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Gene edited meat 'on dinner plates soon' Channel News brendan 28th May 2026 Teaser Media

By Jeremy Brecher,
Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

Listen to the audio version >>

From the day of his inauguration until long after the closing of the Straits of Hormuz, President Donald Trump and his fossil fuel supporters have conducted an unrelenting war against the Greentech revolution and fossil free energy.

President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBBA) into law on July 4, 2025. The law rolls back many parts of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act by ending tax credits for wind and solar energy, removing incentives for electric vehicles and home energy efficiency, and increasing support for fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and traditional agriculture. Photo credit: The White House, Public Domain

The Greentech revolution includes ways of producing energy like solar and wind power; ways of distributing it in time and space like energy storage and energy grids; and ways of using it like electric vehicles (EVs) and carbon neutral buildings. The Greentech revolution is a dagger pointed at the heart of the fossil fuel industry and the political, social, and economic ecosystem in which it is embedded. Donald Trump, MAGA, and the fossil fuel industry are conducting a systematic counter-revolution to halt and destroy the Greentech revolution in all its forms.

The roots of opposition to climate protection and fossil free energy in particular run deep. The fossil fuel industry has spent large sums trying to debunk the reality of climate change and fossil fuel burning as its leading cause. Political forces – left, right, and center — have long seen the expansion of fossil fuel extraction and burning as a key to prosperity and national power. With the rise of fascist-style movements, parties, and governments around the world, denial of climate change and attacks on climate protection became ubiquitous, promulgated by forces far beyond the fossil fuel interests. Trump’s anti-Greentech campaign is backed by an army of economic and ideological allies who are attempting to block the Greentech revolution at every level, from municipalities and states to corporations and the public mind.

While Donald Trump vacillates on many fronts, his personal climate denialism and hostility to fossil free energy have been consistent for much of his career. In his first term, Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Paris climate change agreement; authorized leasing federal land for new coal mines; unblocked nearly the entire American continental shelf for offshore drilling; and opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and national monuments such as Bears Ears in Utah to fossil fuel extraction. By the end of 2018, Trump had eliminated 76 environmental regulations, most related to climate.

The second Trump administration represented a new phase in the attack on climate safety and fossil free energy. Of course, like most presidents before him, Trump is trying to increase fossil fuel extraction and burning. But beyond that he is trying to restrict and if possible, abolish Greentech industry. Trump portrays his energy policy as a search for energy dominance for the US. But the facts belie that claim. In fact, Trump’s efforts to destroy Greentech energy are systematically reducing America’s energy resources and thereby decreasing US power.

Trump’s intent is not primarily to augment US power, but to reverse the Greentech revolution and the global transition to fossil-free energy. It is first and foremost devoted to eliminating the existential threat that the Greentech revolution poses to the fossil fuel industry and the entire economic, political, and social ecosystem that depends on it and on which it depends. If the Greentech revolution is a dagger pointed at their heart, then it is a matter of survival for these forces to attempt in turn to stab it to death. That is the attempt we are seeing from MAGA, the Trump administration, and their allies.

(Left to Right) Chris Wright, U.S. Secretary of Energy (Photo credit: Donica Payne, United States Department of Energy, Public Domain); Jessica Kramer, head of the EPA’s Office of Water (Photo credit: Congress.gov, Public Domain); Audrey Robertson, head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (Photo credit: Energy.gov, Public Domain)

While Trump often seems to be flying wild, it would be a mistake to think that his administration doesn’t know what it is doing. Its key energy and climate related positions are held by top fossil fuel executives and lobbyists who are well aware of the Greentech threat to their industry. Trump’s energy secretary Chris Wright is a longtime fossil fuel executive and a former director of an oil-industry lobbying group. Jessica Kramer, head of the EPA’s Office of Water, previously represented major energy companies, mining companies, and a water trade group working against regulations under the Clean Water Act. Audrey Robertson, head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, was the co-founder of fracking company Franklin Mountain Energy and served on the board of three other fossil fuel companies, including Liberty Energy, founded by Energy Secretary Chris Wright. As Matthew Davis of the League of Conservation Voters put it, “Nominating another oil and gas executive continues the Trump administration’s actions to effectively ban clean energy like wind and solar, and advance dirty energy only policies across the board.”

Smashing Greentech energy production

On day one of his presidency, Trump issued an Executive Order freezing unspent funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It aimed to halt every form of Greentech, from production of solar and wind energy to domestic manufacture of EVs. In February 2025, the Army Corps of Engineers halted approval of renewable energy projects on private land; out of about 11,000 pending permits it singled out the 168 that focused on renewable energy. In March, Trump signed an executive order rescinding a Biden-era proclamation permitting the Department of Energy to fund production of renewable technologies through the Defense Production Act.

There followed a series of actions specifically designed to block solar and wind energy production. The Treasury Department issued new guidance limiting wind and solar energy projects’ eligibility for federal tax credits. Then the Interior Department issued a new “project density” policy requiring wind and solar energy projects on federal land to match the energy output per acre of fossil fuels, disqualifying many renewable projects from receiving permits. In June, Trump signed an executive order directing the Treasury to severely restrict the eligibility of wind and solar projects to qualify for tax credits. According to Bloomberg NEF, the removal of federal subsidies means that over the next five years new wind energy will be 50% lower and new solar energy 23% lower than previously projected.

