power spending ahead of China, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

As Trump’s Iran war devours billions, a Connecticut town closes a public school and shuffles vulnerable kids to plug a budget gap. Drawing on Eisenhower’s warning about “guns” stealing from the hungry and cold, this piece discusses how runaway U.S. militarism quietly wrecks local lives and communities.

Small farms rarely make a decent living in commodity markets. It’s time to stop chasing scale and start building resilient, relationship-based food systems instead.

Revolution, climate denial, invasive species, planetary history, ecocivilization, and the war makers

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A group of Las Vegas advocates are tackling one of the trickiest problems in the fight for livable streets: making sure people on bikes have a good place to lock up once they’re off the street and done with their ride.

Sin City cyclists recently announced that they’d mapped more than 2,152 bike parking locations across the Las Vegas Valley as part of a campaign helmed by the founder of BikeRackMap.com, who lives in the area.

There’s no way to know exactly how much of the community’s bike parking the map represents — and that’s part of the problem. Because bike racks are often sited on private land — and because they’re not legally required by most city building codes, unlike car parking — many local governments have no idea where cyclists can publicly lock up, and do little to proactively increase the share of available spots.

Cyclists themselves, meanwhile, have no choice but to find storage on the go, even if that means reluctantly chaining to a pole and blocking the sidewalk, or praying their ride doesn’t get stolen off a shoddy, grid-style rack that all but asks thieves to pop off a front wheel and abscond with the frame.

For BikeRackMap founder Craig Davis, that’s simply unacceptable — and with the power of grassroots activism, it’s fixable.

“To have viable active transportation, you have to have safe, shared streets — and you have to have a safe, convenient, and secure network of excellent bike parking,” Davis added.

Recommended It’s Time for America to Talk About Bike Parking Kea Wilson November 5, 2021

Davis says that while many city governments maintain searchable, public-facing maps of bike routes, few have similar maps for bike racks, making it hard to identify bike storage “deserts” with no cycling storage for multiple blocks. The maps they do have also tend to be published on user-unfriendly interfaces aimed at traffic planners like ArcGIS, which aren’t helpful for a rider who just wants to figure out where to park for a concert.

When it comes to the quality of bike racks, meanwhile, many governments do promote good bike parking guidelines like the ones published by the Association of Pedestrian and Bicyclist Professionals. In practice, though, it’s largely up to property owners to decide whether they’ll follow those guidelines, never mind exceed them by providing amenities like e-bike charging, covered bike “hangars,” or video monitoring.

In Las Vegas, the vast majority of them don’t clear that bar — and some are way worse than others.

Davis and his fellow advocates recently did a survey of Albertson’s grocery stores across the Valley, and found that nearly all of the racks were obstructed, difficult to access, hard to lock to, or otherwise lost points on the site’s 10-point evaluation system. At the end of the blitz, the group gave a zero-out-of-five rating to 81 percent of the racks.

“[These racks] repel cyclists,” the group wrote in a blog post. “They do not make a positive difference in our communities. Rather, they force shoppers to use expensive and polluting vehicles instead of clean transportation that improves our communities, planet, and shoppers mental and physical well-being.”

Racks at rival grocery Sprouts, though, consistently won high marks from the reviewers – a fact which they highlighted when they brought their results to Albertson’s store directors to lobby for change.

By making the map searchable by company as well as by neighborhood, Davis hopes advocates can pressure the property owners who install bad racks to do better — particularly if those owners are corporations with a stated commitment to promoting public health.

“If cyclists don’t feel that [these racks] are usable, then they won’t get used,” Davis adds. “And it will be a wasted investment, whether it’s from a corporation or from public dollars.”

With thousands of undocumented bike racks peppered across major cities, Davis acknowledges that it’s not easy to create a comprehensive municipal bike storage map — and that putting that burden on advocates isn’t realistic in all communities.

Still, he argues that some advocates enjoy scouting out their cities’ bike storage supply, like one group in Reno, Nevada who mapped over a hundred locations in a single go and ended the night with pizza and beer.

“Cyclists really want to have voice,” Davis continues. “This is giving them agency in this process, and generating very unique data that local governments don’t have.”

As the Tempest editors were preparing this article for publication, the Russian state designated those associated with the website Posle as a “foreign agent.” Russia’s “foreign agent” law is highly repressive, and places the editors at significant risk of criminal prosecution and other threats to their basic civil rights. Russia’s law is a model of what Human Rights Watch has identified as a critical tool in the authoritarian playbook. “The primary target of these laws are civil society and media organizations” whose activities are “aimed at influencing public policy…[and] organizing public debates, events, rallies and demonstrations.” Thus, among other purported sins, the Putin regime has based its decision on Posle’s alleged “promotion” of “LGBT relationships”. This is part of a broader attack on democratic rights internationally. It has its own parallels in the U.S., as the authoritarian creep has been escalated by Trump. Tempest stands in unconditional solidarity with Posle and its editors. We see in Posle fellow “agents”, not of any state, but of a democratic project of international solidarity which is the antidote to a future of unbridled capitalist barbarism. 

Ashley Smith: The U.S. and Israel have expanded their joint genocidal war on Gaza into Lebanon and Iran. They expected a quick victory, but it has turned into yet another disastrous forever war. The Iranian regime has launched asymmetrical warfare; it has struck the region’s oil infrastructure, shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and thereby disrupted the flow not only of oil but also petrochemicals, fertilizers, and helium, which is essential for the manufacture of microchips. While stagflation threatens every corner of the world economy, it appears that Russia has benefited from the war: President Trump has lowered sanctions on Russia oil and increased fossil fuel prices have poured profits into Putin’s coffers. Is this an accurate assessment? What impact is this having on the Russian economy?

Posle: Indeed, in the short term, Russia has benefited from the surge in oil prices and lifting of sanctions. For example, Russian budget revenues from oil exports in April doubled compared to March. However, these additional revenues are not enough to halt the catastrophic rise in the budget deficit (for instance, the deficit currently stands at 2.5%, exceeding the government’s planned threshold of 1.6% for this year).  This has a  negative, knock-on impact on other government spending and the strength of the rouble.This adds further pressure on the creaky financial system.

Furthermore, almost all of the windfall profits were channeled to oil companies to modernise infrastructure (which has been severely damaged by effective attacks from Ukrainian missiles). It is worth noting that Ukraine’s attacks targeting oil refineries and oil loading terminals have seriously undermined Russia’s ability to export raw materials. In recent months, ports on the Baltic Sea, for instance, have reduced oil shipments by a third.

