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A feasibility study update for Vista Gold’s (TSX, NYSE-AM: VGZ) open-pit Mt Todd project in Australia almost doubles its value and mine life while cutting costs by 59% over the previous update last year. Shares rose.

The study pegs Mt Todd’s initial capital costs at $425 million, while outlining a smaller operation with a 15,000 tonne-per-day (tpd) production rate, down from the 50,000 tpd in last year’s study, Vista said Tuesday. With a 5% discount rate, the net present value jumps almost 95% to $2.2 billion at a price assumption of $3,300 per oz., around the yellow metal’s current price of $3,320 per ounce.

That also boosts the internal rate of return (IRR) to 44.7%, with a payback period of 1.7 years. Mt Todd is about 250 km southeast of Darwin in the Northern Territory.

“This study marks a significant shift in the strategy for Mt Todd, demonstrating the potential for near-term development of a smaller initial project by prioritizing higher grade ore to the processing plant, significantly lowering initial capital costs, and incorporating contractors to reduce development and operational risks,” Vista CEO Frederick Earnest said in a release.

“[The study] positions Mt Todd as a project with technical and economic parameters that are comparable to several highly valued Australian gold producers.”

Vista shares gained 2.3% to C$1.33 apiece on Tuesday morning in Toronto, for a market capitalization of C$166.4 million. The stock has traded in a 12-month range of C$0.66 to C$1.84.

30-year life

Average annual output in the mine’s first 15 years is estimated at 153,000 oz. grading 1.04 grams gold per tonne; and 146,000 oz. at 0.97 gram gold over its 30-year life.

The net present value shrinks by 2.6% from last year’s feasibility to $1.1 billion at a $2,500 per oz. gold price, while the IRR rises more than 7% to 27.8%, with a 2.7-year payback period.

The study raises all-in sustaining costs by 45% to $1,449 per oz. in the first 15 years and $1,499 per oz. years over the mine life.

Among largest reserves

Mt Todd hosts 171.97 million tonnes in proven and probable reserves grading 0.94 gram gold for 5.1 million contained ounces. When compared with its development-stage gold project peers in Australia, Ramelius Resources’ (ASX: RMS) Rebecca and Regis Resources’ (ASX: RRL) McPhillamys projects, Mt Todd has the largest contained reserve base and highest NPV.

Its capex is higher than Rebecca’s but lower than McPhillamys. Mt Todd’s IRR is higher than that of the two other projects, while its annual gold output is about 22% lower than McPhillamys’ but 18% higher than Rebecca’s.

As it passes its midway point, 2025 is on track to be the second or third warmest year on record, Carbon Brief analysis shows.

However, it is very unlikely to beat 2024 as the hottest year.

This is not surprising, as 2024’s record temperatures were boosted by a strong El Niño event that has now faded. 

The analysis also finds there is a less than 10% chance that average temperatures in 2025 will be more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. 

However, with long-term warming trending strongly upward and, potentially, accelerating, the world is expected to firmly pass the Paris Agreement 1.5C target – which refers to long-term warming, rather than annual temperatures – in the next five years.

In this latest state of the climate quarterly update, Carbon Brief finds:

• So far, 2025 has seen record warm temperatures in January, the third warmest February and June and the second warmest monthly temperatures for March through May on record.
• The world, as a whole, has warmed approximately 1.1C since 1970 – and around 1.4C since the mid-1800s.
• Neutral El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions are expected to persist for the remainder of the year and into 2026.
• Arctic sea ice extent hit record low levels for much of June and into early July – and remains well below the historical range (1979-2010).

Second-warmest first six months of the year

In this assessment, Carbon Brief analyses records from five different research groups that report global surface temperature records: NASA, NOAA, Met Office Hadley Centre/UEA, Berkeley Earth and Copernicus/ECMWF. 

These records are combined into an aggregate that reflects a single best-estimate, following the approach used by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

The first six months of 2025 have been very warm, each of them coming in the top-three warmest on record across all the different scientific groups that report on global surface temperatures. This is despite the presence of moderate La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific at the start of the year, which typically suppress global temperatures.

The table below shows the rank of each month in 2025 relative to all the months since the dataset began (1850 for NOAA, Hadley/UEA and Berkeley Earth, 1880 for NASA, and 1940 for Copernicus/ECMWF). Hadley/UEA has been unusually slow in reporting data in 2025 and currently only has global mean surface temperature value available up to February.

It demonstrates how January 2025 was the warmest January on record in the WMO aggregate, March, April and May the second warmest and February and June the third warmest. 

Monthly rankNASANOAAHadley/UEABerkeley EarthCopernicus/ECMWFWMO avg Jan1st1st1st1st1st1st Feb3rd3rd3rd3rd3rd3rd Mar2nd1st1st2nd2nd Apr2nd2nd2nd2nd2nd May2nd2nd2nd2nd2nd Jun3rd3rd3rd3rd3rd

When combined, the first six months of the year in 2025 were the second warmest first half of the year in the historical record. Temperatures averaged at just 0.08C below the record set in 2024 after the peak of a strong El Niño event, as shown in the figure below.

Global mean surface temperature anomalies for the first half of the year from 1850 through 2025 from the WMO aggregate of temperature records. Anomalies plotted with respect to a 1850-1900 baseline. Chart by Carbon Brief.

The figure below shows how global temperature so far in 2025 (black line) compares to each month in different years since 1940 (lines coloured by the decade in which they occurred) in the WMO aggregate of surface temperature dataset.

Temperatures for each month from 1940 to 2025 from the WMO aggregate of temperature records. Anomalies plotted with respect to a 1850-1900 baseline. Chart by Carbon Brief.

Global surface temperature is currently around 1.4C above preindustrial levels – in-line with the best estimate of the human contribution to global warming. Most of this warming – around 1.1C – has happened just since 1970.

However, global surface temperatures have been declining in May, April and June from highs at the beginning of 2025. This is driven in part by continued cooling of sea surface temperatures after an El Niño-driven peak in early 2024, as well as a contribution from short-lived weak La Niña conditions at the start of the year. 

The figure below shows a range of different forecast models for ENSO conditions for the rest of this year, produced by different scientific groups. The values shown are sea surface temperature variations in the tropical Pacific – known as the El Niño 3.4 region – for overlapping three-month periods.

ENSO forecast models for overlapping three-month periods in the Niño 3.4 region (April, May, June – AMJ – and so on) for the remainder of 2025. Credit: Image provided by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia Climate School.

Neutral ENSO conditions are expected to persist through the start of 2026 in most models, with a handful of models showing a return to weak La Niña conditions (defined as El Niño 3.4 region sea surface temperatures under-0.5C) in the autumn and winter months. No models expect the development of El Niño conditions in 2025 and early 2026.

On track to be the second or third warmest year

Carbon Brief has created a projection of what the final global average temperature for 2025 will likely be by looking at the relationship between January-June temperatures and the annual average for each year since 1970. The projection also takes into account ENSO conditions in the first six months of the year and their projected development. 

The analysis includes the estimated uncertainty in 2025 outcomes, given that temperature averages from only the first quarter of the year are available so far. 

The chart below shows the expected range of 2025 temperatures using the WMO aggregate – including a best-estimate (red) and year-to-date value (yellow). Temperatures are shown with respect to the pre-industrial baseline period (1850-1900).

Annual global average surface temperature anomalies from the WMO aggregate plotted with respect to a 1850-1900 baseline. To-date 2025 values include January-June. The estimated 2025 annual value is based on the relationship between the January-June temperatures, ENSO conditions, and annual temperatures between 1970 and 2024. Chart by Carbon Brief.

Carbon Brief’s projection suggests that 2025 is virtually certain to be one of the top-three warmest years on record, with a best-estimate suggesting that global average temperatures will be approximately equal to 2023. 

Currently, there is a less than 1% chance of 2025 being the warmest year on record, a 51% chance of it being the second warmest and a 49% chance of it being the third warmest. There is a roughly 9% chance that 2025 annual temperatures will exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

(A single year exceeding 1.5C is not equivalent to a breach of the Paris Agreement goal to limit temperature increases to 1.5C, which has been widely interpreted to mean temperature averages over 20 years.)

The figure below shows Carbon Brief’s estimate of 2025 temperatures using the WMO aggregate, both at the beginning of the year and once each month’s data has come in. The estimate jumped notably after 2025 saw the warmest January on record, but has been relatively stable over the past six months.

Carbon Brief’s projection of annual 2025 global temperatures based on the WMO aggregate at the start of the year and after earth month’s global surface temperature data became available. The dashed line shows the prior record set in 2024 at 1.55C. Chart by Carbon Brief. Record or near-record warmth in many regions

While global average temperatures are an important indicator of changes to the broader climate system over time as a result of human activities, these impacts will differ as some regions experience more rapid warming or extreme heat events than is reflected in the global average.

The figure below shows the temperature anomalies for the first six months of the year relative to the 1951-1980 baseline period used by Berkeley Earth. Virtually the whole planet except a small area off the coast of Baja Mexico and in Antarctica saw temperatures warmer than that baseline, with much of Europe and Asia around 2C warmer than the 1951-1980 period.

Map of year-to-date (January-June) global surface temperature anomalies shown relative to the 1951-80 period following the convention used by Berkeley Earth. Credit: Berkeley Earth.

A number of areas saw record warm temperatures over January through to June in the Berkeley Earth dataset, compared to all prior years since the global temperature record began in 1850. 

