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The Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice stands in solidarity with the people of Nepal and Tibet as they confront one of the most devastating disasters to hit the Himalayan region in recent years. We mourn those who have been killed and stand in grief with the communities that have lost their family and loved ones, their homes, their lives and livelihood and we stand with the workers engaged in the treacherous relief and rescue efforts as they confront the unimaginable scale of the disaster. Nearly 1000 people have been reported killed so far and thousands remain missing after an enormous collapse of ice and rock in high Himalayas triggered a cascading event in the Lhende Khola, sending a sudden surge of water, rock and sediment into the Bhote Koshi-Trishuli river system causing devastative floods in the border region. The formation of new lakes behind the ice and rock debris continue to pose a risk of more destructive floods while rescue operations still continue in the region.

The scale of this tragedy demands more than our sympathy, mourning or condolences. It demands that governments confront the conditions that are making communities across the Himalayas, and on the frontlines of climate impacts everywhere, increasingly unsafe. While the people of Nepal and Tibet grapple with this devastation, the broader climate context and global failure to address it form a clear path that has led to this disaster. Rising temperatures are rapidly transforming the Himalayan cryosphere, accelerating glacier loss and destabilising high-mountain environments. 

The Hindu Kush Himalaya contains more than 63,000 glaciers and feeds ten major river systems on which huge populations across South Asia depend. These mountain’s glaciers had disappeared 65% faster between 2011 and 2020 than in the previous decade. As glaciers retreat and permafrost thaws, slopes become less stable, glacial lakes expand and communities face growing risks from floods, landslides, avalanches, and cascading disasters. This is also not an isolated Himalayan emergency. Communities across the region have repeatedly faced catastrophic floods, landslides and glacial lake outburst floods, from Sikkim in India in 2023, Thame in Nepal in 2024, to the Tibet-Nepal border in 2025.

What is striking is that Nepal has contributed almost nothing to the crisis that is transforming its mountains. It is responsible for only 0.1% global greenhouse gas emissions yet finds itself on the frontlines of climate impacts. It is forced to self-finance the monitoring of glaciers and unstable slopes while building early-warning systems, but also the protection of settlements and infrastructure, responses to disasters, and rebuilding of what is destroyed by disasters that are increasingly becoming hard to predict. The World Bank has warned that unchecked climate impacts could make Nepal’s economy at least 7% smaller by 2050. Meanwhile a Green Climate Fund project intended to reduce the risks of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods in Nepal took 7 years to be approved. 

The fundamental injustice is that countries with very little responsibility for the climate crisis are being forced to spend their limited resources surviving it while the global climate finance policies continue to fail them. This is precisely why adaptation finance is a matter of survival, not a secondary component of climate policy. Developing countries will need nearly US$400 billion every year for adaptation by 2035 while the international public adaptation finance was only US$26 billion in 2023. That gap means countries such as Nepal are being told to become more resilient without being given adequate resources and support required to do it. On the other hand, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage has seen pittance in financial commitments so far. Developed countries must significantly increase public, grant-based finance, rather than loans, with direct and rapid access for affected countries and communities under their existing obligations. Where mitigation and adaptation have failed to prevent harm, loss and damage must be paid for at a scale that reflects actual needs of trillions. This is a historical debt and reparations owed to the Global South and not voluntary contributions disguised as aid or charity and must reach the communities at the frontline of the crisis instead of creating new markets for private investors or new debts for governments.

At the same time countries most responsible for this crisis must move first in stopping the expansion of the fossil-fuel economy. But in contrast the United States, already the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, is on track for another record year of natural gas production in 2026 while the US crude production and export reached a record early this year. Similarly in Western Europe, Norway, the largest petroleum producer and the largest supplier of gas to Europe, expanded the exploration area for oil and gas exploration in 2026. These are not economic decisions but political choices. Rich countries cannot describe disasters in Nepal as an unfortunate consequence of a changing climate while continuing to explicitly expand the industries driving that change.

Nepal cannot reduce the world’s emissions on behalf of the polluters. It cannot protect the Himalayas through adaptation alone while the world continues to burn more fossil fuels. And it should not have to take on more debt to protect its people from a crisis overwhelmingly created elsewhere. The immediate priority in Nepal and Tibet must be rescue, relief and recovery led by the needs of affected communities. But international solidarity cannot end with emergency assistance after people have died. We demand:

• Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage must immediately respond and deliver on Nepal’s request for urgent and direct funds to support its immediate response capacity 
• The Global North countries and other big polluters must cut their emissions far faster without false solutions and end continued fossil fuel expansion
• Global North must urgently provide much higher public and grant-based finance so Global South countries can adapt before disasters happen
• Global North countries must fund the Loss and Damage Fund at the scale of the losses communities are already experiencing without pushing loans and private finance as substitutes for their public finance obligations

We stand with the people of Nepal and Tibet in grief and solidarity and also with their right to justice. What happens next must not be another cycle of disaster, condolences and forgotten promises. There must be greater protection for communities now, far deeper emissions cuts by those most responsible, adequate finance for adaptation and loss and damage, and accountability for the governments and corporations that continue to fuel this crisis.

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The post DCJ solidarity statement on recent Nepal-Tibet Floods appeared first on Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice.

Wolf recovery is far from complete, but these three stories are worth celebrating.