The attack on Greentech energy mobilized departments across the government and obscure opportunities for bureaucratic obstruction. On August 7, the New York Times reported,

“The Trump administration has sharply escalated its attacks on wind and solar power in recent days, issuing a barrage of policies that could halt the construction of renewable energy projects on public and private lands across the country. The Interior Department is now requiring dozens of formerly routine consultations and approvals for wind and solar projects to undergo new layers of political review by the interior secretary’s office, a policy that is causing significant permitting delays. The agency is also opening investigations into bird deaths caused by wind farms and withdrawing millions of acres of federal waters previously available for leasing by offshore wind companies.

At the same time, the Transportation Department is recommending minimum setback requirements for wind farms near federal highways and railroads, requiring them to be placed 1.2 miles away. And it ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to re-evaluate whether wind farms pose a danger to aviation, a potentially momentous step since nearly every wind farm in the country requires height clearance approvals from the agency. Taken together, the policies amount to a far-reaching crackdown on wind and solar power.”

Bureaucratic obstruction has become ubiquitous for solar projects. Late in 2025, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) revealed that more than 500 solar projects in the pipeline across the country are in danger of delays or cancellation “as a result of political attacks.” One planned solar facility on private land in the Upper Midwest is currently delayed because federal agencies have halted all discussions over a needed water permit. Another large solar farm on private land in the West is being held up because it must now undergo three layers of political review.

Trump says ‘We don’t allow windmills’ after cancelling nearly complete offshore wind project. Video: PBS News

Donald Trump’s well-known personal antagonism to wind power goes back to the time he unsuccessfully tried to stop an offshore wind farm from being built in view of one of his Scottish golf courses. On a recent trip to Scotland, he called wind turbines “ugly monsters” that “destroy the beauty of your fields, your plains and your waterways.” On inauguration day, he issued a sweeping executive order halting all leasing for new wind farms on federal lands and waters. On July 30, the Interior Department revoked over 3.5 million acres of federal waters previously designated for offshore wind development, effectively eliminating federal offshore wind leasing. Then the Trump administration ordered a halt to Revolution Wind, a nearly-completed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island.

But that was just a love tap. Just before Christmas, the Trump administration announced that it would “pause” leases for five East Coast wind farms, “essentially gutting the country’s nascent offshore wind industry.” Together the projects were expected to power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses across the Eastern United States. The reason given was national security concerns, but those concerns were never stated. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement that “the prime duty of the United States government is to protect the American people.” He said the decision “addresses emerging national security risks” as well as “vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our East Coast population centers.” Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman described Trump’s wind policy as “an effort to shut down 10 percent of U.S. electricity production — even as electricity prices are soaring.”

The overall objective of the Trump administration is clear – to reverse the Greentech revolution. As the New York Times summed up with considerable understatement, “Instead of simply lifting restrictions on fossil-fuel development and removing subsidies for renewable energy, the Trump administration is creating new roadblocks for wind and solar projects.”

Smashing Greentech energy consumption

CATL batteries power many electric vehicles in China and internationally. Photo Credit: Matti Blume, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Trump’s attack on Greentech does not just aim to dismantle fossil free energy; it also aims to undermine the innovations that are making energy consumption greener and more efficient.

The rapid development of energy storage technology has been central to the Greentech revolution. Trump has taken direct aim at the attempt to develop a domestic battery industry in the US.

In 2024, China made 99 percent of the world’s lithium phosphate cells, the kind most often used for energy storage. It also made more than 90 percent of the main battery components like cathodes and anodes and dominated the refining of raw materials like lithium and graphite. Batteries are essential not only for Greentech, but also to provide electricity for AI and to manufacture drones and other weapons of modern warfare.

Soon after coming into office, President Trump froze billions of dollars in Biden-era federal grants for battery manufacturing. His animus to anything he associated with Greentech was such that he lumped batteries in with electric vehicles, solar farms, wind turbines, and other clean energy technologies, notwithstanding their critical role in both military and industrial production. He boasted that by ending the “Green New Scam” his budget cancelled over $15 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act “Green New Deal” funds. That included ending “taxpayer handouts to electric vehicle and battery makers” and canceling $6 billion in Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds for “wasteful and ineffective EV charger programs.” So much for an energy policy purported to increase America’s power!

The attack on Greentech also includes blocking transmission lines for renewable energy. For example, the Department of Energy had granted a conditional loan guarantee for an $11 billion transmission line in the Midwest, known as the Grain Belt Express, which would transport electricity generated by wind farms in Kansas to more densely populated regions in Indiana and Illinois. It would have been the largest privately funded transmission line in the country’s history. In July, the DOE cancelled the loan guarantee, halting the project just as it was ready to begin construction.

A particular objective of the war on Greentech consumption is the multifaceted destruction of the electric vehicle industry. Less than a month after Trump’s inauguration, a Transportation Department memo ordered the suspension of $5 billion in federal funding, authorized by Congress under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, for states to build electric vehicle chargers. The budget proposed by congressional Republicans eliminated tax credits of up to $7,500 for electric vehicle buyers, clawed back money for fast chargers, and phased out subsidies for companies that set up battery factories and lithium mines. According to the New York Times, “Killing those programs would endanger more than $200 billion that auto companies, battery makers, mining companies and others have invested to create a U.S. electric vehicle supply chain not dependent on China.” In December, Trump reduced the average gas milage automakers are required to achieve by 3031from 50 miles per gallon to 35 miles per gallon and thereby, as the New York Times wrote, “threw the weight of the federal government behind vehicles that burn gasoline rather than electric cars.”