The figure below shows areas of record warm temperatures in dark red; there were no areas with record – or even top-five – cool temperatures. (For more, read Carbon Brief’s factcheck on how climate change is not making extreme cold more common).

Map of year-to-date (January-June) regions that set new records (warmest through to fifth warmest). Note that no regions set cold records for the year-to-date in 2025. Credit: Berkeley Earth.

Notable areas of record warmth include much of China, south-west Australia and the Mediterranean region. Western Europe, in general, was quite warm, though most land areas did not see a new record set. Overall, approximately 7% of the surface saw record warming in the first six months of the year.

In June, the western Mediterranean saw particularly exceptional warmth, as shown in the figure below. This marine heatwave was driven by a combination of short-term natural variability on top of the long-term warming trend in the region. 

The temperature increase in the western Mediterranean region in July – relative to the long-term warming trend – represents the largest short-term increase in temperatures for the region since June 2003, which was a precursor to a devastating heatwave that is believed to have killed 70,000 people.

Map of June global surface temperature anomalies over the Mediterranean region, shown relative to the 1951-80 period following the convention used by Berkeley Earth. Credit: Berkeley Earth. Record-low Arctic sea ice extent in June

Arctic sea ice extent saw record lows for much of June 2025 and early July, moving out of record territory in mid-July, but remaining far below the historical range (1979-2010). 

Antarctic sea ice extent has been at the low end of the historical range for much of the year, but has not set new records aside from a brief period in late February and early March.

The figure below shows both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent in 2025 (solid red and blue lines), the historical range in the record between 1979 and 2010 (shaded areas) and the record lows (dotted black line). 

Arctic and Antarctic daily sea ice extent from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The bold lines show daily 2025 values, the shaded area indicates the two standard deviation range in historical values between 1979 and 2010. The dotted black lines show the record lows for each pole. Chart by Carbon Brief.

Unlike global temperature records, which only report monthly averages, sea ice data is collected and updated on a daily basis, allowing sea ice extent to be viewed up to the present.

However, this dataset – which has been continuously measured by satellites and assembled by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) since 1979 – may soon be less available. 

The US Department of Defence is planning to cease provision of satellite sea ice extent data to the NSIDC at the end of July. While some other satellite instruments can be used to help fill in the gaps, the change will degrade the scientific ability to effectively track this key climate variable. 

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The post State of the climate: 2025 on track to be second or third warmest year on record appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Kinross Gold (TSX: K, NYSE: KGC) has divested its entire equity stake in White Gold (TSXV: WGO) with the sale of approximately 23.68 million shares, or 12% of those outstanding.

The shares were sold at a price of C$0.29 each, for total proceeds of nearly C$6.87 million ($4.9m).

White Gold traded at $0.38 apiece in Toronto at the time of the Kinross’ share sale announcement last Friday.

The stock has since dropped another C$0.01 to C$0.37, giving the Canadian gold junior a market capitalization of C$74.1 million ($53.8m).

White Gold currently holds a large portfolio of exploration projects in Canada’s Yukon Territory. The projects cover approximately 3,150 sq. km or 40% of the prolific White Gold mining district.

Its flagship project, also called White Gold, hosts four deposits with a combined indicated resource of 17.7 million tonnes grading 2.12 grams per tonne gold, containing 1.2 million oz., and an inferred resource of 24.5 million tonnes grading 1.42 grams for 1.1 million oz.

In a news release late last year, White Gold CEO David D’Onofrio called it “one of the highest-grade open-pit gold resources in Canada owned by an exploration company.”

Alongside Kinross, the project has had the backing of Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX: AEM, NYSE: AEM), Canada’s largest gold producer, which has a 19.85% stake in the company.

Thousands of registered nurses at six Tenet Healthcare Corporation hospitals in California will hold informational pickets on Thursday, July 31. RNs hope to raise awareness in their communities about management’s refusal to ensure appropriate staffing and training, and the impact it has on the quality of patient care and the retention of experienced nursing staff.

Open-pit mines around the world have enough room for solar panels to generate more than 4,700 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year, according to a new study. The findings represent the first global analysis of an efficient new approach to renewable energy siting.

Solar power is growing fast in many countries, and that’s stimulating increasing land-use conflicts. The locations that are good for generating this renewable form of energy also tend to be valuable for agriculture, or host important natural ecosystems.

Instead, why not put solar farms in locations that are already disturbed and aren’t being used for anything else—such as abandoned open-pit mines?

The idea has a lot of potential advantages. Abandoned mines tend to have decent road access and solid connections to the grid, ready-made infrastructure that could be useful for solar installations. What’s more, solar projects on abandoned mine sites could also help revitalize mining community economies.

A few hundred abandoned mines around the world host solar installations, but these are scattered, pilot-scale efforts so far. Until now, no one has gotten a handle on the global potential of the approach.

In the new study, researchers gathered publicly available information about the locations of open-pit mines and used an artificial neural network to analyze the feasibility, optimal placement, and power generation potential of using open pit mines as solar installations.

There are 61,822 mining patches around the world that are larger than 10,000 square meters, the area necessary for a sizeable solar farm, the researchers report in the journal Nature Sustainability. Collectively, these mining patches cover 47,900 square kilometers.

That’s about ten times the area covered by solar facilities globally in 2018.

 

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What’s more, the mines are at least as promising locations for solar as existing solar farms, the researchers found when they analyzed potential power generation across both types of sites. Solar panels installed at all these mine sites could produce 4,764 TWh per year, enough to meet projected 2050 electricity needs at a global scale.

In reality, solar panels would best be deployed on spent mines that have been left alone for a while, so as not to interfere with either ongoing mining activities or restoration efforts. (However, solar could also aid restoration by keeping bare soils from drying out or blowing away and making it easier for plants to get established.)

The researchers analyzed vegetation changes over time via remote sensing data to zero in on abandoned mine sites. They constitute the majority of mining patches globally—39,737 of them.

How much abandoned-mine solar gets built out and how fast will depend on global economic growth, electricity demand, and the prices of clean energy and fossil fuels. Exactly where it gets built will depend on things like the local economy, available sunlight, and ease of access to the site.

The researchers fed 16 such factors into their artificial neural network and used it to estimate the probability of solar installations across the world’s mining patches. China, Chile, the United States, Australia, and Russia have the greatest potential for abandoned-mine solar, essentially because they have the most expansive mining industries.

“Given the vast area of open-pit mining sites in China, if fully used, the country could become the largest producer of solar energy globally, with productions reaching 849.5 TWh of electricity, which is nearly equivalent to its total electricity consumption for the year 2023,” the researchers write.

Meanwhile, the largest group of near-shovel-ready projects are found in the Mediterranean region. In contrast, Africa has great sunlight conditions at mining sites, but relatively few mines—and infrastructure and policy barriers to turning them solar.

Anywhere in the world, though, it will take government policy and financial support to take abandoned-mine solar from a niche idea into the mainstream, the researchers say.

Source: Wang K. et al. “Deploying photovoltaic systems in global open-pit mines for a clean energy transition.” Nature Sustainability 2025.

Image: Alan Levine via Flickr.

Bees have a special way of communicating, and it’s through the magical art of dance. There are many insects in the world that are pollinators. Pollinators transfer the pollen grain, […]

The post The Magical Dance of Bees first appeared on Dogwood Alliance.

Two crises in this moment show Trump’s nearly-unchecked power: Brutal deportations of immigrants in Los Angeles and the sudden withdrawal of seven billion dollars in education funding passed by Congress for this coming school year. But when these policies are seen in the totality of Trump’s project, which is simultaneously ideological, political, social, economic, and cultural, they reveal education’s importance as a site of struggle, demonstrating that our location as education workers is uniquely important in building a powerful movement to overturn the Right’s agenda, being fueled by the wealthiest, most powerful elite in this country’s history.

The Moment

The carceral state, with its extensive detention and surveillance,  was started and expanded well before Trump’s recent victory. Yet even for many aware of the development of “Cop City,” seeing ICE and DHS agents in Los Angeles, protected by the local police, conducting deportations, kidnappings, and imprisoning immigrants in detention centers, brutalizing demonstrators who try to stop these actions is a horrifying acceleration and intensification of militarizing the police, endorsed by both parties. LA was the experiment, which Trump has announced he will take to other cities, and we should take him at his word. The massive funding Trump has won from Congress to expand deportations and internments is larger than most nations’ military budgets and is accompanied by expansion of the attack on civil liberties, to include cities’ self-rule. As creation of the internment camp, “Alligator Alcatraz,” in the Everglades and plans to deport more people to other countries show, we cannot count on the courts, lawsuits, or lobbying to stop Trump’s usurpation of the government apparatus to destroy democracy.

Trump’s “strategic chaos” is being used to create havoc in education, throwing school districts into immediate disarray, pushing states to either compensate districts directly for this lost education funding or forcing districts to cover the financial loss themselves.

The other crisis comes with the Trump administration’s surprise announcement that the federal government is withdrawing seven billion dollars in appropriations approved by Congress for K-12 education,  due to be released on July 1 for this coming school year. Trump’s “strategic chaos” is being used to create havoc in education, throwing school districts into immediate disarray, pushing states to either compensate districts directly for this lost education funding or forcing districts to cover the financial loss themselves. While we might have had time to build broad coalitions to fight for state funding in response to money lost in the omnibus GOP legislation by reaching out to other public employee unions and constituencies that will suffer from the cuts, now education workers, our unions, and parent and community supporters face the extraordinary challenge of wheedling money from the states before school begins. Without this additional funding, most districts will be unable to stave off cuts in services to English language learners, children of migrant farmworkers, and after-school programs. Cuts in services generally translate into layoffs of school personnel, and how that scenario plays out will depend on hastily organized political struggles, appeals to governors and state legislatures, and lawsuits against Trump’s action. As of today, thirty-six states have already filed these suits.