At the same time, a sustained increase in oil prices will inevitably lead to a decline in global oil consumption, which could seriously damage the Russian economy that is already in recession. Therefore, the ongoing war in Iran and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz are not in Russia’s economic interests, although they undoubtedly offer it political advantages.

AS: Trump’s war on Iran has further disrupted the so-called rules based order, already discredited by the U.S. and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine. Trump launched the attack on Tehran without consulting or even alerting Washington’s NATO allies. Now that alliance is fraying with Trump increasingly threatening to pull U.S. troops out and abandoning support for Ukraine. As a result, Europe, especially Germany, is rapidly re-arming. Given this reality, what do you believe is the current perspective of the Putin regime regarding the inter-imperial rivalry within Europe, and that between NATO and Russia, and Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination?

Posle: In fact, declining support for Ukraine in the U.S. and America’s further distancing from European security issues due to the war in Iran represent Putin’s main political gain to date. In this sense, it is clear how the interests of Russia and its population (suffering from a falling standard of living and intensifying missile attacks) diverge sharply from those of Putin and his regime, which is prepared to prolong the conflict in order to achieve its geopolitical ambitions. These objectives include crushing Ukrainian resistance (at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers’ lives) and destabilising Europe in order to expand his influence across the post-Soviet space and in Eastern Europe.

Currently, the situation around Armenia is escalating, where President Pashinyan is seeking to gradually withdraw the country from the CSTO (a pro-Russian military bloc) and strengthen cooperation with the EU. Tensions are also rising with the Baltic states, which are becoming increasingly targeted by Russian military sabotage. All these developments are of great significance to Putin, as they raise questions about the reality of NATO’s support for its members and allies.

If aggression against Iran escalates, the U.S. will continue to rapidly reduce its presence in Europe, and NATO risks turning into a “paper tiger,” whose members’ mutual commitments are worthless. It is clear that these challenges not only lead to the remilitarisation of Germany, but also call into question the entire ideological model of the German state, built upon the trauma of Nazi militarism and the colossal sacrifices of the Second World War. All these values are threatened today, as demonstrated by the growing support for the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has effectively become the country’s most popular party.

In these circumstances, the German Left must certainly fight against the danger of fascism and militarisation, but not by ignoring the Russian threat facing Eastern European countries. On the contrary, only consistent support for Ukraine can curb the ambitions of Putin’s regime and, consequently, the need for Germany’s remilitarisation, which ultimately plays into the hands of the far right.

AS: In another development that impacts Russia, voters kicked out Victor Orbán after 16 years of his increasingly authoritarian rule in Hungary. He was an ally of Putin who had blocked the EU’s $106 billion loan package to Ukraine. What is the significance of Orbán’s defeat for the Putin regime?

Posle: This is certainly a serious setback for the Kremlin, as Orbán served as its chief agent within the EU. Today, the only country remaining in this role is Slovakia, which is led by the right-wing populist Robert Fico. He, like Orbán, holds anti-Ukrainian views and is focused on securing supplies of cheap Russian gas. This model of Russian influence clearly demonstrates how the Kremlin has turned energy supplies into a powerful political weapon that it will continue to wield against other European countries.

Orbán’s defeat resulted from the fatigue of Hungarians (and particularly the youth) with his corrupt and authoritarian rule; however, it does not, in our view, signal the beginning of the end for far-right populists on a pan-European scale. On the contrary, this trend continues to gain momentum, and the Kremlin is placing its main bets on it – including in countries such as Germany and France.

AS: The war in Iran will also impact Russia and China, both of whom have supported Tehran in various ways. With oil supplies disrupted by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, will China turn more to Russia for its oil and natural gas supplies? What will this do to their so-called “friendship without limits”? What will their policies be toward Iran? How will this scenario impact Russia and China’s rivalry with the U.S. and Europe?

Posle: The loss of Iran as a reliable oil provider (as was previously the case with Venezuela) has indeed made China more dependent on Russian supplies. Furthermore, the failure of “Operation Epic Fury” in Iran has highlighted the vulnerability of U.S. military power. Nevertheless, a distinctive feature of Putin’s position remains his efforts to develop a bilateral dialogue with Trump, despite his “friendship” with China. It is telling that Russian diplomacy, whilst repeatedly condemning the “war started by the U.S. and Israel,” has emphasised “Russia’s commitment to providing goodwill services to the parties.”

Putin and other Kremlin officials have consistently stressed that, despite its alliance with Iran, Russia is distancing itself from the conflict and prefers to play the role of mediator. Just recently, Putin repeated his proposal to transfer enriched uranium from Iran to Russia. It appears that following the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, Russia is not ready to become seriously involved in conflicts in the Middle East and is seeking to focus on Ukraine and European affairs.

AS: What is the impact of these inter-imperial and macro-economic dynamics on Russia’s ability to continue its invasion of Ukraine?

Posle: Almost five years of war in Ukraine have severely undermined Russia’s economic and human resources, but this has not yet affected Putin’s desire to “achieve the objectives of the special military operation” at any cost. Recently, Kremlin spokesperson Peskov stated that the withdrawal of the Ukrainian army from the Donetsk region is not a matter for possible negotiations with Kyiv, but a precondition for them.

In other words, once Ukraine voluntarily cedes part of its territory, further demands are likely to be made. It is clear that the Kremlin is not interested in a ceasefire and is planning a major offensive in the Donbas this summer and fall. The aim of this offensive is not only military but also political – it is necessary to convince Trump that Russia continues to dominate on the battlefield, and therefore the U.S. must increase pressure on Kyiv, forcing it to accept the Kremlin’s terms.

Putin’s plan clearly highlights a conflict between his personal ambitions and the interests of the Russian people. The Russian army’s losses on the front line have reached their highest level this year – for example, in the second half of April alone, around 4,500 soldiers were killed (in total, at least 350,000 Russians have died over the five years of the war). The number of civilian casualties is also rising due to Ukrainian missile strikes on military and energy infrastructure (though this is completely incomparable to the casualties of Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities).

Ordinary Russians are paying this price for Putin’s desire to tell Trump about his army’s advance of a few dozen square kilometres. The gap between the perception of the war in the Kremlin and among ordinary people keeps growing rapidly.

Ordinary Russians are paying this price for Putin’s desire to tell Trump about his army’s advance of a few dozen square kilometres. The gap between the perception of the war in the Kremlin and among ordinary people keeps growing rapidly.