The attack on Greentech went into many corners of energy production and consumption. For example, agrivoltaics, which combine energy production with agriculture, is an emerging form of Greentech. the US Department of Agriculture issued a report calling for disincentivizing solar development on farms. It then announced that it will stop funding wind and solar energy on farmland.

The Trump administration has particularly targeted Green New Deal-style programs that combine Greentech and social justice goals. For example, in its first month in office, Trump’s EPA halted $7 billion in contractually obligated grants for Solar For All, an Inflation Reduction Act program that delivered clean energy and lower prices to vulnerable communities. Arizona attorney general Kris Mayes, who sued to block cancellation of the program, said it would affect 900,000 low-income households nationwide; 11,000 low-income households in Arizona would face a 20% spike in energy bills. And in June the Department of Agriculture announced the termination of $148.6 million in federal grants related to environmental justice and DEI, including funds for disadvantaged farmers using conservation practices.

Trump has not limited his anti-Greentech counterrevolution to the domestic economy; he has also taken it global. Early in the administration Energy Secretary Wright told an international conference that net zero carbon emissions was a “sinister goal” and criticized a British law to reach net zero by 2050. In his first month as president, Trump ordered tariffs against trading partners, “with severe implications for the supply chains for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles.” Then Trump used tariff threats to demand that US exports be exempt from the EU law requiring that importers report on the carbon footprint of their factories overseas and pay a fine for each unit of carbon emitted before the product gets to the EU. The Trump administration demanded that the EU exempt US companies from a law that requires them to monitor and report methane emissions and to repair methane leaks in their facilities. More recently, the US has demanded that the EU cut back or repeal its new “corporate sustainability due diligence directive” which provides substantial fines for companies exporting gas to the EU unless they show they protect human rights and are cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The damn fool says “push on”

Gas prices in Sonoma, California April 7 2026. Photo credit: Sarah Stierch, Flickr, CC0 1.0.

Even as Trump’s war on Iran initiated the most severe energy crisis in world history, he continued his war on fossil free energy well into 2026. Consider these examples from April alone:

• Trump released his 2027 budget request proposing tens of billions of dollars in cuts to energy and environmental programs, including everything from electric vehicle chargers to prosecution of environmental crimes. At the same time, he proposed increased funding for oil and gas production, mining, manufacturing, and AI development. A White House fact sheet titled “Ending the New Green Scam” said, “President Trump is committed to eliminating funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production.”
• When several federal judges overruled Trump’s blockage of offshore wind farms, Trump did the almost unimaginable and paid roughly $1.8 billion to companies to abandon leases for four offshore wind farms in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
• The US “Department of War” began blocking more than 150 onshore wind farms across the United States by delaying military reviews that were once considered routine. According to Jason Grumet, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, “The Department of War is currently making it almost impossible to build a new wind project in the United States.” Trump had stated in January that “My goal is to not let any windmill be built.”
• And Donald Trump released a series of memos that doubled down on his support of increased domestic fossil fuel production for purported “defense readiness.” The memos said US-based oil, coal, and natural gas production must expand “to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability.” Invoking the Defense Production Act, the memos authorized “making necessary purchases, commitments, and financial instruments to enable these projects.”

The Greentech revolution can provide enormous benefits to the American people. The US system of fossil fuel energy production and consumption is, conversely, a dead man walking. Trump, MAGA, and the fossil fuel industry are making extraordinary efforts to keep fossil fuels alive by destroying all Greentech alternatives. But, as we will see in subsequent commentaries in this series, this fossil fuel counter-revolution is bound to fail.

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The post Trump’s Anti-Greentech Counter-Revolution first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

A stabbing is an intimate kind of violence. It is physical and deliberate, requiring proximity and often, the touch of skin against skin. So, when University of Washington student Juniper Blessing, a young transgender woman, was stabbed 40 times and left in an apartment complex laundry room to die, there is no doubt her killer, motivated by the toxic mixture of hatred and shame, felt life slip from her precious body.

Intimate violence cannot be separated from the violence mediated through the state. This is not a mechanical process, however, and state policy does not directly produce interpersonal harm. Still, the terms set by the state, the violence it permits and condones, define the boundaries of what becomes possible. One flows from the other.

Juniper was murdered just days before the Trump administration issued sweeping grand jury subpoenas to hospitals across the U.S., including NYU Langone, for providing what it calls “sex-rejecting” procedures. As S. Baum has reported, these subpoenas are unprecedented in scope. They demand patient-identifying information, parental consent forms, employee records, and target doctors, nurses, billing staff, administrators, and even volunteers in an effort to intimidate and criminalize the provision of care.

Juniper was not a trans minor. At nineteen (that arbitrary marker), she had survived childhood by a single year, achieving what the state increasingly seeks to prevent. For that defiant act of claiming trans personhood, her life was taken.

She had survived childhood by a single year… For that defiant act of claiming trans personhood, her life was taken.