Dismissing Trump, his backers, and his administration as “morons,” “lunatics,” “ignorant incompetents,” which I see often in posts on social media, obscures the purposes of the policies and the ideology driving them. The policies’ aims are certainly evil, but the decisions are politically calculated, carried out by those transparently furthering personal ambitions. Trump and his backers aim to sow fear, insecurity, confusion, and a sense of powerlessness, as do terrorists. The intent to create chaos in the schools to further the Right’s project of destroying social, political, and economic gains won since Reconstruction is clearly seen in Oklahoma, by two mandates issued by the state superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, one right after the other. Overturning decades-long certification agreements among the states, Walter’s, a Trumpster with an appetite for power unrestrained by law or even GOP norms, announced Oklahoma will withhold certificates for teachers from “woke” states who do not pass a new ideology test developed by PragerU, which measures whether they are patriots. And in response to cuts in federal aid to schools for students’ meals, he ordered districts to submit new budgets to pay for all students’ school meals immediately. Though Walters’ mandate on districts’ funding meals was dismissed by the chair of the Oklahoma House Education Committee as unenforceable and unconstitutional, Walters’ argument repeated rhetoric and arguments Trump/Musk used in firing federal workers. Walters argued education funds “need to go from administrators and bureaucrats’ pockets to school lunches…We have got to get away from growing government, growing bureaucracy, growing administrators….We need less administrators and more of the taxpayer dollars to go to kids directly.” Walters’  actions are intended to make education workers feel isolated and defeated. He may have succeeded for now, but his crude pummeling of school administrators and school boards has the potential to create the kind of support that education workers tapped into during the Red State walkouts, so it’s worth noting that the chair of the House Education Committee, who called out Walters’ action, is a former teacher.

When we examine these crises, such as the one manufactured by Walters, as authoritarian strategy, they reveal the centrality of schools as sites of struggle in this moment and what education workers and our unions can do. Trump and his billionaire backers care very much about what occurs in schools. The Trump administration has not disclosed reasons for the timing of the ICE raids, but we do know the raids began at the very end of the school year, with just two days of instruction left in the calendar. We also know public schools have been central to the life of the Hispanic community in LA, and members of the LA teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), are widely known to be committed to protecting immigrant students and their families. For instance, UTLA won provisions about immigrant rights in their contract and protected students when ICE agents came to schools in the Spring. LA high school students have a long, proud history of organizing walkouts to protect their communities, including walkouts against deportations in February and forming a grassroots organization, Students Deserve, which has won significant reforms to defund policing in schools. Students Deserve has continued the struggles of Black Lives Matter, with support from UTLA in alliance with community organizations. While this background is not conclusive evidence that the timing of the raids was deliberate to avoid schools being used as staging areas for resistance, the information does demonstrate that public schools can be strategic sites for building resistance in the greater society.

Really? Education workers are a threat to Trump?

Why would education workers, taken as a group, from kindergarten teachers, to grad students,  from school bus drivers and classroom aides to full-time higher ed faculty, be of particular concern to Silicon Valley billionaires, asset managers that control Wall Street, and huge corporations like Walmart?

The ideas we hold as individuals can pose a serious challenge to the status quo, which is why universities are being attacked and curricula purged of anything suggesting ideas the Right wants suppressed. But in addition, acting collectively as workers, we are a danger, for reasons Erin explains in her first article for The Future of Our Schools Collective.  What many in education miss, a strength our unions have declined to tap, is that the combination of education’s function in our social system and the unique power workers possess when they organize and fight together, especially when they tap the power a militant, democratic union provides, makes us unique occupationally. Shared occupational interests can unite us if we see beyond geography and institutional silos. Work in the education sector gives us social connections and political power that workers in other sectors can’t tap so readily, though their position in the productive economy can give them power we lack.

Education’s role is ensuring a society secures its future. Education reproduces (or changes) its essential functions. Though teachers generally make sense of that responsibility in individual terms, helping students to learn, grow socially, and master disciplinary knowledge, our work is part of a far greater picture. K-12 teaching’s day-to-day work, accomplished in classrooms and schools that were, by design, insular, isolated from one another and separated from communities, often obscures that big picture from us. But those wielding concentrated power and wealth over our lives and those they employ to orchestrate public opinion and set policy think a lot about maintaining their position, expanding their power and money, and hence what schools can and should do to make that occur. Reforms they successfully impose on us reflect how they want society to look, just as our struggles to use teaching and schooling’s organization to create a more just, equal society contest their vision and plans. Often, when teachers organize to demand adequate preparation time, smaller classes, libraries in schools, and pay and pensions that allow us to make teaching a career, we’re not thinking about the ways the improvements we want in schools relate to the big political, economic, and social picture. But be assured, our enemies see it all. Still, what occurs in classrooms is not the only, nor arguably the most influential, site in which learning occurs. We’re flooded with information from social media and influencers. The cultural apparatus educates, but social movements do as well, exposing cultural and ideological assumptions.

What happens in “government schools,” as the far-right labels public education, what we teach and how, matters to powerful elites because we socialize and educate the workforce; we make their profits possible.

The other site of education occurs at work, which, whether we like it or not,  is configured by conflict between workers and those who control our labor. That’s why workers form unions, which is another reason education workers are a threat.  What happens in “government schools,” as the far-right labels public education, what we teach and how, matters to powerful elites because we socialize and educate the workforce; we make their profits possible. Though this topic is one I can’t give the attention it merits in this article, education’s role in addressing economic contradictions and changes in working conditions is a significant factor now and relates to new reforms being pushed to vocationalize K-12 schools with an emphasis on information technology and work with AI.

A final factor that has motivated education reform and driven attacks on education workers organized collectively is that education remains the last and largest public service that has not yet been privatized. It is a massive source of profit, now more than ever, because of the money expected to be made in AI. Huge profits beckon investors in Trump’s plan to destroy public education as a system and completely privatize it-  as does the new neoliberal project, which is gaining popularity in both parties. The refurbished version of the neoliberal project will fund a system of public education looted internally, with technology.

In fact, this new neoliberal project has morphed from the old.  A blog in February 2020 proudly explained that the Progressive Policy Institute (which has ties to the Democratic Party, through its Center for American Politics), had formally sponsored a group called “The Neoliberal Project” since 2017. Colin Mortimer describes this in “A New Chapter: the Neoliberal Project Joins PPI.” Feb. 10, 2020.  Shortly after it was created, the Neoliberal Project boasted that it had 40 chapters around the world, a podcast listened to over 300,000 times, and a social media reach of over 15 million impressions a month. Will Marshall, PPI’s president, took to Reddit to explain The Neoliberal Project to this new audience.

This is a brutal time for education workers, and it’s understandable they may not feel the idea of potential power is a help when they’re facing vicious attacks on their integrity, ideals, and their jobs. With the exception of Chloe Asselin’s interview with the newly-elected reform president of the Washington DC local, long a bulwark of the national AFT machine, the other pieces the collective has published in our first month, based on observations and discussions with activists, suggest the power education workers might claim is far from what people in schools are thinking and feeling now.  Some are seeking relationships and community to sustain us while questioning long-held assumptions, but not coming up with answers.

The ferocious legislative and political attacks about what we teach and how, as well as the conditions of our labor, are felt most directly by education workers in school districts and states with a well-organized, aggressive Right wing. This sense of being embattled and isolated is prevalent in the South, especially outside of large cities, although education workers in communities under siege by right-wing activists in liberal states and communities can feel it too. While we need to acknowledge and respect these feelings, doing so doesn’t change the challenge:  Protecting democracy and expanding it requires that we carve out space for struggle, even when we question how to win the big battles.

Carving out and expanding space(s)

I suggest we flip the question from whether we can succeed to how we move towards creating and carving out spaces in which activists can imagine struggle in ways that encourage solidarity among education workers, supporting and protecting one another from victimization. It’s a process that needs to occur in schools, though it need not start there.

As food for thought, I’ll share an experience I had before Trump’s election, when I spoke about union democracy at a conference of the Oregon Education Association. I led a workshop intended to help members who were or wanted to be active in the union identify and use their power as rank-and-file workers in their schools, aided by staff when specific help was requested. Most participants taught in rural communities or small towns. We know from research in teacher education that unspoken cultural assumptions can configure how we deal with students, and in my experience working with union activists, this extends to the way we relate to authority as well–administration and school boards. Education workers, especially women (over 70% of teachers are women), especially those working with younger students, often feel they must be “nice” when they face conditions that undercut their work. As the entire workshop analyzed ideas shared by small groups, we saw some reflected reluctance to seem critical, negative, confront authority, or rock the boat. Participants discussed the complex ways we resist and accommodate policies we think are wrong and agreed (it seemed–we took no votes) that at times, to protect our students and the dignity of our labor, we must move from “nice” to another mode.