AS: Now, let’s turn to the domestic impact of all this in Russia. Ukraine has persisted in resisting Russia’s invasion and is militarily striking increasingly deep into Russia. As a result, Russian casualties have mounted at what appear to be an escalated rate during the recent spring offensive. Meanwhile, due to sanctions, and the dynamics of the war economy generally, economic conditions have worsened. There are signs of increasing dissent, expressed in a deflected way by quisling politicians and influencers. What is the domestic political situation in Russia? What should we make of the various expressions of discontent by public figures? Is this a sign of mass discontent developing among workers and the oppressed within Russia? How stable is the Putin regime?

Posle: Indeed, the first half of 2026 was marked by rising inflation and a fall in living standards. It is fair to say that the effect of the “military Keynesianism” associated with the sharp rise in public spending at the beginning of the war has now run its course. Even according to government forecasts, inflation this year will stand at 5.2 percent, whilst wages will rise by 2 percent. At the same time, the Kremlin intends to offset the growing budget deficit, as mentioned before, by increasing taxes on small businesses, as well as by cutting welfare programmes and infrastructure projects.

Against this backdrop, earlier this year, the Russian authorities took entirely unprecedented measures to restrict access to the internet in the country. Specifically, they attempted to block Telegram (used by 105 million Russians – that is, the majority of the population) and VPNs (used by around 40% of Russians to bypass blocks on Instagram, YouTube and other platforms). Furthermore, in Moscow and other major Russian cities, wireless internet was frequently cut off entirely, causing immense damage to the economy and resulting in a dramatic increase in cash withdrawals from banks.

Behind all these measures, which have provoked widespread discontent, stands the Federal Security Service with its “sovereign internet” project, entirely controlled by the authorities. The official reason for all these restrictions, according to the authorities, is to prevent attacks by Ukrainian drones, a claim that seems highly implausible given that the increase in internet restrictions has coincided with an intensification of Ukrainian strikes. A mood prevails in the country that those in power are preoccupied solely with their own war and constant prohibitions, and are not interested in how ordinary people live.

These sentiments were further fuelled, in particular, by government attempts to cover up an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease among cattle in Siberia and other regions. This move was prompted by the fact that Russia remains a significant international meat exporter. As a result, the Russian authorities seized and slaughtered tens of thousands of cattle and pigs belonging to farmers without any explanation or compensation for the damage. In several cases, this has already led to direct clashes between the police and rural communities. Nevertheless, to date, countries such as China and the U.S. have effectively acknowledged the existence of this dangerous epidemic in Russia, which will inevitably lead to a ban of Russian meat exports.

All these factors are clearly leading to a loss of trust in the authorities and increasing discontent. However, by now, any possibility of legally expressing any dissent has been completely eradicated in Russia. For example, young activists who tried to organize a protest against the shutdown of Telegram, as well as dozens of farmers attempting to protect their cattle from slaughter, have been arrested and subjected to heavy police pressure.

Increased repression and government attempts to restrict the flow of information are an answer to the growing discontent. Whereas previously the regime largely enjoyed legitimacy among the population as a guardian of the stability of everyday life, it now relies more and more on fear of the police and secret services. In this sense, Putin may be moving towards the Iranian model, where a regime that does not enjoy the support of the majority retains power through violence.

As for the mood among the political and business elite, they are, of course, dissatisfied with the endless continuation of the war, the economic downturn, internet restrictions, and the growing power of the security services. However, contrary to the rumours being spread by a range of Western media outlets, there is not a conspiracy brewing against Putin.

Whereas previously the regime largely enjoyed legitimacy among the population as a guardian of the stability of everyday life, it now relies more and more on fear of the police and secret services. In this sense, Putin may be moving towards the Iranian model, where a regime that does not enjoy the support of the majority retains power through violence.

This is the case for a few reasons. First, the fear of repression among the elite makes them divided and suspicious. It is worth recalling that over the past year, the number of arrests of government officials has risen sharply: dozens of employees of the Ministry of Defence (including several former deputies to Minister Sergei Shoigu) have been arrested, as well as representatives of other departments. In 2024, Transport Minister Roman Starovoit committed suicide due to the threat of arrest, whilst Deputy Minister of Natural Resources Denis Butsaev fled to the US. Several prominent businessmen suspected of political disloyalty have lost their property and their freedom (for example, this happened to Vadim Moshkovich, the owner of one of the country’s largest agricultural companies).

Second, the agenda and prospects of such a conspiracy are unclear in the current circumstances, as this elite has no common clear vision of an alternative foreign policy direction or conditions for ending the war. It also does not possess any legitimacy in the eyes of the population.

Finally, Putin’s disappearance could trigger large-scale conflicts within the Russian elite over control of property. Having destroyed all the country’s political institutions over the 25 years of his rule, Putin himself has become the sole factor maintaining a relative balance of interests within the ruling class. And that is why the elite fears his departure more than the continuation of his destructive military adventures.

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: ARTIST NAME; modified by Tempest.

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• New research shows that building more housing near existing jobs, stores and transit generates more tax revenue and reduces infrastructure costs, saving taxpayers money. (Pew)
• Another new study found that development patterns are at least partly responsible for the high number of traffic deaths in the U.S. It recommends mixing households and businesses instead of putting commercial uses along dangerous arterial roads. (CNU Public Square)
• Climate Town explains that the U.S. actually has an extensive rail system, but most tracks are old, slow and owned by freight companies, so they’re unsuitable for passenger rail. (YouTube)
• Ironically, drivers are dealing with high gas prices by going out of their way to find deals and topping off their tanks more often. (NPR)
• The Rails to Trails Conservancy has tips for getting around World Cup cities by walking, biking or transit.
• Sound Transit is cutting back or delaying future Seattle transit projects to address a $34 billion deficit. (KING)
• Pittsburgh Regional Transit approved a $600 million budget that includes no fare hikes or service cuts. (WESA)
• Cyclists will soon be able to pedal around Michigan’s Belle Isle park without having to cross paths with cars. (TMDN)
• Florida didn’t suspend its gas tax, but at least residents can save on guns and camping gear for when society collapses Mad Max-style. (Orlando Weekly)
• Bus trips by young people rose almost tenfold after Scotland introduced free bus passes for everyone under age 22. (BBC)
• A new European ticket system will simplify international train travel. (European News)
• A list of the 10 most bike-friendly cities includes the usual suspects like Amsterdam, but also a few surprises like Taipei and Buenos Aires. (Islands)

Sandra “Sister” Hunter Reed, a decades-long activist and death penalty abolitionist, passed away on April 18, 2026, in Bastrop, TX, where she was born. Sandra was the mother of six sons, the most well-known of whom is Rodney Reed, wrongfully-convicted and incarcerated on Texas’ death row since 1998. Sandra organized for decades to win her son’s freedom and for an end to the death penalty, a leader on the front lines in the state she described as the “belly of the beast.”