August Community in the Gitigaan and Beyond August in the North: Harvest, Medicines, and Community August marks the beginning of the harvest season for many communities across northern Minnesota. While some of the early summer berries are beginning to wane, late-season fruits are coming on strong, with plums, apples, and other fruits beginning to ripen. […]

This article What the 1960s can teach us about cross-racial solidarity was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

There is a particular kind of political amnesia that can overtake movements in difficult times. We remember the victories but forget the arguments that preceded them. We remember the marches but forget the years of patient organizing that made them possible. We remember solidarity as a feeling rather than a political practice.

Alice Echols’ “Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic” is a useful antidote to that amnesia.

Echols tells the story of interracial and cross-racial organizing within the Black freedom movement through two organizations that bookend the decade: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and the Black Panther Party. The Panthers’ commitment to armed self-defense, and later debates over militancy and guerrilla warfare, form part of that history. Echols’ central concern — and the focus of this review — is the difficult work of solidarity: how movements build relationships across differences in race, power and political position.

This book arrives at an important moment. Across the United States and elsewhere, racism, xenophobia, and religious and white supremacist nationalism are again being mobilized to divide people who might otherwise have common interests. Authoritarian movements understand something the left sometimes forgets: people who can be persuaded to see one another as enemies are much easier to govern.

The question of how we build solidarity across difference is therefore an urgent question of power.

From Black Power to “Radical Chic”

The title captures the book’s historical arc.

Black Power meant, among other things, the assertion of Black autonomy, self-determination and political power.

White Heat comes from SNCC organizer Bob Moses’s metaphor for the transformative potential of white participation in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. Nearly 1,000 mostly white college students traveled to Mississippi that summer to support Black voter-registration efforts. Moses hoped their presence would expose white America to the reality of racial violence and help generate political transformation beyond Mississippi.

And then there was “Radical Chic,” Tom Wolfe’s infamous 1970 caricature of wealthy white liberals hosting a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Manhattan penthouse. Wolfe transformed cross-racial political solidarity into a punchline: wealthy liberals playing at revolution, fashionable people dabbling in radical causes. Echols argues that the essay became more than a satire of one awkward party: It helped create a durable political language for attacking solidarity itself.

What happened between those moments is the heart of the book. Echols resists a simple story of interracialism giving way to Black nationalism, or a morality tale in which one side was right and the other wrong. She describes experiments in solidarity that were sometimes extraordinarily productive, sometimes painful, and often both at once.

That complexity is precisely what makes this history useful now.

Solidarity is not sameness

The early SNCC experience illustrates both the promise and limitations of interracial organizing.

SNCC brought Black and white activists together in a shared struggle against segregation and disenfranchisement. But Freedom Summer also intensified questions about power inside the movement. What did it mean for white people to participate in a movement led by Black people? Could interracialism reproduce the racial hierarchy it was supposed to challenge?

Echols gives this contradiction a particularly revealing form. Some Black SNCC organizers noticed that local Black people who had repeatedly ignored their appeals to get involved would suddenly listen to newly arrived white male volunteers. In other cases, white volunteers arrived in Mississippi with assumptions about how things should be done, even taking over office work that Black staff had been doing. The conflicts revealed a deeper problem: The racial hierarchy SNCC was trying to dismantle could reappear inside an interracial movement.

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These questions shaped the organization’s strategy and eventually contributed to SNCC’s turn toward Black Power and the expulsion of white staff in 1966.

Echols’ history offers no simple verdict on interracial organizing. It shows how coalitions can generate real political power while reproducing some of the very inequalities they are trying to overcome. The people in her history wrestled with that contradiction, producing new strategies, organizations, alliances and political possibilities.

Their experiences point toward a more demanding alternative to divide and rule: organized solidarity capable of turning difference into political power.

Organizing is more than mobilizing

One of the book’s most important lessons for the present concerns the difference between mobilizing and organizing.

The 1960s are often remembered through spectacular images: marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, crowds in the streets. But the power of the movements Echols describes depended on much more than protest.

It grew through people living in communities, building relationships, developing political confidence, creating institutions and learning how to act collectively. One example is the Freedom Schools organized during Mississippi Summer. Their purpose went beyond political messaging. Organizers developed curricula intended to help people understand their communities and develop the confidence and skills to participate in changing them. The schools became part of the infrastructure through which Freedom Summer could turn a national moment of attention into deeper local organizing.

Freedom Summer did not emerge from nowhere. Neither did the Panthers’ survival programs or their legal and political defense networks. This infrastructure depended on relationships and material capacities built over time.

The mass protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and more recently against Trump’s authoritarianism, demonstrated extraordinary popular anger. But mass participation alone does not create durable power. Movements need the capacity to bring people into action — and then to keep organizing them after the cameras leave. They need structures through which people develop political agency, and organizations capable of surviving repression, disagreement, electoral cycles and changes in public mood.

We need movements that can mobilize. We also need movements that can organize.

The politics of the “ally”

Another question running through the book has become familiar on the contemporary left: What should people do when they want to support a struggle that is not their own? Echols offers no simple answer.

White activists sometimes became important organizers and collaborators. Others became what Echols calls “awkward allies” or “clueless comrades.” The harder question concerned the terms of participation: what could meaningful support look like in a movement organized around Black self-determination?