There is no end to state violence; there is no limit to what the state will do to preserve corporate profits, stabilize the position of those in power, and, at present, shore up its authoritarian rule. One of its most enduring expressions of that effort is the systematic withdrawal from collective care.

Even before the Trump administration took power, the U.S. health care system was already in crisis and failing to meet basic needs. Decades of neoliberal policy have hollowed out public health infrastructure, privatized care, and priced many out of access to care altogether. This is a system that sorts people into categories of the deserving and the disposable. Producing a hierarchical matrix based on race, immigration status, religion, gender, and sexuality, it tells us that some bodies are worthy of care and others are not. Transness is now central to this ideological taxonomy.

This is a system that sorts people into categories of the deserving and the disposable… Transness is now central to this ideological taxonomy.

MAGA pundits recognize the widespread anger and dissatisfaction with the health care system, but they have redirected that ire away from insurance executives and hospital administrators, obscuring the steady erosion of health care as a public good. This displaced blame requires a scapegoat, and so a fraudulent narrative about a supposed transgender industrial complex where reckless health professionals manipulate children into receiving gender-affirming care emerges as the Right’s justification for systemic neglect.

This right-wing narrative is strategic and false. Gender-affirming care represents a tiny fraction of health care spending, and for many trans people, access to that care requires enormous sacrifice. Even after navigating a bureaucratic labyrinth of insurance, those who pursue medical transition are often saddled with untenable debt. Nevertheless, the narrative is mobilized to divert public anger away from state abandonment, the systemic withdrawal of resources for public goods, and toward a manufactured enemy.

Because the health sector has been a consistent site of resistance to neoliberal austerity, anti-trans attacks are also about disciplining health workers. Major work stoppages have occurred across the industry, including a 301-day strike at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, MA (2021), a Minnesota Nurses Association strike involving 15,000 workers (2022), a 75,000-member Kaiser Permanente strike across six states (2023), and a New York State Nurses Association strike involving 15,000 workers (2026). In fact, more than 100 nursing strikes have occurred between 2020 and 2026, involving at least 127 hospitals nationwide. Issuing subpoenas, passing legislation, and wielding threats of prosecution, the state seeks to break the relationship between patients and caregivers and to prevent broader demands for a more just and universal health system.

It is here that the entanglement of state violence and intimate violence is revealed. A state that declares trans youth should not exist, a state that undermines their care, and criminalizes their parents and providers, sets the terms for which lives are considered deserving and which become disposable. In a process that marks trans life as illegitimate, state disavowal grants permission, giving a wink and a nod to the Right’s vigilante terror.

As details about Juniper’s killer emerge, we may find that he does not neatly fit within the category of the Right. But even so, the residue of the Right’s vicious anti-gender politics continues to circulate, influencing the thinking of those even beyond the MAGA faithful. In fact, early reports suggest Juniper’s killer was stalking several women, both cis and trans, which also illustrates the way transmisogyny extends beyond trans women endangering cisgender women as well.

The same logic that seeks to prevent trans children from becoming trans adults leaves those adults vulnerable to unspeakable violence.

While we cannot claim that MAGA’s anti-gender movement murdered Juniper in a direct or immediate way, the regulation of trans youth, the effort to prevent transition, to surveil families, to criminalize care, also produces a world in which trans adulthood becomes precarious and exposed. The same logic that seeks to prevent trans children from becoming trans adults leaves those adults vulnerable to unspeakable violence.

If we want to confront this violence, we cannot see gender politics as separate from the wider resistance to Trumpism and the authoritarian Right. The same system that withdraws support, that redirects tax dollars from care infrastructures and towards militarization and war, creates the conditions for gendered violence. Indeed, the contemporary anti-trans turn is in many ways a reactionary political response to neoliberal crisis, mobilizing gender discipline to stabilize social reproduction, redirect economic grievance, and legitimate continued disinvestment in collective care. In this moment, gender violence functions as a coercive tool where a withered social safety net has driven a return to rigid gender norms. When the state abdicates responsibility, the family must fulfill the remaining need.

As news of Juniper’s death continues to move across the media landscape, they will simultaneously be portrayed as villain and victim, as an object of pity and a figure of blame. These are abstractions. In reality, trans individuals are ordinary people navigating a brutal and precarious moment, often with an extraordinary level of poise and restraint. Comrades, we need you. Juniper needs you.

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.”

The post Violence enabled by the state appeared first on Tempest.