Rodney was convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of Stacey Stites in Bastrop despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence. Engaged to a police officer, Stacey was in a relationship with Rodney, who is Black; Stacey’s fiancée was an open racist who knew about their relationship. Yet prosecutors hammered at the racist assumption that Rodney’s relationship with Stacy, who was white, must have been nonconsensual. This claim was offered as the sole “evidence” in the crime and Rodney was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.

From left to right, Walter Reed, now deceased, the father of Rodney Reed (center), and Sandra Reed.

Rodney’s conviction—and the implementation of the death penalty in the U.S. today—echoes the era of Southern lynchings and a so-called justice system that denies justice for Black people and people of color. “Until a person is in our place, you can’t really describe it,” Sandra said in an interview. “It’s a hard pill to swallow—the corruption and injustice that’s dwelling in my son’s case.” Despite this, Sandra said that “Rodney’s handling things very well—he’s remaining strong for himself. The truth keeps us all strong and believing that justice will prevail.”

George W. Bush and Rick Perry—both former governors—built their national profiles on “tough on crime” agendas, including accelerating the pace of executions at a brutal rate. Texas’ death row today, although less busy than under Bush and Perry, retains a barbaric track record: exactly 600 people have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1982, and 59 percent of those on death row are people of color. Black people are 12 percent of the state’s population yet make up over 40 percent of the executed.

In the face of this overwhelming opposition, Sandra was an unceasing activist and brought many into the movement. She began organizing with the Austin chapter of the national Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) in 1999. She later joined the CEDP’s national board, serving alongside other abolitionists including exonerees Yusef Salaam of the formerly-known Central Park 5, and Shuja’a Graham, exonerated from California’s death row,

In a statement shared at her memorial service, Lily Hughes, a former national director of the Campaign to End the Penalty based in Austin, TX, reflected on the joys of Sandra’s friendship and the work they shared for close to three decades:

Sandra was a fierce advocate for Rodney and for so many other wrongfully convicted death row prisoners and victims of the criminal “injustice system.” She spoke at rallies, marches, meetings, and conventions in Texas and all over the country. She was a powerful voice in the abolition movement.

Sandra was so brave. She hated flying, but still she flew around the country to speak out. She disliked the limelight, yet she spoke in front of huge crowds of people. When she took the podium, she commanded the attention of all with her Grace and passion.

Sandra was so loving and supportive to her family, friends, and fellow activists. She welcomed everyone into the movement, into her community and into her home with open arms.

The campaign for Rodney has been a very long, hard road. He and his family suffered the torture of three scheduled execution dates. He has fought for many years for DNA testing of the murder weapon, a leather belt used to strangle Stacey Stites. Despite finally winning a favorable ruling with the U,S. Supreme Court in 2023, when the Court ordered the evidence to be tested, the state of Texas continued to block Rodney’s request, shifting the goal posts to argue against DNA testing on new grounds. Rodney once again fought for his case to be heard by the highest court but in March of this year, just weeks before Sandra’s death, the Supreme Court dealt his case a major blow when it refused to hear his latest appeal.

Sandra was so well-loved for her warmth, humor and generosity, and for her ongoing activism despite serious health problems in later years; her passing leaves a hole not easily filled. She was a crucial voice in shining a light on the realities of criminal “justice” in the rural South and for keeping the movement for social justice at the center. In 2009, standing alongside exonerees and family members, she joined historian Howard Zinn and writer Dave Zirin onstage at the University of Chicago for the CEDP’s national convention. “I’m in this fight for life,” she declared to the over 1,000 audience members.

Because of Sandra, many others made that same commitment. She will be in our hearts always. Sandra Reed presente!

How to support Rodney Reed:

Rodney urgently needs movement support to stop his execution from moving forward and to finally free him from decades behind bars. With the recent Supreme Court ruling against him, the way is clear for Texas to set another execution date. Please take some of these steps to join this fight:

• Sign and share the petition
• Follow the Reed Justice Initiative for updates and actions.
• Watch and share the documentary State vs Reed streaming on YouTube
• Across the country, the pace of executions has begun to pick up after a period of decline. Donald Trump is a strong supporter of capital punishment, potentially threatening those on federal and military death rows. Find out about and support ongoing campaigns including Rodney’s at Death Penalty Action.

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: ARTIST NAME; modified by Tempest.

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The right to strike is under attack throughout the world, including in the United States. Labor strikes are currently forbidden or restricted in the majority of countries.

Now, in a landmark 43-page advisory opinion issued May 21, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) has determined that the right to strike is protected under the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention No. 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise.

“At a moment when workers’ organizations face sustained attacks around the world, this opinion reaffirms that the freedom to withhold one’s labor is not a privilege granted by the powerful, but a fundamental human right grounded in international law,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement.

The ILO is the United Nations agency that sets global labor standards. It has 187 member states and has adopted 191 conventions since its founding in 1919. The ILO considers Convention No. 87 to be one of its 11 fundamental conventions.

In 2023, the ILO asked the ICJ to settle an internal dispute about whether Convention No. 87 gives workers the right to strike, which is not specifically addressed in the convention. Although advisory opinions of the ICJ are not legally binding, many courts accept them as authoritative legal decisions.

The ICJ ruled in its 10-4 opinion that a strike “is one of the main activities engaged in and tools used by workers and their organizations to promote their interests and improve conditions of labour, thereby ensuring the effective exercise of the freedom of association protected under Convention No. 87.”

The Court found “that protection of the right to strike is encompassed in the protection of the freedom of association provided for in Convention No. 87.”

In reaching that conclusion, the Court considered provisions in two 1996 Covenants that contain relevant rules of international law regarding the right to strike. Both refer to Convention No. 87.

Article 8, paragraph 1 (d) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) expressly protects the right to strike, if it is exercised in conformity with domestic laws.