Ella Baker advocated for a broad movement expansive enough even to include what she called the “matron in the fur coat.” Her approach was not merely rhetorical. When SNCC was getting started, Baker hired Jane Stembridge, a white Southern theology student and poet, as the organization’s first paid staffer. Echols notes that historian Clayborne Carson has suggested SNCC might have collapsed during that first summer without the energy and skills Baker and Stembridge brought to the work. Baker’s organizing philosophy centered on developing people’s capacity rather than accumulating authority. As Echols notes, she believed that “strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

Solidarity is a relationship, not a performance. That does not mean every contribution carries the same value or that movements should welcome everyone without conditions. It means that meaningful participation depends on relationships of trust, accountability and a willingness to support work that one may not control.

The Panthers offer a particularly interesting example. They remained committed to Black political autonomy while deliberately cultivating relationships with white radicals, lawyers, journalists, publishers and other supporters. These relationships could be politically useful, but they also created tensions. White radicals sometimes struggled with being asked to play supporting rather than leading roles, while the Panthers had to navigate relationships with people whose social position was fundamentally different from their own. Huey Newton later acknowledged the importance of progressive white activists to the Panthers, even as relationships between Black and white radicals remained fraught.

SNCC’s evolving approach to white radicals points toward another way of thinking about this relationship. Stokely Carmichael, later Kwame Ture, increasingly argued that white activists should organize in their own communities. White radicals were encouraged to confront the institutions shaping their own lives, including the military draft and the Vietnam War. Bob Moses himself worked with white antiwar organizers such as David Dellinger, A. J. Muste and Staughton Lynd.

Organizer Staughton Lynd shakes hands with a Mississippi resident during Freedom Summer. (Mark Levy Collection/The Civil Rights Archives of the Queens College)

Carmichael’s argument proposed a different structure for solidarity: people developing power in their own communities and around the forms of oppression shaping their own lives while remaining connected to a broader struggle.

That approach can help shift solidarity away from paternalism. Rather than entering someone else’s struggle primarily as a helper, people are asked to examine how the systems they are fighting also shape their own lives, communities and possibilities. That can create a more grounded basis for political commitment.

There is a tension here as well. A politics built around one’s own stake can narrow into self-interest, with people feeling responsible only for struggles in which they can identify themselves as directly affected. The challenge is to begin from one’s own lived position without ending there — to build power where we are while recognizing the larger systems that connect our struggles.

Autonomy and coalition can coexist.

The material side of solidarity

Echols also pays unusual attention to something movements sometimes overlook: the practical resources needed to keep political work going. Movements need lawyers, meeting spaces, printing presses, transportation, ways to communicate, food, bail money, staff, research, childcare, and, of course, money. 

The Panthers’ relationships with white lawyers and other supporters offer a useful example. Their legal defense efforts depended on people who could provide skills, money, publicity and access to institutions that the Panthers themselves could not easily command. In courtrooms across the country, mostly white left-wing lawyers defended Black radicals against prosecutors and police forces. These relationships could strengthen the movement materially and sometimes helped expose the workings of the state itself. 

Political economy is inseparable from organizing. Good intentions do not build legal networks, communications systems, or the other infrastructure movements need.

Resources, however, also create relationships of power. A movement dependent on wealthy supporters can become vulnerable to their influence. A donor may want to help without understanding the political work — or may expect gratitude, access, influence or even authority in return.

Movements often need resources from people outside their core constituencies. The challenge is to build relationships in which those resources expand collective power rather than quietly shifting power toward those who control them.

Rather than resolve this contradiction, Echols shows why movements have to confront it.

Repression and the politics of division

Movements do not operate in a vacuum.

Echols shows how repression can reshape a movement from within. COINTELPRO and local police “Red Squads” amplified existing rivalries and ideological divisions inside the Panthers, helping create a climate of debilitating paranoia. Panther chief of staff David Hilliard captured the bitter irony: The party had been created to help Black people determine their own destinies, yet increasingly “the state — FBI, police, Red Squads — is deciding our fate.”

Repression also pushed the Panthers toward coalition. Echols traces how the pressure of state surveillance and police attacks encouraged the party to seek alliances with other radicals and left-leaning liberals, including through the 1969 United Front Against Fascism, a broad coalition that brought together the Panthers and other groups concerned about state repression and the threat of fascism.

Previous Coverage

Ingredients for building courage

Authoritarian politics thrives on fragmentation. It encourages workers to blame migrants rather than employers, poor people rather than concentrated wealth, and racial minorities rather than the institutions that reproduce inequality. It turns religious difference into a political weapon and cultural difference into evidence of threat.

The parallels between the present and the 1960s have limits. The present should not be reduced to a replay of that earlier period. The underlying political problem, however, is familiar: Those in power often seek to divide people who might otherwise recognize their shared interests and build power together.

Echols’ history shows what becomes possible when movements resist that fragmentation — and what can happen when they cannot. 

“Radical Chic” and the attack on solidarity

Perhaps the book’s most surprising contribution is its treatment of Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.”

Wolfe’s 1970 essay mocked a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party held at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Manhattan penthouse. The image was almost irresistible: wealthy white liberals in evening clothes mingling with Black revolutionaries, champagne and revolution sharing the same room. Wolfe turned the gathering into a joke about fashionable people playing at radicalism.