• From 1983 to 2022, the number of 18-year-olds with a driver’s license fell from 80 percent to 60 percent. Uber sees this as an opportunity to make ride-hailing (Fortune) and eventually autonomous vehicles (CNN) the standard mode of transportation. Shouldn’t it also an opportunity to get these kids who don’t want to drive acclimated to walking, biking and transit?
• It’s no wonder young people aren’t all that interested in driving, considering that the average car payment is now over $600, not to mention gas, maintenance and insurance. A new car is a luxury item, and a used one will eventually cost you plenty in the repair shop. (Jalopnik)
• The House transportation bill drastically cuts funding for transit and Amtrak, but hey, at least it includes a historic amount for bridges! (Smart Cities Dive)
• Henry Grabar writes more about why suspending the gas tax is a bad idea, any way you look at it. (The Atlantic; paywall)
• The CEO of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority has resigned. Lona Edwards Hankin’s three-year tenure saw a significant uptick in bus ridership, but she faced several controversies as well. (Times-Picayune)
• Despite their efficiency, Denver is abandoning future center-lane bus rapid transit lines due to business complaints. (Denverite)
• $50 million and 25 years after its inception, Greensboro, North Carolina’s downtown greenway opened (The Thread). A couple hundred miles away, on the coast, Wilmington is installing more speed humps to calm traffic (Star News).
• Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson took a bike ride last weekend, joined by hundreds of supporters and a few dozen Nazi protesters, including one with a sign that read, in a play on an antisemitic slogan, “Bikes will not replace us.” (Seattle Bike Blog)
• Seattle protesters turned out ahead of a key Sound Transit vote today on potential cuts to long-range plans for light rail. (KOMO)
• If you listen to Reddit, drivers are getting more abusive toward cyclists because they don’t see them as human beings. (Momentum)
• Dublin officials thought bike-sharing would a flop, but is now looking to replace a private operator with a publicly owned system that would triple the number of bikes. (Irish Cycle)
• The frustration of fighting for safer bike facilities in Australia will be familiar to many readers in the U.S. (Australian Broadcasting Corp.)

Washington, D.C. is preparing to make the same mistake too many American cities keep making: building a billion-dollar destination without building the transportation system to match it.

The proposed redevelopment of the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium site — the once and potentially future home of the Washington Commanders football team — is being sold as “transit-first.” And that phrase sounds ambitious — until you look at the numbers.

The plan anticipates that roughly 40,000 people — the overwhelming majority of attendees — will arrive by Metro, bus, walking, biking, or other non-car options. Only about 25,000 are expected to arrive by automobile, despite thousands of planned parking spaces.

In other words, the project depends on transit to function.

So why isn’t the city building a new Metro station?

Recommended Opinion: Adding Parking to Sports Stadiums Makes It Harder for Everyone To Get Around Streetsblog March 23, 2026

Instead, Washington is preparing to funnel tens of thousands of people through the existing Stadium—Armory station and supplement the gap with expanded bus service. That may satisfy transportation modeling spreadsheets. But anyone who has stood shoulder-to-shoulder on an overcrowded platform after a concert, playoff game, or public event already knows what those models often miss: transit systems break down long before they technically fail.

They break down when stations become bottlenecks.

They break down when crowds overwhelm sidewalks, fare gates, escalators, and platforms.

They break down when moving people safely becomes secondary to simply moving them eventually.

And they break down when cities mistake “having transit nearby” for actually designing around transit.

That distinction matters.

Recommended This Chicago Stadium Could Go From a Sea of Sprawling Parking Lots to a Bustling, Walkable Pedestrian District AJ LaTrace January 15, 2025

The RFK redevelopment is not a suburban football stadium surrounded by parking lots. It is being positioned as a dense entertainment and mixed-use district capable of hosting NFL games, concerts, festivals, international events, and potentially World Cup-related activities. This is the kind of project cities spend generations talking about and decades financing.

Yet the transit conversation surrounding it feels stuck in the 1990s.

Globally, cities that build major stadium districts understand a basic truth: transportation is not an accessory to development. It is the development.

Look at London. Paris. Tokyo. Even newer international stadium districts in less transit-rich countries are designed around layered mobility systems, with multiple rail access points and distributed pedestrian circulation. These elements work together with bus integration, dedicated bike infrastructure, and redundancy to prevent one station or corridor from collapsing under pressure.

American cities, by contrast, too often approach mobility like an afterthought. We build first, celebrate renderings second, and only later realize we forgot to ask how 60,000 people are supposed to leave at the same time.

Then comes the predictable cycle. Overcrowded stations. Overwhelmed transit staff. Traffic spillover into neighborhoods. Emergency access concerns. And millions — sometimes billions — spent retrofitting infrastructure that should have been included from the start.

Recommended Can ‘Transit-Oriented Entertainment’ Help End the National Ridership Decline? Terenig Topjian October 1, 2024

The most frustrating part is that Washington already knows what successful high-volume transit design looks like.

Stations like Gallery Place and the Farragut corridor work because they distribute people. Riders can enter and exit from multiple points. Crowds disperse across blocks instead of collapsing into a single choke point. Pressure is absorbed by the system instead of concentrated into one vulnerable node.

That is not just convenience. It is safety infrastructure.

A single overloaded station serving a massive stadium district creates risks that extend far beyond game day inconvenience. That might look like dangerous crowd surges, delayed emergency response, or simple platform overcrowding. It could even result in accessibility failures and ripple effects across the broader transit network.

And those burdens will not fall equally.

Residents east of the Anacostia River — many of whom already rely heavily on public transportation and endure longer commute times — will inherit the operational strain of a project largely marketed toward visitors, tourists, and regional entertainment consumers.

That is why this debate matters beyond football.

Recommended Opinion: Make This Summer’s World Cup A Car-Free Paradise Norman Brown March 12, 2026

The RFK site is ultimately a test of whether American cities are serious about building transit-oriented futures — or whether “transit-first” has simply become another branding phrase used to justify mega-projects without making the hard infrastructure investments required to support them. Because a project cannot claim to be transit-first while treating transit capacity as optional.