I suggested “naughty,” pushing the envelope on school practices and behavioral norms.  More seasoned activists cautioned that this has to be done in ways that keep individuals from being singled out and harmed. An energy filled the room as we discussed this mindset change, and although I do not know what follow-up occurred when they returned to their schools, when the workshop ended for a break before the next sessions began, several workshop participants decided they wouldn’t wait in the very long line for the women’s bathroom, claiming the right to use the empty men’s bathroom, laughing about being “naughty.”This anecdote suggests that what often appears to be spontaneous is often a result of a new idea. Building confidence and solidarity depends on more than attitudes. Knowledge counts too.

Another source of power for education workers in this country, from the most militant urban locals in “blue” states to the smallest communities in states dominated by the Right, is what we can learn from the “Red State” walkouts, curiously ignored by the media, the left, and our national unions. For complex reasons, including the fact that education involves social reproduction, that we do “care” work, as well as cultural and knowledge work, rather than manufacturing cars or delivering packages or lattes, many don’t see teachers as “real” workers. Yet we have blazed trails that contain vital lessons in building a resistance to Trump.

[Education workers] have blazed trails that contain vital lessons in building a resistance to Trump.

Just seven years ago, education workers led the  2018 “Red State Revolt,” a struggle that labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein discusses as one of four instances in which unions transformed themselves into “popular and consequential social movements” in his forthcoming book Why Unions Matter. In these historic walkouts,  “tens of thousands of public-school teachers conducted a set of entirely illegal strikes in GOP-dominated West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and other conservative states.” While the four examples differ in many respects, they shared “something far more transcendent” than being a labor struggle, a term, a way of thinking, Red State participants themselves may not have used to characterize their struggle. Regardless of their conception of what they were doing and why, their actions spoke for them. They launched a vast social movement, developing and bringing with them new allies–a movement in the most conservative regions of this country aided by radical ideas and activists. The movement, our movement of education workers, challenged repressive political authority directly, demanding democracy, creating a moment in history “when these social movements are at flood tide” and  “multitudes of ordinary men and women glimpse a world transformed.”

While I intend this to inspire, I am not proposing that the “Red State” walkouts are a template for organizing education workers at this moment because I do not think there is a single model or blueprint. What we do have are examples from which we can learn. The walkouts demonstrated our potential power, how a labor struggle can become a social movement, and how a struggle in one place can spark similar battles elsewhere, even when not coordinated. What’s to be learned from the walkouts?

Imagine how militant national unions could support education workers coming under the most severe attacks in states controlled by the GOP and also educate and help mobilize members in Democratic states about the destructive policies being hatched now for them? Imagine if our national unions helped coordinate actions for a national walkout, in alliance with social justice activists and community organizations? Imagine if they,  or we, coordinated a national day of protest, not a “Saturday march,” but a one-day national strike?

NEA and AFT have made important shifts in their rhetoric and appear more hospitable to members mobilizing. Still, they shirk from providing the leadership we need, in part because mobilizing members, supporting them to think and act independently, having a robust democratic culture and organizational practices that support it, creates challenges to their power and ideas about what’s best. So, how might we put pressure on the national unions to lead as they should? I’ll address that challenge in another article, but for now, let me propose that we be naughty.

I’ve heard arguments from teacher union activists that now is not a time to criticize the national unions. Instead, we need a “united front.” However, AFT’s deal with OpenAI and Microsoft to push AI in classrooms is a glaring example of how their strategy disarms us, forcing us to struggle defensively, in locals or maybe states, against harm being done on the national level, by our own unions, supported by our dues.

Some also contend we should not organize along “sectoral lines,” that is, as education workers per se. This strategy not only ignores the harm done to all of labor by AFT’s stunning alliance with tech moguls who support Trump, but it also misses what education workers bring to the critical task of organizing the South. We have won the most important battles not because we have followed the wishes of the national unions but because we have set out an independent path, fighting for democratic unions that integrate social justice ideals and ideas into our organizing, fighting the powerful elites rather than trying to accommodate them.

I’ve been concerned about how much discussion about labor’s future in general and teachers’ unions in particular focuses on the more liberal political environments in which collective bargaining is (still) legal. The focus has encouraged people to miss an important victory that followed the aftermath of the West Virginia walkouts. Education workers organized “wall to wall” in a struggle that brought radical activists, union members, and education workers who belonged to neither AFT nor NEA affiliates, together in a social movement supported by communities and often local school administration, throughout the state. They created the conditions and pressure for ” a merger-from-below” in which both the AFT and NEA state affiliates combined in one state union of education workers.

Education workers in West Virginia are now unified organizationally, not just wall-to-wall in their own districts but throughout the state. What occurred in West Virginia is a sharp contrast to bureaucratic fusion of the NEA affiliate in New York and the New York City AFT machine, which produced  New York State United Teachers. This West Virginia experience suggests that rank-and-file members of AFT and NEA in all the states that have separate state affiliates might consider their own “merger-from-below,” demanding a single, democratic organization to represent education workers in the state. Do we really have resources for the rivalries between separate state affiliates?

The third accomplishment of education workers in the South, in North Carolina, a “purple” state,  that provides ideas as well as hope for U.S. education workers, is Organize2020, a caucus that intended to democratize its sclerotic, bureaucratic NEA state affiliate, NCAE, North Carolina Association of Educators by building a grass roots movement of education workers committed to racial justice. The caucus started out as a small group of people meeting in someone’s kitchen and grew its network based on its vision, organizing in the locals in the “Triangle” as well as rural areas. Their goal was to win leadership in a revitalized union by 2020, which they did. It has changed the culture and organizational practices of the state organization, reflected in its Summer Member Organizer program. Organize2020 has grown the program from 45 members in 5 counties when they took office to 150 members in 45 counties, with more than two dozen members playing lead roles. Before writing this article, I talked with one of the first Organize2020 members, who is the current NCAE president, about the vision guiding their work. I was struck by how his brief answer captured Nelson Lichtenstein’s more expansive description of what unions can and should do:

Trade unions advance democracy, nowhere more clearly than in those times and places where an oligarchic or authoritarian government holds sway. To do so, however, the unions have to transcend themselves. They move from being organizations that represent just a well-defined sector of the working-class to social movements that engender a vast new set of energies and aspirations. They open political and moral opportunities never before thought possible for ordinary men and women.  And that is a large part of the reason that when dictators and reactionaries come to power, in the United States as well as distant lands, they invariably attack the unions, either by destroying them outright or transforming these organizations into but an apparatus of the state.1Op. Cit. Chapter V, “Subverting the Union Impulse.”

The largest union in this country is the NEA, with about three million members. The AFT has 1.8 million members. Our numbers, education’s location in the society, our existence in almost every community in this country, and the conditions of our work, in particular our relationships with parents and students, make us uniquely situated to claim our power in fighting the billionaires who aim to destroy our livelihood and the role of schools in improving our society. To do that, we have to recognize our power, take ownership of the unions,  and think of new possibilities, going beyond lobbying, lawsuits, webinars in which we’re given information,  using the contract but going beyond contract unionism. Details?  In future articles, I’ll explore what those possibilities might be. In the meantime, solidarity!

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: Anastasiya Badun; modified by Tempest.

The post Schools as sites of struggle appeared first on Tempest.

From July 21 to 25, 2025, thirty regional youth delegates of the Youth Articulation of La Vía Campesina from over twenty countries gathered in Morogoro, Tanzania, for the biannual international meeting. They shared the various struggles and the issues affecting them and made commitments to continue to fight for dignified agrarian policies, agrarian reforms, and an alternative trade framework.

The post Declaration of the Youth Articulation gathered in Tanzania: Building strength to advance our proposals appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

This piece is part of the weekly series “Growing Forward: Insights for Building Better Food and Agriculture Systems,” presented by the Global Food Institute at the George Washington University and the nonprofit organization Food Tank. Each installment highlights forward-thinking strategies to address today’s food and agriculture related challenges with innovative solutions. To view more pieces in the series, click here.

Despite the central role nutrition plays in preventing and managing disease, U.S. medical schools currently devote, on average, fewer than 20 hours to nutrition education over the course of four years. This limited exposure stands in stark contrast to the outsized impact that diet has on health; indeed, diet-related disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States. This educational gap is one of several systemic barriers that limit physicians’ capacity to effectively address diet-related diseases and promote healthy eating habits among their patients.

But that is starting to change. 

In recent years, the concept of Food Is Medicine has gained rapid momentum across the U.S. health care sector and beyond, broadening understanding of the critical role that nutrition plays in maintaining health, preventing illness, and treating many chronic conditions.

No longer a niche interest, Food Is Medicine’s core interventions—medically tailored meals, prescriptions for produce, enrollment in assistance programs, and nutrition education—have captured the zeitgeist. 

Instacart launched a mission-driven arm that embraces Food Is Medicine interventions and is championing nutrition access, resources and education. advocates for nutrition policies. Private and public sector organizations have committed nearly US$10 billion to change the trajectory of diet-related disease and hunger in the U.S.

And earlier this year the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and nonprofit health system Kaiser Permanente founded the Food Is Medicine National Network of Excellence to establish standardized approaches for integrating food-based interventions into health care systems and communities. The first members of the network, some of the biggest names across health care touching millions of lives—Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, CVS Health, Devoted Health, Elevance Health, Geisinger, and Highmark Health—are all in on Food Is Medicine.

But even with these developments—and while health systems, clinicians, academic researchers and others have been building a substantial evidence base that demonstrates Food Is Medicine’s potential to improve and save lives—Food Is Medicine is still reaching relatively few people. 