Echols argues that something more consequential happened. “Radical Chic” helped establish a political language for dismissing cross-racial solidarity as fundamentally unserious: the rich were hypocrites, the radicals were dangerous, and everyone involved was performing for status.

That framing has proved remarkably durable. Echols traces how the idea of “radical chic” migrated into conservative politics, becoming part of a broader effort to portray progressive politics as the indulgence of cultural elites rather than a response to real systems of exploitation and racial domination.

There is an important tension here. Some of the people who participated in these relationships undoubtedly were motivated by status, fashion or a desire to be close to something exciting. Yet the imperfections of individual participants do not tell us much about the value of solidarity itself. Treating privileged or imperfect allies as evidence that coalition is inherently fraudulent can become a way of making solidarity seem suspect.

Echols shows that cross-racial solidarity persisted in forms far removed from Wolfe’s caricature. Black radicals continued to find unexpected points of connection with white lawyers, journalists, activists, jurors and ordinary people who encountered their politics through organizing, political trials and community work. What mattered was whether those relationships could produce greater political understanding and collective power.

That distinction matters now. In a political culture increasingly eager to reduce solidarity to social-media signaling, celebrity activism or elite posturing, cynicism can spread easily.

We should be capable of criticizing performative solidarity without becoming cynical about solidarity itself. The first can sharpen political judgment. The second can become political disarmament.

A history worth putting to work

“Black Power, White Heat” offers no formula for building the next movement. Its value lies in the richer political history it gives us for thinking about our own organizing — and in the questions that history leaves us with:

How do we build solidarity across real differences in power and experience?

How do we combine autonomy with coalition?

How do we organize people rather than simply mobilize them?

How do we build institutions that can survive repression?

How do we develop political power within our own communities while remaining committed to a larger movement?

And how do we build relationships strong enough to withstand the deliberate efforts of those in power to divide us?

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Echols’ story offers no easy answers, and the people she writes about did not have them either. Their collaborations were productive and fraught, sometimes exhilarating and sometimes heartbreaking. That is precisely why this history is useful.

The left does not need another mythology about the 1960s. We need its contradictions.

For those of us trying to build movements now — against racism, militarism, ecological destruction, exploitation, xenophobia, patriarchy and authoritarianism — this history offers something more valuable than nostalgia. It offers political literacy.

Read it with your organizing group. Read it with your political education circle. Argue about it. Ask where the people in the book succeeded and where they failed. Ask what their dilemmas look like in your own community.

Because solidarity is something we build.

In an age increasingly defined by attempts to divide us, building solidarity may be one of the most important forms of power we have.

This article is co-published with ZNetwork.org.

This article What the 1960s can teach us about cross-racial solidarity was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The unprecedented drying of the Rio Grande has made this year one of the hardest summers for the bosque.  About a month ago, my co-worker Tucker and I were heading out to conduct routine...

On Tuesday afternoon, Sept. 22, Food Tank and Diestel Family Ranch will host “Nourishing the Future: How Farming Practices Shape the Food We Eat, the Health We Build, and the Longevity We Seek” at Climate Week NYC 2026. The invitation-only event will explore how the way food is grown, raised, and produced directly shapes human health and longevity.

Through farmer stories, regenerative and organic production models, emerging nutrient-density research, and clinical perspectives on food as fuel, speakers will examine how better farming practices can produce better food—and why the next frontier in food systems may be measuring value not just by cost, yield, or convenience, but by nourishment.

“What happens on the farm doesn’t stay on the farm. Decisions about soil, feed, animal health, and how food is produced ultimately show up on our plates,” says Heidi Diestel, fourth-generation family farmer at Diestel Family Ranch. “What excites me about ‘Nourishing the Future’ is that we’re bringing farmers, scientists, food companies, and health experts into the same conversation to better understand those connections.”

Sessions will include fireside chats with industry leaders and chefs exploring nutrient density as the next frontier in food, farming, and health. Panel discussions will cover how farming practices, animal health, soil biology, and production choices shape the nutritional value of food and impact human health, as well as what it takes to bring better food to more people.

“We’ve spent decades asking people to care about where their food comes from,” says Diestel. “I hope this summit gets them asking the next question: What happened to my food before it arrived on my plate and why does that matter?” 

The event will kick off at WNYC-NPR Studios’ The Greene Space in New York City at 1:30pm with food, drink, and live musical performances, and a reception will follow until 4:30pm.

Confirmed speakers include Melissa Clark, Food Reporter and Columnist, The New York Times and NYT Cooking; Heidi Diestel, Fourth-Generation Farmer and Executive Vice President, Diestel Family Ranch; Anne Marie Hourigan, Quality Standards Principal Advisor for Sourcing Standards, Whole Foods Market; Danielle Nierenberg, President, Food Tank; and Chef Andrew Zimmern.

“Nourishing the Future” will feature a special musical performance by Clair Rachel Howell, a Broadway performer who made her Broadway debut in Wicked, where she played Nessarose, and is now performing on the Wicked National Tour. She will be joined by Broadway Music Director Noah Turner.

This summit will be streamed live on FoodTank.com and Food Tank’s YouTube channel, here. Join the Food Tank newsletter list for reminders, and click here for Food Tank’s full lineup of events at Climate Week NYC 2026.