If tens of thousands of people are expected to rely on Metro to make the project viable, then Metro infrastructure should expand alongside the project itself — not years later after overcrowding, delays, and public frustration become politically impossible to ignore.

And this is bigger than Washington.

Cities across America are racing to build stadium districts, innovation hubs, entertainment corridors, and waterfront megaprojects. But too many are still planning transportation the way previous generations planned highways: as something engineered around cars first and people second.

The result is infrastructure that looks impressive in renderings but feels dysfunctional in real life.

The RFK redevelopment offers Washington a rare opportunity to do something different:
2to treat mobility as core civic infrastructure, to prioritize long-term public movement over short-term construction savings, and to build a stadium district designed not just to attract crowds — but to handle them.

Because great cities are not judged only by what they build. They are judged by whether people can actually move through them.

RFK JR Lies Us Americans Die.

SFMTA has received $600 million over the past ten years from the state’s cap-and-trade program—now rebranded “cap-and-invest”. “These funds have gone to crucial efforts like replacing our light rail vehicles and improving transit service through our Muni Forward program (the 38 Rapid Geary bus is an example),” explained SFMTA’s Michael Roccaforte.

That’s part of why some 100 transit, clean air, and affordable housing advocates held a rally at San Francisco’s Civic Center Wednesday afternoon to demand that Governor Newsom quash an effort by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to allocate as much as $4 billion in new free emission permits to Chevron and other corporate greenhouse gas emitters. This would cut funds to Muni and other transit operators, plus defund several affordable housing programs.

Seamless Bay Area’s Adina Levin (in yellow) with other advocates at the rally. Photo: Streetsblog/Rudick

“It’s terrible that we have to be here today,” said the Transbay Coalition’s Carter Lavin, who helped organize the rally. “CARB said: ‘You know who really needs help right now? Chevron and big polluters,” he told the crowd. “The state should be doubling down on affordable housing and transit.”

“CARB is proposing something that supports our biggest polluters at the expense of public transit riders,” said the San Francisco Transit Riders Dylan Fabris, who also addressed the crowd. “I don’t love having to come here every year to tell the governor to stop divesting in public transit.”

Advocate George Spies calling Governor Newsom’s office. Photo: Streetsblog/Rudick

The argument for the free pollution credits: to reduce the price of gasoline. But, of course, the way to reduce demand for gasoline is to give people alternatives, such as quality public transit.

Advocates expressed frustration that this is coming on the heels of the announcement that they had massively exceeded signature gathering requirements to qualify a regional funding measure for transit. It’s as if the state saw that as an opportunity to grab transit funds and divert it to gas and oil interests.

After a few speeches, the crowd walked from Civic Center Plaza to the steps of the state office building. There, they took out their cell phones and called Governor Newsom’s office and demanded he intervene to stop the proposal, which will be discussed at CARB’s regular board meeting on Thursday and Friday.

Affordable housing advocate Sally Greenspan at the rally. Photo: Streetsblog/Rudick

Some callers reported that they “couldn’t get through,” suggesting they had overwhelmed the governor’s phone exchange. Organizers recommended they call again later from their homes and offices. Not long afterwards, officers with the California Highway Patrol, tasked with guarding the state office building, informed the demonstrators that their San Francisco demonstration permit did not apply to the state building’s stairs. The group moved back to the civic center, which is San Francisco territory, apparently.

El Cerrito city council member and Bike East Bay Co-Executive Director Rebecca Saltzman calling the governor’s office during the rally. She managed to get through. Photo: Streetsblog/Rudick

“Without Cap-and-Invest funding for these vital programs, California will not hit our climate goals, we will not build the affordable housing we need, and our transit systems will languish,” said Zack Deutsch-Gross, Executive Director at Transform. “CARB’s decision to push through this last-minute change is not only a major setback for climate and affordability, but undermines the agreement made by the Governor and Legislature to reauthorize Cap and Invest last year.”

“The Governor’s Air Resources Board is about to allow California’s refineries to ramp up emissions and pollution in working-class communities. Forget ‘cap’ or ‘invest’–CARB is forgoing both as they zero out investments in our people. We know what this rule change represents: a massive giveaway to the oil industry, rushed in at the last minute,” said Megan Zapanta with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network.

The rally was organized by the Transbay Coalition, Seamless Bay Area, TransForm, San Francisco Transit Riders, and several other aligned groups.

If you don’t think CARB should be cutting breaks for Chevron and other polluters on the backs of transit riders, send an email and/or call into the hearing.

We’ve all faced union-busting employers before. But what if your boss is the federal government and the head union buster is the president of the United States? That’s the situation that National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United’s Veterans Health Administration nurses are battling now.

Nurses understand that priorities can be the difference between life or death. When a hospital CEO values corporate profits over investing in safe staffing, medication errors or missed interventions can lead to increased patient mortality. When the federal government prioritizes military spending — lining the pockets of corporate war profiteers — instead of funding Medicaid, Medicare, and other public health programs, patients die. Nurses can also see their units shut down or their facilities close entirely.

Sharing information and educating nurses is essential to an effective PPC, an elected staff RN-controlled committee representing each major nursing unit in the facility. The PPC usually meets monthly on paid time and is a key part of contract negotiations. The PPC has the authority to document unsafe practices and the power to meet with management and make real changes across the facility.