Article 22, paragraph 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides for the right to freedom of association. The ICJ noted that for more than 25 years, the Human Rights Committee — which monitors the implementation of the ICCPR — has considered the right to strike to be encompassed in the protection of freedom of association.

Due to the high degree of overlap between the states parties to the ICESCR and ICCPR, and Convention No. 87, the ICJ determined there was a common understanding among them on the right to strike. The Court thus concluded “that an interpretation taking into account the relevant rules of international law contained in the ICESCR and the ICCPR indicates that the protection of the right to strike is encompassed in the protection of the freedom of association provided by Convention No. 87.”

No Right to Organize Without the Right to Strike

“For generations, working people have understood a simple truth: The freedom to join a union means nothing if you cannot withhold your labor when bosses refuse to listen. Now, the world’s highest court has affirmed that truth,” said Jeffrey Vogt, director of the International Lawyers Assisting Workers (ILAW) Network, which issued the call for the ILO referral of this case to the ICJ.

The ICJ decision “affirms decades of judicial precedent and what workers around the world know: there is no right to organize and bargain collectively without the right to strike,” Shuler said in her statement. “When workers are barred from taking collective action on the job, they cannot defend their rights and demand the workplace conditions and contracts they are owed. The freedom to join a union becomes an empty formality.”

“This is an important day for the International Labor Organization [ILO], and for its continued relevance in the world of work. However, the significance of this opinion extends well beyond the institutional context in Geneva,” the ILAW Network wrote in a statement.

The ICJ advisory opinion came “at a moment of acute pressure on the international labour rights system,” ILAW stated. “Across the world, the right to strike is under sustained attack — through restrictive legislation, expansive judicial interpretation of essential services, the criminalisation of trade union activity, and the use of dismissals, injunctions, and damages claims to deter collective action.”

Legal restrictions on the right to strike are increasing. In 2022, strikes were outlawed or stringently restricted in 129 of the 148 countries tallied by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), one of the six organizations with consultative status at the ILO Governing Body.

The ITUC, which represents 191 million workers in 169 countries and territories, is dedicated to trade union democracy and independence. It has regional organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The ICJ decision “is important not only for workers and trade unions, but also for governments and responsible businesses,” ITUC stressed.

This decision “will serve as a powerful interpretive tool before national constitutional and labour courts, before regional human rights bodies, and before the ILO’s own supervisory bodies,” ILAW noted. “It strengthens the hand of every worker and union challenging strike bans, broad essential-services designations, criminal sanctions against strikers, prohibitions on solidarity and political strikes, and the dismissal and blacklisting of workers who exercise this right.”

Ruling Will Affect Tens of Millions of Workers

In October, 18 countries and five international organizations, including the ILO, presented oral testimony before the ICJ, and other nations filed written contributions. The majority of participants supported the right to strike, which is guaranteed in most European countries.

Harold Koh, who represented the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) before the ICJ, told the judges that the case would “affect the real rights of tens of millions of working people around the world.” If the Court ruled that the Convention didn’t protect the right to strike, Koh warned, “National employer groups would contest the right to strike country by country, focusing first on nations with compliant courts, weak civil societies and ineffective media.”

Jeffrey Vogt worked with the legal team of the ITUC on the briefs and oral arguments presented to the ICJ. Vogt’s co-authored book, The Right to Strike in International Law, provided a legal roadmap for the case.

Vogt told Truthout that “the written view of the US (under the Biden administration) was to support the right to strike, albeit on narrower grounds than what we had argued. When the Trump administration came in, they withdrew the Biden era brief but fortunately did not appear for oral arguments and take a contrary view.”

“The decision deals with the right to strike in the abstract — does the convention protect it — but does not go into the modalities,” Vogt added. The Court wrote that its “conclusion that the right to strike is protected by Convention No. 87 does not entail any determination on the precise content, scope, or conditions for the exercise of that right.”

“That was a conscious decision,” Vogt noted. “We did not want the court to attempt to define the scope, especially since we believe that is the proper role of the ILO supervisory system.” Vogt said that “the ICJ gave ‘great weight’ to the views of the supervisory system, which is helpful.” And although “the ILO has supported secondary strikes,” in which workers strike in solidarity with other workers at a different employer, the ICJ decision didn’t opine on that specific issue.

The Right to Strike in the US

“The right to withhold one’s labor, inherent in the right to strike, belongs to all workers, but it has been restricted,” Jeanne Mirer, a labor lawyer in private practice working with the International Commission for Labor Rights, told Truthout. “Many unions have agreed never to strike while a collective bargaining agreement is in effect.”

Most private sector workers in the US have the right to strike under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Employees, including international and undocumented workers, cannot be fired or disciplined for participating in a lawful strike.

“Those exempted from the NLRA, such as agricultural and domestic workers, are not restricted in the right to strike but have no protections against discharge if they strike and do not have the power to prevent such retaliation,” Mirer added.

Some states have their own laws granting protection to domestic workers and 14 states guarantee farmworkers collective bargaining rights.

Railroad and airline workers are not covered by the NLRA, but they come under the Railway Labor Act, which has several limitations on the right to strike.

In recent years, Congress and the courts have narrowed the definition of “protected concerted activity” under the NLRA. Union membership is dropping. Nevertheless, strike actions in the US increased by almost 50 percent in 2022, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

In 2023, the US Supreme Court weakened the legal protections for striking in Glacier Northwest, Inc. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, making it easier for employers to sue unions in state courts. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing, “The right to strike is fundamental to American labor law.” She noted:

Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their masters. They are employees whose collective and peaceful decision to withhold their labor is protected by the [National Labor Relations Act] even if economic injury results.

The NLRA’s protections for private sector workers don’t extend to public sector employees. “Public employees in the United States have been restricted in many ways from striking,” Mirer said.

Federal workers are legally prohibited from striking. Thirty-six states prohibit public sector workers from striking. Three other states that haven’t addressed the issue would likely outlaw public sector strikes as well. In the 12 states where strikes are not per se unlawful, various preconditions must be met before workers can engage in strikes.

The World Federation of Trade Unions, which played a decisive role in the creation of Convention No. 87 in 1948, applauded the ICJ’s decision:

[I]t is clear that the existence of a class-oriented and militant trade union movement is the essential, decisive, and irreplaceable factor to ensure that the right to strike, as well as conventions, collective bargaining, labor laws, and workers’ achievements, are not merely empty words on paper but are implemented in practice. The WFTU reiterates its call for struggle in every country, sector, and workplace to safeguard the sacred right to strike in practice.