One of the greatest hurdles to scaling is integrating food and nutrition into the normal course of providing and receiving health care. It continues to be seen primarily as an intervention for serious illnesses or following a hospital admission. 

Getting there will require an expansive reorienting on the part of clinicians, whose advice Americans trust more than almost any other profession, and on the part of patients, whose definition of “medicine” will have to expand beyond the pharmacy window. The vast systems change this will require is one of the reasons why so many health care organizations have joined the National Network of Excellence.

So how do we get to a future state where food and nutrition are as much a part of health care as a blood pressure check? 

One path is training the next generation of physicians to embrace Food Is Medicine as a foundational part of how they provide care. The Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, for example, in addition to 12 hours of dedicated nutrition education, has intentionally woven it throughout the curriculum to underscore its importance across health. This includes emphasizing the connections to food when teaching about metabolic disorders, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, endocrine disorders, pregnancy, heart disease, and many other topics. Students receive instruction on related fields including scientific approaches to nutrition, food insecurity, and policy-levers to address diet-related disease; and the school offers intensive instruction through a culinary medicine elective that dedicates 120 hours to topics in nutrition and culinary literacy for the many students who want to deepen their knowledge to apply in their future practice.

Among the goals of a holistic education in Food Is Medicine strategies is to move past a model where physicians sound like chemists when discussing diet with patients, focusing on nutrients rather than providing practical counseling on meal planning and healthy eating. 

This means care teams should be attuned to the wide variation in how people come to food: variables such as a person’s ability to cook or not cook; accessibility of grocery stores; whether they experience food insecurity; dietary restrictions and allergies; and traditional foodways. Then, they must employ low-barrier approaches to help patients implement lifestyle changes. 

It means knowing under what circumstances a prescription for medically tailored meals, groceries or produce—often combined with nutrition education and a culinary medicine course —is likely to positively impact clinical outcomes.

And, it means grappling with the fact that food insecurity is consistently the top social health need that Americans experience, and that assistance programs like SNAP, WIC, and Summer EBT are still not reaching everyone who would benefit from them.  

The good news is that we are on our way. Because of the growing enthusiasm for Food Is Medicine and the promise it shows to keep people healthier while reducing health care costs, we are on a path to achieving this reorienting in the next 5 to 10 years. 

We can make that future a reality by investing now in the people who will be caring for patients tomorrow. By making nutrition curriculum and food security support a core component of medical education, we can ensure physicians have the tools and perspectives needed to unlock the evidence-based potential of food as an integral part of healthcare delivery that saves lives, reduces costs, and improves health outcomes for generations to come.

Photo courtesy of Taylor Kiser, Unsplash

The post Food Is Medicine and the Future of Care Delivery appeared first on Food Tank.

Finland has regained its status as the world’s most attractive jurisdiction for mining and exploration it held in the early 2010s, followed by Nevada and Alaska, according to the Fraser Institute’s latest Annual Survey of Mining Companies.

Canada’s standing slipped this year, with only two provinces — Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador — remaining in the global top 10. Saskatchewan placed seventh, down from third in 2024 and second in 2023, while Newfoundland and Labrador ranked eighth.

Rounding out the top five jurisdictions that are most attractive to investors, considering both mineral endowment and policy, are Wyoming and Arizona. The worst performing jurisdictions overall were Ethiopia, followed by Suriname, Niger, Canada’s Nova Scotia, and Mozambique. 

On policies alone, Ireland ranked first and Bolivia last.

With data from FI’s Annual Survey of Mining Companies, 2024.

The survey evaluates jurisdictions based on geological potential and government policies that either encourage or discourage exploration and investment. This year’s edition ranked 82 regions and included responses from about 350 mining professionals, mostly from exploration and mining companies. Participants assessed issues such as tax regimes, permitting timelines, environmental regulations, and labour availability.

Most of the respondents (40%) worked for exploration companies, 32% for mining companies and the remainder identified as consultants or as ‘other’.

Policy uncertainty hits Canada

Policy uncertainty was a recurring concern among respondents, particularly in Canada. The Fraser Institute noted that disputed land claims with Indigenous groups and shifting environmental protections contributed to investor hesitation.

The nation had four provinces ranked amongst the world’s top 10 jurisdictions last year, compared to only two this year.

Yukon, British Columbia, and Manitoba still boast strong geological potential but ranked 40th, 32nd, and 43rd respectively when policy factors were included. Ontario continued its downward slide, falling to 15th from 10th last year due to rising concerns over taxes, labour rules, and political stability. Quebec saw the steepest drop, from fifth to 22nd, amid worries about tax policies, regulatory duplication, and its legal framework.

In response to Nova Scotia’s poor performance, Sean Kirby, executive director of the Mining Association of Nova Scotia, said the province must overhaul its permitting process to unlock its potential.

“Nova Scotia has great geology for critical minerals and many others, but we need to fix permitting to attract investment and create jobs,” Kirby said. “The new Fraser Institute study is a stark reminder that we need to copy how other provinces regulate their mineral sectors.”

Source: FI’s Annual Survey of Mining Companies, 2024.

Kirby added that while most of the government’s mining experts work in the Department of Natural Resources’ Geoscience and Mines Branch, they play almost no role in permitting.

“Instead, we are almost entirely regulated by people in other departments who are not experts in mining,” Kirby said.

Since the survey was conducted between August and December last year, Canada has seen significant political and regulatory shifts.

Mark Carney’s election as prime minister and new federal and provincial legislation aimed at speeding up major project approvals could potentially improve Canada’s standing in next year’s report.

The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) denounces the stalling of Agrarian Reform and demands an effective commitment from the government. Land concentration continues to be one of the main causes of inequality in Brazil, with land being one of the most important assets protected by elites, and its disputes are a driver of constant tension, violence, and attacks on the rights of nature and its peoples.

The post MST Letter to Brazilian society: “Lula, Where is the Agrarian Reform?” appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

A legal tipping point on climate Channel Comment brendan 29th July 2025 Teaser Media

A wide-ranging analysis, drawing from data on nearly 30 million people, finds a link between air pollution and dementia. 

Read more on E360 →

Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs by Garth Mullins (Doubleday Canada, 2025) In a political moment when right-wing forces mobilize to dismantle even the...

The post Crackdown: A revolutionary testament from the frontlines of the drug war first appeared on Spring.

Eight years ago, when Debbie Wei Mullin founded her company Copper Cow, she wanted to bring Vietnamese coffee into the mainstream. 

Vietnam, the world’s second-largest exporter of coffee, is known for growing robusta beans. Earthier and more bitter than the arabica beans grown in Brazil, Colombia, and other coffee-growing regions near the Equator, robusta beans are often thought of as producing lower-quality coffee. 

In an effort to rebrand robusta, Mullin signed deals with coffee farming cooperatives in Vietnam and created smooth blends. Over the years, she helped a cohort of farmers convert their operations to organic. “We put in huge investments and were certified as the first organic specialty-grade coffee farms ever in Vietnam,” said the CEO and founder. In a few weeks, Copper Cow is planning to launch its first line of organic coffee at Whole Foods and Target.

But the second Trump administration has changed the calculus of her business. Mullin said she “was bullish” about her company’s prospects when President Donald Trump first took office, believing that Vietnam would likely be exempt from exorbitant tariffs since the president has many supporters in the coastal Southeast Asian country. Then, in April of this year, the White House announced a 46 percent tariff on goods from Vietnam. 

The shock left Mullin rethinking the very thesis she had set out to prove. “A big part of our mission is about how robusta beans, when treated better, can provide this really great cup of coffee at a lower price,” she said. “Once you put a 46 percent tariff on there, does this business model work anymore?”

Trump soon paused his country-specific tariffs for a few months, replacing them with a near-universal 10 percent tax. This month, Trump announced on social media that he would lower Vietnam’s eventual tariff from 46 to 20 percent — a sharp price hike that still worries Mullin. Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to impose an astounding 50 percent tariff on goods from Brazil, the nation’s largest importer of coffee, starting August 1. 

“I joke with my partner that I feel like I’m in a macroeconomics class,” said Mullin. In lieu of raising its prices, Copper Cow, which sells directly to consumers as well as to retailers, has scrambled to cut costs by reconsidering its quarterly team get-togethers and slowing down its timeline for helping more farmers go organic. The price of coffee hit an all-time high earlier this year, a dramatic rise due in part to ongoing climate-fueled droughts in the global coffee belt. As the U.S. considers fueling a trade war with coffee-producing countries, “it just feels like such an insult to an injury,” said Mullin. “It’s like, let’s have an earthquake hit a place that is in the middle of a hurricane.”

Coffee beans being roasted in a traditional coffee roasting store in India. Abhishek Chinnappa / Getty Images

Economists like to say that demand for coffee is relatively inelastic — drinkers are so attached to their daily caffeine fix that they keep buying it even when prices increase. As the Trump administration mounts its retaliatory trade agenda, that theory will be put to the test. Coffee growers, as well as the roasters and sellers that purchase them in the U.S., are now facing unforeseen geopolitical and economic challenges. “We have not seen tariffs of this magnitude before,” said David Ortega, a professor of food and economics policy at Michigan State University. “There’s no playbook for this.” 

Should Trump’s threatened tariffs go into effect next month, it will likely hurt consumers, as many businesses will pass on the costs by raising prices. But it could also have ripple effects on coffee farms, as companies may cut costs by pulling back on investments in environmentally-conscientious practices like organic or regenerative agriculture. “Our goal was always to slowly convert the rest of our products to certified organic,” said Mullin. “And we feel like that is not an option anymore because of the tariffs.”