Articles like the one you just read are made possible through the generosity of Food Tank members. Can we please count on you to be part of our growing movement? Become a member today by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Bill Sturgell, Unsplash

The post The Future of Health Starts on the Farm appeared first on Food Tank.

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

Listen to the audio version >>

The threats presented by hyperscale data centers are galvanizing resistance in hundreds of communities around the country. How are those movements developing? What is their significance? And how might they help shape a “Greentech New Deal” to address our climate, affordability, and democracy crises? 

Anti-data-center sentiment in rural Kansas neighborhood, May 24, 2026, Photo credit: Catboy69, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data centers in particular, are generating an unprecedented resistance – in Texas they call it the Texas Data Center Rebellion. Robinson Meyer of the climate news website Heatmap recently told the New York Times,

“Every quarter, we poll about 4,000 Americans and we ask: Would you support or oppose a data center being built near where you live? We asked that question in August of last year, and Americans were very split. They were about 43 percent in support and 42 percent against. We asked again in the spring, and this time, 21 percent of Americans said they would support a data center being built near where they live, and 71 percent said they would oppose it. So it is a staggering shift, basically, in how Americans feel about this industry and about this form of land use in their communities.”

In the latest poll from Heatmap three-quarters of Americans now say that they would oppose a new data center being built near where they live. Just 4% say they would “strongly support” a data center proposed in their area. 

A June poll from Data for Progress finds that a majority of voters (63%), including 67% of Democrats, 66% of Independents, and 58% of Republicans, support pausing the construction of all US AI data centers nationwide for at least one year. Most voters think AI will increase unemployment in the U.S. and support regulations to give workers decision-making authority over how AI is used in the workplace.

Data centers are meeting unprecedented local resistance. According to a recent report, data center opponents blocked or delayed at least 75 projects around the country worth about $130 billion just from January through March 2026. Active opposition groups have grown from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of March 2026. 

According to Brad Johnson of Hill Heat, “a strong pattern has emerged of hyperscale data centers causing popular revolt at the ballot box. 

“After the city council of Festus, Mo. voted in favor of a $6 billion hyperscale proposal, voters promptly kicked out all four incumbents on the ballot in an April election. On the same day in April, voters in the Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington WI. showed their irritation with a massive $15 billion hyperscale facility by overwhelmingly approving a ballot measure to restrict future hyperscale projects from receiving tax-increment financing. 

“In May, supervisors in Meridian, Mich. voted to put a six-month pause on data center proposals. Meanwhile, in the Grand Rapids suburb of Lowell Township, township board members refused to adopt a data center moratorium, with the majority of the council opting to court a $1 billion proposal from Microsoft instead. Now, recall petitions are circulating against the board members who voted against a moratorium, with the chair of the effort accusing Lowell board members of ‘representing Microsoft more than the people who elected them.’”

Some, even on the left, have portrayed the Data Center Resistance as affluent NIMBY-ism. Data scientist Geoff Holtzman analyzed a dataset of current and proposed data center projects alongside US census data and came to these startling conclusions:

1. The poorest neighborhoods resisted data centers at nearly five times the rate of the wealthiest (19.0% vs. 3.8%).

“The highest rate of resistance comes from neighborhoods with a median income of between $8 thousand and $72 thousand. The lowest rate of resistance is in neighborhoods where the average household makes between $133 thousand and $250 thousand per year.”

2. Recently proposed data centers that faced pushback were canceled or suspended at more than five times the rate of data centers that didn’t (28.2% vs. 5.2%).
3. Cancellation rates are highest in lower-income areas, a fact fully explained by their higher rates of pushback.

“The odds of cancellation are six times higher in neighborhoods that fight than in neighborhoods that don’t. Increased cancellation in low-income areas is fully explained by high rates of pushback in these neighborhoods, so continued proposals in these areas may stoke outrage, drive resistance, and increase cancellation rates.”

The Moratorium Cometh

According to a new review of public records conducted by Heatmap Pro, more than 500 counties or municipalities now actively restrict or block new data centers. These constraints, such as steep setback requirements, impossible noise limits, or outright bans on permit approvals, all but forbid the construction of data centers. The overwhelming majority of these restrictions have been enacted since the beginning of 2026. Nearly 190 have been passed since June 1.

Earlier this year the New York state legislature passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers. The law would block data center permits for “hyperscale” facilities, which it defines as those with a peak load of more than 20 megawatts. Soon thereafter, New York governor Kathy Hochul imposed the nation’s first-ever statewide freeze on new “hyperscale” data centers that can use 50 megawatts or more of power. A recent report found that bipartisan proposals for moratoriums on constructing data centers were introduced in 14 states from January through March.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a national data center moratorium that would temporarily ban the construction of data centers in the U.S. to “buy time to create strong, federal guardrails for AI.” Sen. Ed Markey and others have made other proposals for reigning in data centers. More surprisingly, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, recently called for a nationwide halt to data center construction.

Efforts to constrain data center impacts have taken a variety of forms besides moratoriums. Michigan, Oregon, and Minnesota passed laws in the last 18 months designed to protect their pre-existing requirements that electric utilities use only emissions-free energy sources by 2040. Minnesota and Oregon ordered regulators to ensure that the energy that supplies data centers is in line with their emissions-reduction goals, while Michigan required hyperscale data centers to use 90% clean energy within six years to receive its lucrative sales tax exemption. Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona paused subsidies and tax incentives for data center developers.