“It is up to workers and their organizations to build on the ICJ decision to ensure the right to strike can be an effective tool to build worker power,” Mirer said.

This article was originally published at Truthout

A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 24, 2026 thru Sat, May 30, 2026. Stories we promoted this week, by category:

Climate Change Impacts (7 articles)

• Malnourished Gray Whales of the Eastern North Pacific Are in `Serious Trouble` The population has plummeted over the past seven years as climate change triggers mass starvation in warming Arctic waters. Inside Climate News, By Blaine Harden, May 24, 2026.
• An Unusually Early Heat Wave Breaks Temperature Records Across Western Europe 'This is an unprecedented event with a one in 1,000 chance of happening at this time of year based on the climate from 1979 to 2025 and virtually impossible in the preindustrial era,'' Christophe Cassou, a climate scientist, told Le Monde. Inside Climate News, Kiley Price, May 26, 2026.
• UK heatwave has `fingerprints of climate change all over it` It’s clearly exceptional when the May temperature record falls not once but twice in two days’ The Independent News, Nick Ferris, May 26, 2026.
• It's so friggin' hot Dr Gilbz on Youtube, Ella Gilbert, May 26, 2026.
• `Mind-bogglingly crazy`: climate experts alarmed by deadly spring heatwaves searing Europe Scientists warn of ‘new reality’ of heat extremes that claim three times more lives than car crashes and 16 times as many as murderers The Guardian, Ajit Niranjan, May 27, 2026.
• Western Europe is roasting in unprecedented spring heat - and it`s not alone Climate scientist Christophe Cassou said the heat in France would have been virtually impossible in the preindustrial era. Yale Climate Connections, Bob Henson, May 27, 2026.
• An Arctic community on the climate front lines | Science The harsh realities of global warming are becoming difficult to ignore in Norway’s Longyearbyen Science, Sarah Boon, May 28, 2026.

Climate Education and Communication (5 articles)

• How the jet-setting commissaries of the climate change quango use dodgy statistics to peddle hysteria - and justify their own existence: MATT RIDLEY Op-ed is a display of classic climate-denier tactics intended to change the subject and swerve public attention from what's important. Mail Online, Matt Ridley, May 22, 2026.
• Twenty Years After His Film, Al Gore Tweaks the Climate Script Mr. Gore is still giving the slide show that ''An Inconvenient Truth''” was built around, but with changes that reflect a shift in the discussion of climate change. NYT, Chico Harlan, May 25, 2026.
• Which of your climate actions make the biggest difference? Here`s how to find out The Conversation, Charlotte A. Kukowski and Kimberly Nicholas, May 27, 2026.
• Translating Climate Awareness Into Action at New York High Schools State of the Planet, Emma Kyzivat, Aynsley Kretschmar and Laurel Zaima-Sheehy, May 28, 2026.
• Ask a Climate Therapist: Is it still `catastrophizing` if the threat is real? Psychotherapist Leslie Davenport breaks down some of the tools that can help manage anxiety in the face of mounting climate catastrophe. Grist, Leslie Davenport, May 29, 2026.

Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation (4 articles)

• UK bets on private investors to fill climate aid gaps after cuts Humanitarian organisations say the needs of private investors and developing countries are not always aligned. The Independent News, Nick Ferris, May 23, 2026.
• When Will Emissions From Air Travel Start to Fall? Perhaps we will fly less when we accept that ''bored and restless'' is less important than ''don't cook the planet.'' NYT > Climate and Environment, Claire Brown, May 26, 2026.
• Deadly Europe Heatwave Linked to Multiple Deaths as Temperatures Continue Rising Officials have warned that without major adaptation efforts, future heatwaves could place even greater pressure on health systems and urban infrastructure. IBT, Rosemarie Zamora, May 27, 2026.
• Backlash is often swift when authorities try to plan retreat from the coast. There`s a better way Research shows why planned retreat can become divisely emotional and how planners and communities can tackle this backlash. The Conversation, Anne Maree Kreller, May 28, 2026.

Climate Policy and Politics (4 articles)

• TikTok’s Climate Pledges Collide with Sponsorship of Climate Deniers By backing a right-wing Canadian conference featuring anti-climate speakers, experts warn TikTok has “abandoned” its commitments to combat climate misinformation. Desmog, Rei Takver, May 22, 2026.
• Once A Climate Leader, Canada Is Now Doubling Down On Oil The reversal reveals a stark truth about the direction of global climate action: Despite the rapid deployment of clean energy, even countries and politicians once seen as climate leaders are turning to fossil fuels to protect against the turmoil of Trump’s trade disputes and the war in Iran. Grist, Jake Bittle, May 25, 2026.
• Why Kate Marvel left NASA The former NASA climate scientist explains how pronouns have become more important than the planet at the nation's space agency. HEATED, Emily Atkin, May 28, 2026.
• EPA rollbacks could raise air conditioning, refrigeration costs despite promise of lower prices A new Trump administration rule will likely cost consumers more money while creating higher emissions of climate-warming superpollutants, industry and environmental groups warn. Inside Climate News, EHN Curators, May 29, 2026.

Miscellaneous (4 articles)

• The Paradox of AI and Climate State of the Planet, Renée Cho, May 21, 2026.
• 2026 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #21 A listing of 28 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, May 17, 2026 thru Sat, May 23, 2026. Skeptical Science, Bärbel Winkler & Doug Bostrom, May 24, 2026.
• Document leak at Australia's richest company shows how it put off going green Mining giant BHP quietly shelved billions of dollars of green projects despite promising the public it was committed to cutting emissions, and telling its board climate action was "urgent" and any delays would "risk" its reputation. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Angus Grigg, Alex McDonald, and Jade Toomey, May 25, 2026.
• Environmentalists Turn Out in Force to Oppose Trump Coal Ash Rollbacks Proposed new regulations from the EPA would loosen requirements for protecting groundwater near power plants where the toxic residue from burning coal is stored. Inside Climate News, Arcelia Martin, May 28, 2026.

Climate Science and Research (1 article)

• Solar, wind, and EVs have knocked out a doomsday climate scenario Explosive growth in clean technologies has pushed an old coal-heavy scenario out of the realm of plausibility, according to a recent study. But there’s more work to be done. Yale Climate Connections, Dana Nuccitelli, May 29, 2026.