Even if the tariffs do not go into effect in August, the ongoing economic uncertainty will likely impact coffee growers in Brazil, which provided 35 percent of America’s unroasted coffee supply as of 2023. As U.S. coffee companies navigate the Trump administration’s evolving trade policies, they are likely to seek out new, cheaper markets for coffee beans. “Suddenly, they become less attached to where they source their coffee from,” said João Brites, director of growth and innovation at HowGood, a data platform that helps food companies measure and reduce carbon emissions along their supply chain. 

The problem with that, according to Ortega, is that other countries in the coffee belt, such as Colombia, do not have the production capacity to match Brazil’s and meet U.S. demand for coffee. If the threat of punitive tariffs on Brazil kickstarts an increase in demand for coffee from other countries, that will likely raise prices. For coffee drinkers, “there are very few substitutes,” said Ortega.

These pressures on coffee farmers and buyers are coming after a period of worsening climate impacts. A majority of coffee grown in Brazil — about 60 percent — comes from smallholder farms, grown on about 25 or fewer acres of land. “The current reality they’re operating in is that they’re already very stretched,” particularly because of weather disruptions, said Brites. Coffee grows best in tropical climates, but in recent years unprecedented droughts in Brazil have stunted growers’ yields, forcing exporters to dip into and almost deplete their coffee reserves. Vietnam has been rocked by drought and heat waves — and though robusta beans need less water to grow than arabica beans, making them a relatively climate-resilient crop, growers have also seen their yields decline. (Mullin said she is seeing early signs of harvests rebounding this year.)

Brites speculated that U.S. companies buying from smallholder farms in Brazil may be able to pressure growers into selling their beans at lower prices, adding to the economic precarity that these growers face. “For a lot of these coffee growers, the U.S. is such a big market,” he said, adding that it would take time for them to find new buyers in other markets.

Charts showing President Donald Trump’s country-specific “reciprocal tariffs” on April 2 in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong / Getty Images

Growers themselves are worried. Mariana Veloso, a Brazilian coffee producer and exporter, said producers are facing logistical challenges — and anticipating more. “If we want to ship a coffee in the next month, we will probably not be able to,” said Veloso, remarking that sometimes cargo ships holding coffee sit at Brazilian ports for weeks before setting out. Shipping companies seem to be delaying shipments from Brazil, said Veloso, perhaps in anticipation of the looming tariffs.

In the U.S., not every coffee company sources from Brazil or Vietnam. But the Trump administration’s existing 10 percent across-the-board tariffs are still rattling the coffee business. “We source coffees from all around the world. So we’re not immune to anything,” said Kevin Hartley, founder and CEO of Cambio Roasters, an aluminum K-cup coffee brand. He added, “You know, 10 percent here and 30 percent there, that’s not trivial.”

Hartley added that one of the impacts of droughts on coffee growers is that younger farmers worried about the future are considering leaving the business. “In coffee farming families around the world, it’s a tough life and the current generation is showing reticence to take off where their parents began,” he said. 

Regardless of whether the U.S. imposes prohibitive tariffs on individual coffee-growing countries, climate change is already taking a toll on this workforce. “Everyone’s looking for a solution for this,” said Mullin, who believes robusta beans can offer a drought-resistant alternative to the ever-popular arabica beans. 

Copper Cow has even started experimenting with a lesser-known varietal of coffee beans called liberica, which requires even less water to grow than robusta beans. “And it’s delicious,” Mullin said. It’s an extremely labor-intensive crop because the coffee plant grows so tall, but one of the farmer cooperatives she works with is starting to plant them now, thinking the investment will be worth it as temperatures keep rising. 

This new era of environmental, economic, and geopolitical challenges has shaken coffee brands. “Everybody’s wondering, in 50 years, will there be much coffee anymore? People are trying to be really realistic about what that world is going to look like,” said Mullin. In the midst of that broader uncertainty, the impact of Trump’s tariffs is another question only time can answer.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change has sent coffee prices soaring. Trump’s tariffs will send them higher. on Jul 29, 2025.

The Arctic island of Svalbard is so reliably frigid that humanity bet its future on the place. Since 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — set deep in frozen soil known as permafrost — has accepted nearly 1.4 million samples of more than 6,000 species of critical crops. But, the island is warming six to seven times faster than the rest of the planet, making even winters freakishly hot, at least by Arctic standards. Indeed, in 2017, an access tunnel to the vault flooded as permafrost melted, though the seeds weren’t impacted.

This February, a team of scientists was working on Svalbard when irony took hold. Drilling into the soil, they gathered samples of bacteria that proliferate when the ground thaws. These microbes munch on organic matter and burp methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas and significant driver of global warming. Those emissions are potentially fueling a feedback loop in the Arctic: As more soil thaws, more methane is released, leading to more thawing and more methane, and on and on. 

Read Next Ice roads are a lifeline for First Nations. As Canada warms, they’re disappearing. Hilary Beaumont

In some parts of Svalbard, though, the scientists didn’t need to drill. Air temperatures climbed above freezing for 14 of the 28 days of February, reaching 40 degrees Fahrenheit, when the average temperature at this time of year is 5 degrees. Snow vanished in places, leaving huge pools of water. “I brought my equipment to drill into frozen soil and then ended up sampling a lot of soil just with a spoon, like it was soft ice cream,” said Donato Giovannelli, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Naples Federico II and co-lead author of a paper describing the experience, published last week in the journal Nature Communications. “That was really pretty shocking.”

Scientists can now dig with silverware in the Svalbard winter because the Arctic has descended into a crisis of reflectivity. Until recently, the far north had a healthy amount of sea ice, which bounced much of the sun’s energy back into space, keeping the region cool. But as the planet has warmed, that ice has been disappearing, exposing darker water, which absorbs sunlight and raises temperatures. This is yet another Arctic feedback loop, in which more warming melts more sea ice, leading to more local warming, and on and on. 

Making matters worse, as temperatures rise in the far north, more moisture enters the atmosphere. For one, warmer seawater evaporates more readily, adding water vapor to the air. And two, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. This leads to the formation of more low-level clouds, which trap heat like blankets — especially in the dark Arctic winter — amplifying the warming. That, combined with the loss of sea ice, is why the Arctic is warming up to four times as fast as the rest of the planet, with Svalbard warming even faster than that. 

James Bradley

James Bradley

Researchers on Svalbard say rising Arctic temperatures have led to reduced sea ice cover and rapidly thawing permafrost. These conditions are part of a feedback loop that makes the region especially vulnerable to climate change. Courtesy of James Bradley

James Bradley

During the winter, Svalbard’s soils have historically frozen solid, and scientists assumed this made microbial activity grind to a halt. Reindeer could push through the snow to graze on vegetation. But February’s heat and rain melted the snow, forming vast pools of water that froze once temperatures dropped again. That created a layer of ice that reindeer couldn’t break through. “What we encountered was just so powerful, to be in the middle of this event,” said James Bradley, a geomicrobiologist at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography and Queen Mary University of London, co-lead author of the paper. “It really almost all melted over large, large, large areas of the ground. That ground remained frozen, so the water didn’t have too many places to drain away to, so what we also saw was huge pooling of liquid water over the tundra.”

This new climate regime could be profoundly altering the soil microbiome. Scientists assumed that methane-producing bacteria, known as methanogens, stopped proliferating when Svalbard’s soils froze in the winter, just like food in your freezer keeps for months because it’s in a hostile environment for microbes. But with warm spells like this, thawing could awaken methanogens, which could still produce that greenhouse gas even if it then rains and a layer of ice forms at the surface. In addition, that solid cap on the soil will stop the exchange of atmospheric gases into the ground, creating anaerobic, or oxygen-poor, conditions that methanogens love. “In some areas, deeper layers might never freeze completely, which means the methanogens and microbes at depth remain active,” Giovannelli said. “There’s no real winter period.”

If snow melts and the ground thaws, microbes eat organic material and release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that accelerates warming. Courtesy of James Bradley

Vegetation, too, is changing up there, a phenomenon known as Arctic greening. As temperatures rise, trees and shrubs are creeping north to conquer new territory. The good news is that those plants capture carbon as they grow, mitigating global warming to a certain extent. But the bad news is that dark-colored vegetation absorbs more of the sun’s energy and raises temperatures, just like the exposed ocean does. And shrubs trap a layer of snow against the landscape, preventing the chill of winter from penetrating the soil and keeping it frozen.

The speed of transformation in the Arctic is shocking, even for stoic scientists. And as nations keep spewing greenhouse gases, the feedback loops of the far north are threatening to load the atmosphere with still more methane. “We call this the new Arctic — this is not something that is a one-off,” Giovannelli said. “And on the other side, we’ve probably been a bit too cautious with our warnings regarding the climate. It’s not something for the next generation. It’s something for our generation.”

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips6','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis on Jul 29, 2025.

In her latest rap song, Madhura Ghane, known by her stage name Mahi G, walks on a barren, drought-stricken hill where a large, leafless tree has fallen to the ground. In the following frames, with the background music slowly rising, the video shows close-ups of Indian laborers — men, women, and children — working at a brick factory in Maharashtra. As the background tempo reaches a crescendo, Mahi G fires the first few bars about brick kiln workers, sewage cleaners, and construction workers toiling under the scorching sun. “The one whose sweat builds your house himself wanders homeless,” she raps in Hindi. “But who cares about the one who died working for you in the sun?”