National Nurses United nurses rallied in Washington, D.C. on April 13 to demand that Congress abolish ICE by immediately voting to cut off funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to rescind the hundreds of billions in funding it received through the Republican budget bill H.R. 1 last year.

Munson Medical Center registered nurses in Traverse City held a standing-room-only community town hall in March to shine a light on their concerns about working conditions and the need for a fair contract. About 150 people attended to hear updates from the nurses, share their own concerns and experiences with patient care, and get involved in the nurses’ efforts.

Our community should know that we are in this contract fight with their care in mind. We want to be able to provide the best experience. We value our patients, and we want our employer to value us so we can continue to provide the care patients expect.

Registered nurses at three Prime Healthcare facilities held strikes during the same week in February. The RNs and health care workers urged management to invest in nursing and health care staff and agree to a contract that provides safe staffing and a commitment to practices that recruit and retain workers.

On Feb. 26, the last striking New York City nurses walked back into the hospital for the first time in 41 days. The largest and longest nurse strike in New York City history officially ended with hugs, tears, cheers, and reunions.

The post CA oil permits skyrocket in 2026’s first quarter; majority are for Chevron wells appeared first on Last Chance Alliance.

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters

In brief:

• Scientists expect dramatic swings between active and inactive hurricane seasons in the future.
• The risk of back-to-back hurricanes is growing. 
• Hurricanes are expected to get more damaging and deadly. 

Wild year-to-year swings — from punishing hyperactive seasons to quiet years with little activity — could well become the norm for future Atlantic hurricane seasons, according to recent climate change research. 

The latest science paints a complex but alarming future, as the unprecedented amount of heat that humans are supplying to the climate system disrupts the fundamental atmospheric circulation pattern in which we designed our civilization. 

During the coming busy seasons, death and destruction from unprecedented hurricane catastrophes will probably grow much more commonplace, because even as risks grow, people have continued to build in risky flood-prone regions. But eventually, the coming hurricane catastrophes will pose an increasing threat to the viability of living in many coastal areas, particularly in the Caribbean.

Hurricane seasons will likely grow more erratic

The year-to-year variability of Atlantic basin hurricane activity already is the largest of any of the globe’s tropical cyclone basins. And climate change will make extreme swings between active and inactive hurricane seasons the norm, according to a 2024 paper, Projected increase in the frequency of extremely active Atlantic hurricane seasons. 

The high-resolution climate models used in the study projected a 36% increase by 2050 in the variance of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity. The main causes: an increase in the variability of wind shear (strong upper-level winds that tend to tear a storm apart), and major swings in how stable the atmosphere is in the tropical Atlantic. One good thing is that the study found that the increased activity during hyperactive seasons would be focused farther from land over the eastern and central Atlantic, with less activity over the Caribbean.

A 2022 study, Extreme Atlantic hurricane seasons made twice as likely by ocean warming, found that ocean warming from 1982 to 2020 doubled the probability of extremely active hurricane seasons over that time period. However, the authors did not clearly separate out how much of that change resulted from increased heat-trapping greenhouse gases and how much was caused by a reduction in planet-cooling air pollution particles called aerosols. These particles are not likely to change much in the future, while greenhouse gases will be increasing, so it is important to know their relative impacts on ocean warming.

More double whammies: back-to-back hurricane threats are increasing

The worst sequential hurricane disaster on record for the Atlantic occurred in 2020 in Nicaragua and Honduras. 

Hurricane Eta made landfall in northern Nicaragua on Nov. 3, 2020, as a Category 4 storm. Moving slowly at landfall, Eta lingered for three days over Central America and the adjacent waters, dropping catastrophic amounts of rain. 

Just two weeks later, Hurricane Iota made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Nicaragua only 15 miles from where Eta hit. Iota brought torrential rains that inundated flooded regions still struggling to recover from Eta, with the combined tolls from the two storms exceeding 300 people dead or missing. 

There was no precedent in the Atlantic for two such powerful hurricanes to make landfall so close together in space and time. The combined impact of the two hurricanes on Nicaragua was estimated at $738 million – about 6% of that nation’s GDP. 

But the twin Category 4 hurricanes left behind an even more extreme catastrophe in Honduras. The U.N. estimated that total damages from Hurricane Eta and Hurricane Iota in Honduras exceeded $2 billion – 8% of the poverty-stricken nation’s GDP.

In the future, an increase in hyperactive hurricane seasons will boost the threat of two hurricanes striking the same place within a few weeks of each other. Overlapping disasters could threaten the Gulf of Mexico region with a cycle of “perpetual disaster recovery” — making communities vulnerable to worse outcomes with every subsequent event, researchers at the National Academies wrote in a 2024 report.

A 2022 paper, Increasing sequential tropical cyclone hazards along the US East and Gulf coasts, found that in the current climate, two named storms hitting the same location within 15 days along the U.S. East and Gulf coasts and bringing significant hazards (strong winds, heavy rainfall and storm surges) could be expected to occur once every 10 to 92 years. But under a moderate emissions scenario, this return period could be expected to shrink to just one to three years because of sea-level rise and a change in storm climatology. The odds of a Katrina-like hurricane and a Harvey-like hurricane impacting the U.S. within 15 days of each other — which was non-existent in the historical period they simulated — was projected to have a one-in-650-year return period (or a 5% chance over 30 years) by the end of the century.