Geoengineering (1 article)

• With geoengineering, a fringe climate solution moves into the mainstream A decade before Exxon’s scientists warned the company’s executives about the likely fallout of burning fossil fuels, White House scientists were already advising then-president Lyndon B. Johnson on a theoretical technology that might curb the impacts of global warming: geoengineering. Atmos, Miranda Green, May 28, 2026.

Health Aspects of Climate Change (1 article)

• Climate change could significantly worsen summer air quality in future decades The Conversation, Rebecca Kaarina Saari, May 25, 2026.

Public Misunderstandings about Climate Science (1 article)

• One Nation says it`s the only party in Australia to question climate science. It should ask itself why | Temperature Check Climate change denial has become untenable yet Hanson’s party digs in – with conspiracy theories, cherrypicking and claims that are easy to refute The Guardian, Graham Readfearn, May 21, 2026.

If you happen upon high quality climate-science and/or climate-myth busting articles from reliable sources while surfing the web, please feel free to submit them via this Google form so that we may share them widely. Thanks!

At first, he thought it was smoke.

Jackie Onsurez was driving the bustling New Mexico highway between his home in Loving and nearby Carlsbad last Tuesday evening when he thought the smoke didn’t look right. As he pulled closer, he saw that the 70-foot plume was actually a roaring geyser of toxic oilfield wastewater, commonly called produced water, spewing from a pipe at a site operated by NGL Energy Partners. 

Onsurez, who until recently was running for the state’s lieutenant governor position, said he called NGL, 911, the New Mexico Environment Department and others. He was at the site for a few minutes when an oilfield roughneck arrived in a pickup truck and tried to stop the spraying water but couldn’t. 

Stills from video footage of a geyser of oilfield wastewater at a site operated by NGL Energy Partners in southeast New Mexico. Courtesy of Jackie Onsurez

He said the man then “started to haul ass out of there. He said, ‘Get out of here. There’s gas coming out. I don’t know what’s there. Get out, get out!’”

Onsurez didn’t leave, though. He is an engineer and serves on the New Mexico State Emergency Response Commission — the day before, he had attended a commission meeting on hazardous materials spills. The serendipity wasn’t lost on him. 

“I was able to observe firsthand the equipment and the training and everything else that’s needed for here [in the oilfield],” he said. “The only people that had protective gear was the fire department when they arrived.”

The fire department cordoned off the area a few minutes after the roughneck fled. NGL representatives arrived soon after and shut off the shooting water. By that point, Onsurez had been at the site for about a half hour. He didn’t know how long it had been spewing before he arrived.

The contaminated water flowed across the road and ran into a nearby drainage ditch. Onsurez had also called Alisa Ogden, a farmer and rancher and member of the Carlsbad Soil and Water Conservation District, to let the group know of the spill. 

“I said, ‘Ms. Ogden, I hate to bother you, but it looks like this might be getting into your acequias,’” Onsurez said, using the common Spanish term for the traditional Southwest water system.

Read Next Oil companies accused of massive accounting fraud in New Mexico Jerry Redfern, Capital and Main

“If you don’t know what happens, you can’t do anything about it,” Ogden said later. “Gratefully, Jackie let us know immediately when he saw it, and we got right on it and were able to keep the produced water … from flowing down towards the Pecos River,” she said.

“It doesn’t keep us up at night, but with the oilfields out here, it’s always a hazard that it could happen,” Ogden said.

According to a report filed by NGL with the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division, a one-inch nipple broke on a high-pressure water injection line, leading to the blowout. The report said 40 barrels of produced water escaped, 10 of which were recovered. The remaining 30 flowed into the nearby ditch.

Sidney Hill, the public information officer at the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, which oversees the Oil Conservation Division, said that NGL collected samples from the ditch, and “We expect to receive them sometime this week.”

“Accidents do happen,” Ogden said. “We’ve all had accidents occur. It’s how you react to ’em.”

She said NGL is responsible and has agreed to do the cleanup. “They did everything they could at the time,” she said. “Once we get all the samples back and everything, then we’ll come up with a plan on what they need to do.”

Read Next The Colorado River is nearing collapse. It’s Trump’s problem now. Jake Bittle & Rebecca Egan McCarthy

NGL did not respond to phone and email requests for comment.

In December 2024, an inspector from the state’s Oil Conservation Division found a pump leaking wastewater on the wellsite’s cement slab. Asked by Capital & Main about a scheduled three-month follow-up visit that didn’t appear in the well files, Hill said, “Thank you for pointing out the past due compliance. We will investigate why it isn’t closed out, but it does not seem associated with the current release.”

NGL transports oil, gas, and wastewater around oil basins from the Gulf Coast, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico. It also has a growing business disposing of produced water in deep injection wells like the one just north of Loving. In its annual report, the company claimed to be the largest independent wastewater transporter and disposal company in the U.S., handling nearly a billion barrels of the toxic water across its operations last year.

In the greater scheme of wastewater spills in New Mexico, NGL’s accident was notable for being visible, not for being big. Between Jan. 1 and May 19, 48 companies reported 356 spills, losing 15,335 barrels of wastewater across the state. The biggest was a 2,000-barrel spill in January by Hilcorp Energy Company, just 1,300 feet from a neighborhood in north Farmington. Devon Energy Corporation reported the most wastewater spills so far with 93, compared to three for NGL.

But last week’s briny geyser highlights one of the fastest-growing controversies in New Mexico’s oil and gas industry: what to do with produced water. In 2025, oil producers brought up more than 800 million barrels of oil and 2.7 billion barrels of wastewater in the state. Those barrels of wastewater increase as oil and gas production grows, and the total has doubled since 2020. There is little agreement on what to do with all of it. 

Read Next ‘A fraudulent scheme’: New Mexico sues Texas oil companies for walking away from leaking wells Mark Olalde, ProPublica & Nick Bowlin, Capital and Main

The water occurs naturally in oil and gas formations and is highly saline, laced with petroleum-based chemicals. It is often radioactive and can include the chemical cocktails that companies inject into wells during the fracking and production processes. The recipes for those cocktails are often protected trade secrets and can differ radically from well to well. Basically, the water is toxic, and its use outside the oilfield for anything but testing is forbidden in New Mexico.

Wastewater can be used to drill new wells, but the most common disposal method is underground disposal wells — like the one near Loving — where the water is reinjected into rock formations under extreme pressure.