Mahi G’s song “Heatwave,” which was produced in collaboration with Greenpeace India, dropped in June, just as the country was reeling under soaring temperatures. Last year, more than 100 people died across India because of an extreme heat wave during the summer. Prolonged heat exposure can lead to heat strokes, a risk disproportionately borne by outdoor workers. 

In India, those workers typically occupy the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. The country’s caste system divides people into four main groups based on birth. Those who are placed outside the system — referred to as Dalits — are often relegated to the most hazardous jobs. Members of tribes or Indigenous communities — referred to as Adivasis — also fall outside this structure and face systemic discrimination. Successive governments in India have evicted Adivasis from their ancestral lands to clear the way for exploiting mineral resources.

Mahi G’s music primarily speaks to the experiences of Dalits and Adivasis. She belongs to the Mahadev Koli tribe, a community found in the western state of Maharashtra, and lives in Mumbai. She has released 12 songs so far since she first began rapping in 2019.  Nearly half of them are about climate justice.

Growing up, the 28-year-old rapper witnessed her community struggle to access clean drinking water. “It always made me sad to see women walk long distances to fetch water,” she said. As an Adivasi woman, her drive to research and write about the environment comes from a deep, personal space, she said, and she chose to rap about sociopolitical issues because “you can talk about a big issue in a short, powerful, and aggressive way.”

India’s mainstream hip-hop scene has been mostly dominated by upper-caste male artists, primarily from Maharashtra and Punjab, a northwestern state. But in recent years, a handful of Dalit and Adivasi rappers have broken into the mainstream, using their music to challenge caste hierarchies, critique government policies, and spotlight social injustices.

Among them is Arivu, who shot to fame with his track “Anti-national,” a bold critique of the Indian government led by Narendra Modi, a right-wing Hindu nationalist, whose party and supporters routinely label dissenting voices as anti-national. In another song, Arivu lays bare feudalism and its contemporary manifestations while paying homage to his grandmother, a landless laborer in a tea plantation. The video has garnered more than half a billion views on YouTube.

Mahi G’s videos haven’t had that level of reach, but she draws support from activists and nongovernmental groups working on environmental and social justice causes. Her videos typically garner tens of thousands of views, and one song about Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a social reformer and architect of the Indian constitution, has more than 300,000 views. But the music hasn’t made much money so far. She hasn’t monetized her YouTube channel and is instead funding her music through her salary as an engineer at a private company. 

“Heatwave” is not the first time Mahi G has used her music to talk about climate justice. In her first rap song, “Jungle Cha Raja” — King of the Jungle — Mahi G explored the relationship between tribal communities and the natural environment, highlighting how they have long worked to protect it. In another song, “Vikasacha Khul,” she raps about the cost of development — how the building of roads, skyscrapers, and shopping malls has come at the expense of forests, lakes, and clean air.

Rappers like Mahi G and Arivu are often making music that challenges the political establishment at great risk to themselves. In 2023, Umesh Khade and Raj Mungase, two rappers from Maharashtra, were jailed after the right-wing political party ruling the state alleged they had made defamatory statements about their politicians. Despite these concerns and looming threats, Mahi G said the response to her songs keeps her going. Her music has compelled people to think about the environment and has helped them realize that they don’t want industrialization that destroys forests, she said. Even though her community members, who are often new to rap, do not understand her music, she said they have appreciated her work to spotlight climate change, which has directly affected their lives. Shifting rainfall patterns and depleting water resources have taken a toll on the Mahadev Koli tribe’s ability to sustain themselves.

Asim Siddiqui, who teaches at Azim Premji University in southern India’s Bengaluru city and works on the educational and cultural politics of youth, said that rappers from lower-caste and Indigenous communities who have been historically marginalized grow up in contexts where they are intimately connected to their social and natural environment. Ecological destruction or social injustice has a personal impact on their emotions and identity. “It becomes obvious for them to bring out these themes in their musical expression,” he said.

Siddiqui said that singing was historically stigmatized in India as a degrading occupation and, therefore, confined to lower-caste communities. But once India gained independence from British rule and embarked on its nation-building project, “some of the music traditions got classicized and later commodified, which excluded singers and performers from Dalit and Adivasi communities,” Siddiqui said. Hip-hop provided access to marginalized communities across the world, he added, as it enabled young rappers like Mahi G to tell their stories through music.

For Mahi G, music is a platform for activism. “My rap focuses on protecting natural resources,” she said. “If you can’t plant a tree, at least don’t cut one down.” These basic principles form the core of her message.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Indian rapper is spitting bars about climate justice, caste, and Indigenous rights on Jul 29, 2025.

From Frankfurt to London to Lisbon, major European airports are seeing an expansion frenzy. In Barcelona, where residents have grown increasingly frustrated with overtourism and its associated problems, authorities and business associations are trying to push ahead with a plan to enlarge El Prat, Europe’s sixth-busiest airport. But will the project really benefit Catalans and the Spanish economy, as its promoters claim?

June 10, 2025. The Catalan government announces a project aimed at expanding Barcelona’s El Prat Airport with an investment of 3.2 billion euros. The proposal – which has acquired the Spanish government’s stamp of approval – joins a roster of ambitious projects to expand air travel capacity in Europe’s major airports, including Madrid-Barajas, London’s Heathrow, Frankfurt airport, and a new airport in Lisbon.

In recent years, various proposals to expand El Prat Airport had surfaced in public debate but none had received official approval. However, the recent alignment of the Socialist Party (PSOE) in the national, regional, and Barcelona city governments has revived the project, which had been shelved since 2021 due to opposition from the then-regional government and Barcelona city council, as well as popular mobilisation. 

The main drivers of the expansion are the Catalan business lobby and the major political parties, namely the PSOE and the Catalan nationalist Junts. On the other hand, the largest trade unions oscillate between ambiguity and support, while parties to the left of the PSOE, environmental movements, and a large part of Barcelona’s civil society remain fiercely opposed. The latter group took to the streets on 28 June to protest against El Prat’s enlargement – and has promised to continue resistance.

The Catalan government and the Spanish Airports and Air Navigation Authority (AENA, the public-private company that manages airports) hope to begin construction in 2030 and complete it by 2033. Yet in reality, what we have seen so far resembles the case of Heathrow Airport, where expansion was first proposed in 2009 but has yet to materialise in the face of fierce opposition from environmental groups, local residents, and some political parties. In fact, the coalition government between Conservatives and Liberals (2010-2015) cancelled the construction of Heathrow’s third runway – approved by the previous Labour government  – due mostly to the opposition of residents and MPs from nearby towns, who worried about noise pollution. Current prime minister Keir Starmer has recently revived the project, citing expected positive economic outcomes.

In 2024, El Prat Airport, located about 15 kilometres from the centre of Barcelona, surpassed 50 million passengers – mostly tourists – and 182,000 tonnes of air cargo. More than 700 flights depart every day from El Prat, making it the sixth busiest airport in Europe. The Catalan government’s expansion plan includes building a new terminal and extending the third runway by 500 metres, with the stated aim of increasing long-haul flights, as larger aircraft require longer runways to land. In the words of Catalan President Salvador Illa, the goal is to turn El Prat into an “intercontinental hub”. The airport’s enlargement is expected to increase passenger numbers to around 70 million per year. 

Adopting a rhetoric that frames cities as competing businesses, Illa has stated he does not want to “allow other hubs like Istanbul and Qatar to take advantage and steal this opportunity from Barcelona”. This is precisely the sort of argument used by Alan Rides, the CEO of West London Chamber of Commerce, to demand the construction of a new runway in Heathrow: “If Heathrow doesn’t expand to meet the demand, then airlines will take their trade to European Hub airports like Paris, Frankfurt, or Amsterdam.” 

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According to the Climate Emergency Declaration approved by the Barcelona city council in 2020, El Prat emits nearly eight million tonnes of CO2 and equivalent gases annually, more than double the total emissions of the city of Barcelona itself. Still, the Catalan government claims that increasing long-haul flights and airport capacity is compatible with reducing emissions, thanks to the development of clean fuel. However, the public research institute Barcelona Regional has calculated that the planned capacity increase would raise the airport’s CO₂ emissions by 33 per cent.

The government of Socialist Salvador Illa has, in theory, committed to halving Catalonia’s emissions by 2030 – a target that would be nearly impossible if El Prat is enlarged. Eva Vilaseca, a spokesperson for the Catalan Assembly for Ecosocial Transition, has told  Infolibre that reviving the expansion was “outrageous”, warning: “We have a very narrow window to avoid exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming. The deadline is 2030, and this legislative term runs until 2028. Missing this opportunity is extremely worrying.” 

In its Proposal for a Carbon Budget for Catalonia (2021-2045), the expert group on climate change advising the Catalan parliament calls for “no expansion or construction of projects and mega-projects with significant environmental impacts”. It also suggests imposing a ban on “domestic flights where there is a train alternative of under two and a half hours”. As journalist Manel Riu has noted in Crític, the Catalan Climate Change Law obliges the government to incorporate this expert committee’s recommendations – a mandate Salvador Illa is ignoring with his expansion proposal. 