A massive 633% increase in hurricane damages to come?

It is widely acknowledged that higher weather disaster losses result primarily from an increase in exposure: more people with more stuff moving into vulnerable places, including those at risk of floods. 

Martin Bertogg, Swiss Re’s head of catastrophic peril, said in a 2022 AP interview that two-thirds, perhaps more, of the recent rise in weather-related disaster losses — including from hurricanes — is the result of more people and things in harm’s way. 

But this balance will likely shift in the coming decades. For example, a 2025 study led by Avantika Gori of Rice University, Sensitivity of tropical cyclone risk across the US to changes in storm climatology and socioeconomic growth, looked at how damages from wind, rainfall, and storm surge would change under a moderate global warming scenario. The study found that the fraction of increased hurricane damages because of climate change would grow by the end of the century to be roughly equal to the increased damages from higher exposure (assuming a 2% annual growth in GDP). The combined increased costs for hurricane damage for the future (2070-2100) period compared to the historical (1980-2005) period would be truly extraordinary, if no additional adaptation measures are taken: a 633% increase, the paper said.

Gori’s prediction is by no means a worst-case outcome, because the study assumed a moderate global warming scenario. Even in a best-case scenario — which I’ll explore in a future post — development is going to continue in flood-prone places. And there are at least four ways that hurricane scientists are very confident that climate change will make hurricanes worse:

• The strongest hurricanes will get stronger.
• Hurricanes will rapidly intensify more quickly and more often.
• Hurricanes will dump more rain.
• Storm surge damage will rise because of rising sea levels.

Highest U.S. hurricane total death tolls (direct plus indirect deaths) since the National Hurricane Center began tracking indirect deaths in 1963.
Expect hurricanes to get more deadly

Accompanying the shocking increases in hurricane damages in our future will likely be sharply increased risks of high death tolls. Stronger, wetter, slower-moving storms will dump more rain, causing increased flood risk. Higher sea levels and stronger hurricanes will bring more dangerous storm surges and compound flood events. Post-storm power outages will coincide with heat waves more frequently, increasing heat mortality. More hurricanes will rapidly intensify just before landfall, leaving vulnerable populations unprepared, further increasing mortality risk.

Read: ‘Deadliest in generations’: The Texas floods are the latest in a disturbing pattern

Fortunately, steadily improving hurricane forecasts over the past 20 years have significantly lowered the risk of death, and the recent emergence of AI forecast models has been an exciting step forward. In some places, improved building codes have also reduced the hurricane damage and presumably, mortality risk. Nevertheless, it is concerning that the U.S. has suffered five hurricanes since 2005 that were deadlier than any hurricane since 1972.

A staggering indirect death toll from hurricanes: as high as 5% of the U.S. population?

In a stunning paper released in 2024, Mortality caused by tropical cyclones in the United States, Rachel Young and Solomon Tsiang found that the average U.S. hurricane that made landfall between 1930 and 2015 caused 24 direct deaths. 

However, they observed an increase in excess deaths – mortality beyond what would otherwise be expected in that period – that lingered for 15 years, totaling 7,000-11,000 excess deaths per storm. This burden is 300-480 times greater than government estimates of direct deaths and was equivalent to an astounding 3.2-5.1% of all deaths across the contiguous United States.

The largest single category of deaths was from cardiovascular disease (36%), while 12% of the deaths were from cancer, “consistent with some evidence of stress from extreme weather affecting long-run health,” the authors wrote. Between 1950 and 1995, monthly excess tropical cyclone deaths ranged from 4,500 to 6,000, then rose to about 7,500 per month by 2003. In 2004, an onslaught of landfalling hurricanes brought a sharp rise in the death rate, which peaked at approximately 13,000 per month in 2013.

Read: The hidden health toll of hurricanes

a). Total incidence of tropical cyclone excess mortality in the contiguous U.S by month. Bar height is sum of average maximum wind speeds for all state-by-storm events. Colors correspond to decades. b) Stacked overlapping excess mortality responses to each storm for all of the contiguous U.S. Outline colors correspond to the decade when the storm occurred. The upper envelope is the total estimated mortality burden resulting from all tropical cyclones occurring during the prior 172 months (14.3 years). c) Official direct tropical cyclone deaths by month according to NOAA. The y-axis scale is the same for b and c. (image credit: Young, R., Hsiang, S. Mortality caused by tropical cyclones in the United States. Nature 635, 121–128 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07945-5, open access)

Young and Tsiang hypothesized five ways that hurricanes may have triggered excess mortality:

1. Economic disruption might change household economic decisions, eventually translating into worsened health outcomes. For example, a person who loses a job might lose health insurance, too. Or retirement savings could be drawn down to repair property damage, both of which could reduce future spending on health care.
2. Social network changes could affect future health. For example, working-age people might move away, changing the social support for older people who remain behind.
3. Fiscal adjustments by state or local governments in response to the disaster may impact future health outcomes. For example, restructuring budgets to support recovery might reduce spending on healthcare infrastructure.
4. Heightened physical and mental stress may alter health in the long term.
5. Changes in the natural environment could harm health — for example, ecological changes could redistribute disease vectors, or flooding may expose populations to harmful chemicals.

Many of these factors can be expected to grow worse in the future, resulting in higher hurricane excess mortality.