The Data Center Rebellion and the Greentech New Deal

Servers, Photo credit: Victorgrigas, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

However ludicrous the more extreme claims made for AI’s impact, that impact is too great to ignore. The continued growth of AI and data centers at current rates threatens to derail the Greentech revolution. Unrestrained they will lead to aggravated climate change, local ecological devastation, unaffordable electricity, and a substantial growth and centralization of oligarchical power. It’s hard to see who they will benefit except a handful of the world’s richest men. 

Just as there is little precedent for the explosive proliferation of hyperscale data centers, so there is little precedent for the data center rebellion. David Wallace-Wells and Robinson Meyer discussed in the New York Times whether the gathering coalition of Americans against data centers “could be the next Occupy Wall Street movement or Tea Party.” Perhaps the closest we have to a historical precedent is the anti-toxics movement that followed the exposure of toxic chemical dumps under low-income neighborhoods at Love Canal and the nationwide explosion of protest that followed as hundreds of communities around the country discovered that they too were exposed to toxic dumps. They created a nationwide movement against toxic dumps and won the landmark Superfund law which established unprecedented accountability for corporate polluters.

The local anti-data center movements are about as close as you can come to true grassroots rebellion. While many organizations are providing support, they are not the result of an organizing campaign or national call. Close examination shows that they are being created by people talking with their neighbors, banding together in their neighborhoods, packing meetings, confronting politicians, and throwing out officials who don’t take a stand against local data centers. Red and blue communities are joining together across party and ideological lines. Participants are overwhelmingly non-affluent – working class if you will. While there is little common ideology, there is certainly a widespread ethos based on the idea that wealthy, powerful elite forces are threatening the livelihoods and wellbeing of ordinary people and that people must force government to put a halt to such threats. 

The outcome of any such movement is unpredictable. It could, like the Tea Party, be captured by rightwing populist elites. It could, like Occupy Wall Street, dissipate in the face of repression and lack of clear direction while leaving a transformed political landscape behind. It could, like the post-Love Canal anti-toxics movement, impose significant limits on corporate depredations through local campaigns and federal legislation. Or it could become part of a far deeper transformation of the political, economic, and social landscape.  

One constructive outcome might be for the Data Center Rebellion to converge with an emerging Greentech New Deal. For the past eight years, the Green New Deal has provided a highly popular vision and program that would protect the climate in ways that would create good jobs for working people, end poverty, and alleviate injustice. 

The original Green New Deal called for “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal.” The Green New Deal aimed to save the climate by meeting scientific targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases. It would seek to end the epidemic of poverty by mitigating deeply entrenched racial, regional, and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth and distributing federal aid and other investment equitably to historically impoverished and marginalized communities. And it would provide good jobs constructing a just and climate-safe economy. A poll soon after it was initially proposed in 2018 found that 40% of registered voters “strongly support” and 41% “somewhat support” the concepts behind the Green New Deal. Another poll five years later in 2024 found that “the Green New Deal is still incredibly popular.” 

Since the original proposal for a Green New Deal, the “Greentech revolution” has transformed the cost and viability of fossil free energy. Today a “Greentech New Deal” can be driven forward by an entirely different economic environment – one in which the transition to fossil free energy is not a costly and painful duty, but rather a “free lunch” that the American people can use to make a happier, healthier, and more just society and world. Indeed as I have shown elsewhere, that Greentech revolution is driving forward at local and state levels despite opposition from Trump, MAGA, and the fossil fuel industry.

While a convergence of the Data Center Rebellion and the Greentech New Deal is far from inevitable, we can envision some steps that might help lead in that direction:

• Continue and expand the local struggles against data centers. Those struggles have put the issue squarely in the public eye, shown that communities are not powerless, and already blocked a remarkable number of data center proposals. They can take heart from the local struggles to shut down coal-fired power plants which have led to retirement commitments for over 70% of coal plants since 2010.
• Continue and expand the burgeoning coalitions promoting data center bans and moratoriums at city, state, and national levels. Force politicians and elected officials to impose such policies with no ifs, and, or buts.
• Encourage the broad array of forces that backed the Green New Deal, and continue to implement it at local and state levels, to use their considerable power and resources to champion the struggle against data centers. 
• Steadily broaden the Data Center Rebellion’s implicit– and often articulated – goal of replacing oligarchic with democratic control of the economy.
• Demand that the “precautionary principle” – that new innovations not be permitted until they are proven harmless — be applied both to data centers and to fossil fuel infrastructure.
• Prioritize the blocking of fossil fuels for data centers. 
• Present the Greentech New Deal as an alternative to the billionaire plan to dominate our communities, our economy, and our lives. 
• Promote the Greentech New Deal as at once the solution to the climate, the jobs, and the affordability crises. 

A handful of hyperscalers are trying to shape the future through AI and the data centers on which they depend. But the future may also be shaped in part by the unprecedented popular mobilization against data centers.

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The post The Data Center Rebellion first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

The Aug. 26 executive order, previous executive actions and the Treasury Department’s Foreign Entity of Concern guidance are likely to hit battery and inverter supply chains particularly hard, an industry analyst tells Utility Dive.