The report filed by NGL with the Oil Conservation Division said the broken nipple was on a pipeline charged to 2,600 pounds per square inch. But the state is running out of injection locations as the rock formations fill and shift under the intense pressure of the injections, resulting in swarms of earthquakes across the Permian Basin in both Texas and New Mexico. In addition, high-pressure wastewater deposits have breached old oil and gas wells, leading to brine leaks and geysers.

A proposal put forward by the industry group Water, Access, Treatment and Reuse Alliance to allow wastewater to be treated and used outside the petroleum industry is once again before the state’s Water Quality Control Commission. It was knocked down last year following a fracas where Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham appeared to pressure the commission to overturn a recently instituted ban on using the wastewater outside the oilfield. Earlier proposals argued that treated water could be used by other industries or possibly discharged into lakes and streams, a highly controversial use in a state that continues to suffer from a decades-long drought. 

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In separate interviews, lead lawyers from each side of the debate tackled each other’s arguments.

Matthias Sayer, co-founder of the alliance, said he views treated water as “a new source of water supply and as a reduced burden on the current management system.”

Sayer said, “Spills happen because oilfield [waste]water management is massive, constant, and operationally complex … That does not excuse spills, but it explains why a system built around moving very large volumes of high-salinity water will continue to experience [spills] unless the state improves infrastructure and creates better incentives for treatment, recycling, and beneficial reuse.”

Tannis Fox, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center and a lead attorney against the reanimated wastewater proposal, said, “The main argument that industry is making is that reuse of produced water is one solution to the water scarcity problem. And with that, we disagree. It’s not a silver bullet.” 

Sayer said a “robust body of science” shows that oilfield wastewater can be treated and safely reused. “The question is not whether it can be done, but how to craft a rule that appropriately manages the risk,” he said. “That question is answered by engaging the science and the experts behind it.”

Fox said, “There is, of course, a significant debate about what the science is telling us.” She and others are skeptical that new water treatment processes can reliably clean what’s coming out of the ground. Water testing generally starts with looking for known, likely contaminants in the water. 

But, she said, “We don’t know all the constituents in produced water because the hydraulic fracturing fluids that industry uses are protected by trade secret rules.” In addition, basic water chemistry and salinity vary widely across the state. The lack of clarity about what’s in the water “is a problem for emergency response workers if you don’t know what’s in those fluids,” she added, with a nod toward the Loving spill.

In addition, Fox said there hasn’t been large-scale testing. “There have not been studies at scale. There has not been discharge at scale. There has not been treatment at scale. Reuse of produced water at an industrial scale is not there yet. So it is not a solution to water scarcity tomorrow,” she said.

“If the [Water Quality Control Commission] approves a rule, the system will necessarily ramp up organically,” Sayer said. “This is a runway, not a light switch.”

Fox said, “It is by its nature a dirty industry, and obviously the world needs energy, and the sooner we get to clean energy, the better.”

Copyright 2026 Capital & Main

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 70-foot wastewater geyser reflects New Mexico’s latest oilfield challenge on May 31, 2026.

Homeless Hunger, a youth-led volunteer is providing meals to unhoused individuals in Sydney, Australia. The initiative aims to cook and deliver 50 meals every one to two weeks.

Natalia Alderson, a high school student, explains that she felt unsatisfied by passively observing the hardships endured by unhoused people in her city. She realized she could offer home-cooked meals to those in need by mobilizing a group of peers at her school.

“We carry bags of food in containers and hand it out to people around Sydney Central Station and the surrounding park,” Alderson tells Food Tank. “If it’s a hot day, we try to also provide bottles of water.” The students make their delivery at a similar time and along the same route each time. They hope that this consistency allows those in need of the meals to locate them.

What began as a personal response has become a coordinated, student-led initiative to engage in direct community action. Homeless Hunger reports that they have cooked and distributed almost 500 meals.

Using Jame Oliver’s stew recipes, Alderson and her team focus on nutritious and scalable meals that are rich in protein and have broad appeal. The meals are distributed with napkins, forks, and sometimes a biscuit. And as important as the meals themselves are, Alderson emphasizes the power of human connection as one of the initiative’s most powerful components.

“While the meals provide short-term nourishment, the act of stopping, speaking, and acknowledging someone can be just as meaningful,” Alderson tells Food Tank.

According to Foodbank Australia’s 2025 Hunger Report, one in three Australian households experienced food insecurity in 2025, making hunger a highly prevalent and pressing issue to tackle nationwide 

Alderson hopes to see the program grow even further, aiming to provide hundreds more meals over the next year. She also hopes that the project serves as an example of the power and potential of grassroots youth-led direct action.

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 Wikimedia Commons

The post Sydney’s Youth Work to Alleviate Hunger appeared first on Food Tank.

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Kenapa Banyak Pemain Menyukai Slot dengan Gameplay Sederhana?

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Headline News:

• “Clean Energy Saved EU €51 Billion In 2025 By Cutting Fossil Fuel Imports” • Using wind and solar to generate power meant significantly less reliance on imported oil and gas, according to energy think tank Ember. Europe looks set for further savings in 2026 as renewable energy generation hits record highs thanks to ideal Spring conditions. [Euronews]

Solar array in Italy (Sungrow EMEA, Unsplash)

• “Cuba Bets On Solar Power As Energy Crisis Deepens” • Cuba has gone through a worsening energy crisis for years, leading it to rely on Venezuelan oil. Following the US intervention in Venezuela in February, the energy crisis has grown even worse, as Cubans face regular blackouts and the economy suffers. Now Cuba is turning to solar power. [OilPrice.com]
• “California Has Lowest Wholesale Electricity Prices In USA” • Wind power, water power, and solar power all mean no fuel and low wholesale electricity prices. But given how much people love to exclaim “California is expensive,” it is a shock to find out that wholesale electricity is cheaper in California than anywhere else in the country. [CleanTechnica]
• “Company Bets $1.2 Billion On Massive Wyoming Solar And Battery Hub For Meta Data Centers” • A clean energy project tied to one of Meta’s data centers is drawing attention after Enbridge announced a $1.2 billion investment in Wyoming. The Cowboy Project combines 365 MW of solar capacity with battery storage of 200 MW and 1,600 MWh. [Yahoo Finance]
• “Connecticut Approves Plug-In Solar” • Small-scale solar is growing every year. Connecticut passed HB 5340, making the state the sixth to send a plug-in solar bill to the governor for final approval. Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Virginia, and Utah are the other states that are making it easier for consumers to add new types of solar. [CleanTechnica]

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