Furthermore, there are fears that El Prat’s expansion will have a negative impact on La Ricarda lagoon, a protected ecosystem that is part of the Natura 2000 network due to its high-value bird species and habitats. The lagoon and its surroundings are one of the most biodiverse areas in the Llobregat Delta, with over 540 identified species that also include endangered birds. The Catalan government has promised to offset the damage from the project, which would affect 27 hectares of protected wetlands, by enlarging the lagoon and improving water quality to aid ecosystem restoration. However, a report by the University of Barcelona states that it is impossible to fully reconstruct an ecosystem like La Ricarda, which would suffer irreversible damage if the project goes ahead. 

Because it affects a Natura 2000 site, El Prat’s expansion requires approval from the European Commission, which has reminded Spain that ecological compensation measures promised in 2004 (when the third runway was built) remain pending. Since 2021, there has been an open infringement case for non-compliance against Spain, with Brussels warning it would not approve the new plan until outstanding compensations are completed. This is something the current Catalan government has pledged to address. 

Yet, despite the Commission’s apparent firmness, the Habitats Directive allows the EU to authorise constructions that damage Natura 2000 sites if they are justified by “imperative reasons of overriding public interest”. Given that the current European Commission, which has been open to making deals with the far right, is weakening Green Deal requirements and other environmental and climate regulations, it seems unlikely it will block El Prat’s expansion to protect a wetland. And this sort of EU negligence is not unprecedented: In Frankfurt, massive protests against clearing forest areas to add a fourth runway to the airport failed to stop construction, which was completed in 2011. The German government accepted the destruction of valuable natural areas as collateral damage, and the Catalan and Spanish administrations seem set to follow the same path.

Given that the current European Commission is weakening Green Deal requirements, it seems unlikely it will block El Prat’s expansion to protect a wetland.

The tourism problem

President Illa has warned that El Prat airport is nearing capacity and argued that a larger infrastructure is needed “to remain a tourism leader”. However, the overtourism plaguing Barcelona and the Catalan coast is precisely one of the main arguments evoked by those who oppose expansion. In 2024, over 15 million people visited Barcelona, a city of fewer than 2 million inhabitants. Between January and July 2024 alone, Catalonia received more than 11 million tourists – a 10.5 per cent increase from the previous year. With 80 per cent arriving by plane, there is little doubt that a higher airport capacity would raise the number of tourists significantly: Barcelona Regional estimates an additional 10 million visitors per year. 

74 per cent of Barcelona residents believe the city has reached its “tourism limit”. This view comes as no surprise, as mass tourism is driving up housing prices in Barcelona and other Catalan cities. Moreover, the tourism industry has also brought about significant environmental consequences due to emissions from planes and cruise ships, energy and water consumption, and waste production – all far higher among tourists than the city’s residents. And what’s more, the tourism sector offers worse working conditions than average (higher temporary employment rates and lower wages) and increases nuisances like noise and street overcrowding, particularly in a geographically small city like Barcelona. These adverse effects explain the growing street protests against overtourism in the Catalan capital. Last year, demonstrations against mass tourism in Barcelona sparked similar action around the world when protestors squirted visitors with water pistols.

In addition to the overcrowding of the city centre, the impact on the housing market is the most tangible negative consequence of the Catalan capital’s tourism market. In 2024, the average rent reached 1200 euros per month, an amount higher than the minimum wage. One of the reasons for this rise in property prices in Barcelona and other tourist areas of the country is the use of thousands of homes as tourist apartments or for short-term rentals, which evade the price regulations introduced by the Spanish parliament in 2023.

Growing discontent over the social and environmental harms of mass tourism has spread widely across Spain in recent years, challenging a long-standing dominant narrative – pushed by major political parties and the media – that tourism should not be criticised since it brings wealth to the country.  Since 2024, massive demonstrations have taken place in various locations, especially in the Canary Islands, an archipelago that continues to have one of the lowest income levels in Spain despite (or perhaps because of) its booming tourism industry, and where locals are also facing soaring rents and environmental degradation.

With Catalan authorities seemingly resolute to press ahead with the expansion of El Prat, the issue of mass tourism will be one of the key political battlegrounds between the defenders and the opponents of the project.

The economic growth imperative

The Catalan government and business leaders have tried to justify El Prat’s expansion by arguing that it will lead to economic growth. President Illa declared at the project’s launch that it was “a great day for Catalonia’s competitiveness in the coming decades”, even claiming that “all Catalan businesses and their infrastructures need an international airport that represents a leap forward”. Yet in Spain, less than one per cent of goods are transported by air, and the airport already has numerous international connections. 

Foment del Treball Nacional, the main Catalan employers’ organisation, has proposed  various options over the years for extending the airport – including building a runway over the sea – and published triumphalist reports on the supposed urgency of the project. According to the business lobby, the planned expansion would boost Catalonia’s GDP by “almost 2 per cent”.

The issue of mass tourism will be one of the key political battlegrounds between the defenders and the opponents of the expansion of El Prat airport.

Meanwhile, the region’s largest trade union, Comisiones Obreras, has taken an ambiguous stance: while criticising the lack of “social dialogue” before the project’s announcement, the union, lured by the prospect of job creation, does not oppose the expansion. This aligns with Foment del Treball’s forecasts that “tens of thousands of new jobs” will be created if the runway is extended and the number of flights increased. Similarly, business groups and major trade unions in the UK are among the leading advocates for Heathrow’s third runway. Starmer’s government has said that it could create 100.000 jobs. 

In both London and Barcelona, the promise of economic growth and reduced unemployment – structurally high in Spain – seems to remain effective in rallying key political and economic actors behind a project that contradicts the very climate and environmental agendas they claim to support. 

Yet alternatives exist. The Sustainable and Safe Mobility Foundation estimates that with 2 billion euros – less than the projected cost of expanding El Prat – numerous train and tram lines could be built across Catalonia, improving low-emission connectivity and creating jobs. More than a quarter of Catalonia’s population uses trains or metros daily, taking 2.2 million trips per day. This is a far more democratic use than air travel, as Sweden’s Linnaeus University found that the wealthiest 1 per cent of the world population generate half of aviation-related emissions. Activist Eva Vilaseca proposes a broader alternative: “a 10-year productive conversion plan for Catalonia’s economy, with an ecological transition fund worth 10 per cent of GDP. We propose investing in rail infrastructure, which would also create jobs with a future,” she told Infolibre. 

Corporate profiteering

Promoting economic growth and turning Barcelona into an international hub with more long-haul flights are the stated arguments of politicians and business leaders. However, to understand why this investment is prioritised over alternatives (such as rail or promoting low-emissions economic sectors), we must look at the structure of the Spanish airport sector.

In Spain, airports are managed by AENA, a public-private company that is 51 per cent controlled by state-owned air navigation manager Enaire, with the remaining 49 per cent in the hands of investment funds, banks, and other private shareholders. Infrastructure investments allow increased fees on plane tickets, translating into immediate profits for shareholders. The prospect of higher earnings for AENA investors is absent from public debate, but it is one of the most powerful drivers of the push to expand El Prat, especially for the business lobby. In 2024 alone, AENA posted a record profit of more than 1.9 billion euros.

A report by the Barcelona city council’s Infrastructure Advisory Committee – supportive of the airport’s enlargement – admits that the number of long-haul flights could be increased without extending the third runway, by allowing more large aircraft to use the existing longest runway. However, the committee dismisses this option due to the extra noise it would provoke in nearby residential areas. It is worth noting that the most affected areas are governed by the Socialist Party, a major advocate of expansion. 

As the case of Heathrow shows, local politics should not be underestimated in debates over mega-infrastructure. Even in Frankfurt, where a fourth runway was built despite mass demonstrations in 2011, civil resistance continues. Protests resumed in 2024, this time focusing on emissions rather than noise, and led to the cancellations of more than 100 flights.

A European frenzy

European air traffic is projected to grow by 52 per cent by 2050, according to Eurocontrol. Clean fuels currently account for less than 0,1 per cent of all aviation fuels consumed, and even the most optimistic forecasts envision a share of 2-4 per cent for sustainable fuel by 2030. Another way to reduce aviation-related emissions would be to improve aircraft efficiency, but according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), even a potential improvement of 20 per cent in efficiency will be outpaced by growth in activity. Therefore, increased air traffic – brought about by the planned airport enlargement – will inevitably mean more emissions. Besides, aviation is excluded from national emission reduction targets under the Paris Agreement, a special regime enabling the sector’s uncontrolled growth. 

The expansion of El Prat Airport exemplifies this dynamic. The Catalan and Spanish governments – which elsewhere maintain green rhetoric – have embraced a proposal pushed by the business lobby and guided by profit-seeking for AENA shareholders and the tourism sector. In London, the business coalition backing Heathrow’s expansion is led by engineering and freight firms. The continent-wide airport expansion fever reflects the fossil fuel economy’s enduring influence over national and European economic policies. The Catalan government’s plan to extend El Prat’s third runway, cloaked in rhetoric of infinite economic growth, prioritises corporate profits over climate action and biodiversity protection.  And the ongoing airport fever reveals the fragility of European governments’ climate commitments when it comes to imposing limits on the aviation sector. 

In Barcelona, the coalition of political and business elites will be a formidable opponent for social movements opposing the expansion. However, the final project has not even obtained the necessary approval yet. Past airport expansions show these are slow, decades-long processes, giving opponents multiple opportunities to derail the project through action ranging from street protests to legal challenges. The long-delayed Heathrow case suggests El Prat’s expansion may also prove more complicated than its backers hope.