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The post Latest Newsletter first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Sanchioni Butler is a veteran labor organizer, policy advocate, coalition builder, and leadership development professional with more than three decades of experience advancing workers’ rights, workplace democracy, racial and economic justice, and community empowerment.

Sanchioni began her career at Ford Motor Company in 1988 and later became an organizer and International Representative with the United Auto Workers. She organized workers and supported campaigns across Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, and other parts of the South. Her international collaborations with trade unionists in South Africa, Brazil, France, and Japan strengthened her commitment to advancing worker and human rights globally.

After retiring from the UAW in 2018, Sanchioni expanded her work in public policy, political engagement, education, and community organizing. Her professional roles have included Senior Organizer with Jobs to Move America, Political Campaign Coordinator for the Mississippi AFL-CIO, and American Rescue Plan Coordinator for the Mississippi Association of Educators.

Sanchioni is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Impact Strategies and Consulting LLC, where she provides strategic planning, leadership development, team building, workforce advocacy, coalition building, organizational support, and youth engagement services. She also remains active in labor and civil-rights leadership through the Central Mississippi Central Labor Council and the NAACP Jackson Branch.

A skilled facilitator, trainer, and strategist, Sanchioni is committed to preparing emerging leaders and strengthening partnerships among labor, community, education, faith, and social justice organizations. Her work is grounded in the belief that lasting change occurs when people have the knowledge, confidence, and opportunity to advocate for themselves and their communities.

The post September 2026 LNS Spotlight: Sanchioni Butler first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

If you're like me, you have a lot of field guides lying around. And I mean a lot. I have, of course, the guide that I still use regularly of the eastern birds of North America, but I also have field...

Joe Uehlein’s tour for his new book Three Roads: Labor, Music, Ecology rolls on. Joe says,

The book tells the story of how LNS was founded, while also tracing my life’s trajectory from growing up along the banks of the Great Lake Erie and all the intrigue of a life in the labor movement, and my dedication to worker rights and environmental justice.

At many of the early stops I was introduced by LNS ED, Joshua Dedmond, and ably assisted by LNS Development Director, Yasmin Gabriel. We’ve played Detroit, Denver, San Francisco, Berkeley, Champaign-Urbana, IL, and Chicago.

Upcoming confirmed dates include Amherst, MA, Boston, MA, Portland, ME, Seattle, WA, Portland, OR, Homestead, PA, Takoma Park, MD/Washington, DC.

For information contact Joe at joeuehlein@mac.com; 202-256-7848

The post LNS Prez Joe Uehlein Book-and-Music Tour Coming to Boston September 16 first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

By Joe Uehlein

Global warming causes climate change. Climate Change is here. Many wrongly talk about what we are experiencing now as the new normal; it is not. Think of this year as the least extreme. It will get worse every year until we stop burning fossil fuels. Not reduce, but stop burning fossil fuels; and reduce meat consumption.

If we plot out the last 10,000 years, which is when society really began to develop, carbon in the atmosphere remained stable at 280ppm. Since 1850, almost overnight, we’ve gone to 430ppm. That’s “parts per million” and that’s how scientists measure carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. The warming rate has doubled since 2015.

Our most marginalized communities are living on the front lines of climate change and in the places with the fewest resources to prepare and recover. We need climate justice. The communities need a seat at the table. And we need climate action. They go hand in hand.

A massive heat dome is sent temperatures to 126 degrees across the western US this summer. 100 million Americans were breathing toxic smoke. This isn’t weather. It’s climate catastrophe, and it was a choice. Fossil fuel executives made it. Politicians protect it. Working people are paying for it with their pocketbooks and their health. Scientists are now warning that Earth is on track to cross a climate point of no return and become uninhabitable.

Even with the incredible build-out of renewable energy over the past 20 years, carbon emissions continue to skyrocket, and the planet continues to warm. Carbon (CO2) levels in the atmosphere are now at 430 ppm (parts per million), higher than ever before in human history. Research reveals that the US accounted for 50% of the worlds increase in emissions last year.

My conviction at starting LNS was that labor is blocking action on global warming and climate change, and without labor on our side we will lose. So we dedicated ourselves 20 years ago to working with unions and allied organizations to help them better understand their self interest in the fight to end global warming and climate change, and we work with enviro and climate justice/change orgs to help them better understand and work with unions.

We need power. Unions have power. Even in their reduced state, unions have economic power, and considerable power in the electoral arena. Most importantly, the American labor movement is the most powerful counterbalance to corporate power and control.

Our core, bedrock principle in the labor movement is worker solidarity. We are now challenged to bring this core principle to everyone, everywhere, and nurture human solidarity.

The post Prez Uehlein on What We’re Really Facing first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Developed intentionally, AI data centers can help create a more resilient and affordable electric system, write officials from Heron Power, NVIDIA, Invenergy and Emerald AI.

By LNS Executive Director Joshua Dedmond

On July 28th, representatives from the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS), alongside comrades from sister organizations including the Just Transition Alliance, The Chisholm Legacy Project, and Taproot Earth, joined the picket line in Jackson, Mississippi. The delegation stood in direct solidarity with striking transit workers represented by Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1208.

ATU Local 1208 represents 80 bus operators, mechanics, cleaners, and customer service representatives operating Jackson’s public transit system, JTRAN. This picket line mobilization took place alongside a joint planning meeting focused on aligning Labor and Environmental Justice (EJ) strategies across the region.

Following a resilient 39-day strike, ATU Local 1208—led by Local President Charles Tornes Jr.—officially ratified a new contract with private contractor MV Transportation. The agreement secured immediate wage increases, protected essential working conditions, and fully restored regular bus service routes across the city.

In a state with a 4 percent union density rate and strict “right-to-work” laws, the victory of ATU Local 1208 demonstrates the transformative power of organized labor and community-wide solidarity. LNS and its environmental justice partners remain committed to uplifting ATU Local 1208 and continuing the shared struggle for transit equity, climate resilience, and worker dignity across the South.

The post Climate Justice Leaders Support Striking Transit Workers first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

A recent article by Sasha Abramsky in TruthOut tells how “Fired Federal Employees Are Bringing Climate Change Info Back to the People.”

Soon after Donald Trump was inaugurated President, the government’s premier educational website on climate change, Climate.gov, was shut down and most of the staff that produced it were fired by Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). But now fired NOAA employees have resurrected it as Climate.us to bring climate information back to the people. Advised by a distinguished group of climate scientists, it is already receiving nearly a million hits a month.

Abramsky reports that their work has proven to be “an inspiration” for ex-government employees in a number of other agencies and branches of government. For example, former Environmental Protection Agency workers are preparing to resurrect climate-related EPA pages that have been taken down; Public Environmental Data Partners is rescuing specialist environmental monitoring tools; and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative is saving specialized environmental justice screening tools.

The post Fired Federal Workers Want to Let You Know What the Government Won’t Tell You about Climate Change first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

A  new report from the nonpartisan business group E2 found that since Donald Trump was inaugurated, 216 major clean energy generation and manufacturing projects were scrapped, closed, or downsized. That led to the loss of nearly half a million potential jobs. The projects would have generated an estimated $53 billion in wages for workers during construction and more than $31 billion annually after they began operation.

For more: Trump’s clean energy attacks are costing the US jobs | Canary Media

For the full report: “One Year Since the One Big Beautiful Bill: An Economic Impact Analysis Of America’s Clean Economy”

The post Trump’s Attacks on Clean Energy Cost Half-a-Million Jobs first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Image source: Los Angeles skyline viewed from Griffith observatory at sunrise by martinm303, Envato Elements.

An AP/NORDC poll conducted in July asked people tell whether extreme heat has impacted their lives. 90 percent answered that it had.

Fifty percent of respondents said that extreme heat has had either a major or minor impact on their sleeping patterns, while only 44 percent said it has had no impact on their sleep. Fifty-two percent of respondents said extreme heat has impacted their travel or vacation plans, while only 44 percent said it hasn’t.

Two-thirds of Americans, 68 percent, said that their family’s outdoor activities have been impacted by extreme heat, while only 31 percent said their outdoor activities have not been impacted. Meanwhile, 81 percent said extreme heat over the past year has affected their electricity bills, while only 15 percent said they haven’t noticed a difference.

For More: Truthout: “9-in-10 Americans Polled Say Extreme Heat Is Affecting Their Lives”

The post 9 in 10 Americans Say Extreme Heat Is Affecting Their Lives first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Overall, climate protection policies create jobs and improve conditions for workers. But employers can try to take advantage of climate policies in ways that harm workers instead.

The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle nearly 40% of containerized imports to the US. Most of its existing technology is mechanical – and highly polluting. California air pollution regulators have proposed that equipment like trucks, cranes, and yard tractors should be electrified to meet the ports’ targets of 100 percent zero-emission operations. But workers and local communities are concerned that employers will take advantage of the need to reduce pollution through electrification as an excuse to automate the ports and eliminate jobs that have been the backbone of the local economy for generations.

A new report from the UCLA Labor Center warns that Southern California regulators’ efforts to electrify the ports create “a real risk of driving terminal operators to pursue port automation under the pretense of meeting environmental standards.” Rich Dines, a former Long Beach harbor commissioner and member of the ILWU longshoreman’s union, who contributed to the report says, “Electrification is an excuse for automation.”

Both ILWU and the Teamsters — who represent truckers moving goods from the ports to inland warehouses — stress they’re not against electrification and other zero-emission technologies in themselves. “We absolutely support green transportation and electric vehicles,” said Peter Finn, Teamsters’ western region vice president. But the companies are trying “to conflate the issues to engage in some PR spin and imply the technology is somehow more environmentally friendly,” Finn said.

The UCLA Labor Center report points the way toward a possible resolution. Industry stakeholders questioned the immediate benefits of increased automation. Terminal operators and labor representatives alike expressed significant doubts about automation’s presumed efficiencies. Instead, they championed a wide range of possible solutions other than automation, including increasing hours of operation, investing in inland ports, better worker-training programs, optimizing existing infrastructure to achieve standardization across terminals, shifting containerized cargo to on-dock rail systems, and the planned Goods Movement Training Campus. The report found that, “unlike automation, these solutions offer a systematic approach to maximizing port productivity and mitigating job loss.”

To learn more:

Politico: “California dockworkers have a new target in their fight against automation”

For the report:

“Automation and the Future of Dockwork at the San Pedro Bay Port Complex”

The post Climate Protection vs. Jobs? first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.