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Children bear the consequences of today’s major crises more than most, yet their concerns and experiences remain largely invisible in political life. A childist revolution calls for transforming the political space to cultivate a deeper sense of our social and natural interdependence – including fully democratising democracies through ageless suffrage. 

This article is part of the Green European Journal’s upcoming print edition on demographic futures, out in early June. Subscribe now and get it delivered straight to your door.

Democracies face crises when populations lose confidence in their ability to address fundamental concerns – as is usually the case in periods of rapid industrialisation, runaway inequality, economic depression, mass migration, and war. During such times, they often backslide into authoritarian appeals, but tend eventually to evolve new democratic norms and practices. 

The worldwide crisis of democracy today revolves around issues that centrally concern one of the most disempowered social groups: the third of humanity who are children. It is children above all who face the greatest impacts of climate change, both immediately and in the long term. Children in rich and poor countries alike suffer disproportionate poverty because of global neoliberalism. Young people die in outsized numbers from civilian-targeted modern warfare and terrorism. And they are hit hardest by the ways that new digital technologies manipulate information and foster technological addiction. 

However, children remain largely invisible in political life. Indeed, it is this very invisibility that keeps children’s issues at the margins of democratic policymaking.  

The rise of childism 

The past couple of decades have seen the rise of a movement among academics and activists to respond to these democratic and childhood realities under the umbrella of childism. Childism is a critical approach to societies similar to feminism, anti-racism, decolonialism, and the like. It seeks to empower children and acknowledge their concerns and experiences by transforming historically ingrained assumptions and structures. Its aim is to reconstruct social norms to make them genuinely age-inclusive. 

The word “childism” was coined in the early 2000s in academic literature rooted in the then-emerging field of childhood studies, which seeks to understand children’s agency and experiences as children rather than as developing adults. In the 1990s, the term was used briefly in literary studies to refer to a practice of reading like a child. More recently, it has also been used in a negative sense, akin to sexism and racism. But the predominant meaning in scholarship – and now also in social activism – is in its positive sense of children’s empowerment. 

The central problem that childism addresses is a deeply rooted adultism: the assumption that the adult is the measure of the human. Adultism is the often forgotten side of patriarchy, the historical power of the “pater” or father, which is not only gendered but also aged. Like sexism, adultism is deeply embedded in our histories, cultures, and languages. Adultism in particular asserts a binary opposition between supposedly rational and independent adults on the one hand, and supposedly irrational and dependent children on the other. In this way, it divides social relations in everything from families and communities to human rights and law. 

 Adultism is the often forgotten side of patriarchy, the historical power of the “pater” or father, which is not only gendered but also aged.

Children themselves are already practising an implicit childism. Young climate protesters are demanding age inclusivity in environmental policy. Child labour union activists are calling for recognition for non-adult work. Youth are fighting for schools free of gun violence. Transgender children are pushing their communities to change how they think about gender identity. Children and youth in the dozens of countries with child and youth parliaments are pressing for children’s perspectives on safe streets, access for people with disabilities, and education reform. 

Children’s suffrage 

As marginalised groups over history have found, however, the ultimate right to political inclusion is the right to vote. Suffrage does not solve all problems, but it does confer on those possessing it the status of first-class citizens with equal political dignity. It is the right to participate in the process of forming rights. This is why non-landowners, the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and women fought so hard to achieve it. And it is why the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights call, without any type of qualification, for “universal and equal suffrage”.  

Children have been fighting for suffrage since at least the 1990s. They have done so in campaigns and legal action by groups like We Want the Vote and KRÄTZÄ in Germany, the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) in the US, Young Pirates of Europe (YPE), and Green Youth. Adults have joined them with academic and policy support, including through initiatives like the Children’s Voting Colloquium, Amnesty International UK, the Freechild Institute, the National Association of Large Families , and the Child Rights International Network (CRIN). What is more, children and adults have sued governments for ageless suffrage in Germany, California and Massachusetts in the United States, Sweden, and Canada.

The childist argument for ageless suffrage is that it is necessary for the wellbeing of both children and democracies. Children themselves would finally have their lives and perspectives taken just as seriously by policymakers, whose jobs would no longer rely solely on pressure from adults. And democracies would benefit from the full range of the people’s ideas, thus making better-informed decisions. 

A matter of competence?  

The main objection to children’s suffrage has historically been that children lack voting competence. People under the age of maturity are thought to be deficient in democratic thinking skills, knowledge, and independence, and to be too open to manipulation. And they are presumed to lack the experience and understanding needed to contribute to difficult decisions about complex political matters like war, health policy, and immigration. 

But these presumptions misunderstand both democracy and childhood. Working backwards from the aims of democracy, voting competence consists in the ability to give voice to political views. The purpose of democratic voting is not to place decisions in the hands of those with certain types of knowledge, but to hold elected representatives accountable to the people impacted by their decisions. Anyone should be included in the vote who wishes to have a say in what policymakers may do. 

Barring children from voting is, in reality, a form of systemic discrimination. It holds them to a standard of voting competence that is not applied to the rest of the population.

If voting competence is properly understood, children have much more of it – and adults much less – than commonly thought. It is hard to deny democratic capacities to the millions of children who march for climate change policies, fight against racism, or participate in children’s parliaments, child labour unions, or any number of other political organisations. Children worldwide discuss politics at the dinner table, read or watch the news, and hold diverse opinions about current events. There is no magical stage of neurological development at which the capacity to have political views suddenly arises. It is a general capacity of anyone aware of their larger world. 

This capacity of children to participate in democratic life is already legally recognised in Articles 12, 13, and 15 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. These guarantee children the rights to “express [their] views freely in all matters affecting the child”, “freedom of expression” without unnecessary restriction, and “freedom of association”. All of these rights are violated when children are banned from exercising their democratic capacities. 

Likewise, adults exhibit very wide ranges of democratic skill, knowledge, and susceptibility to influence. Adults have the right to vote regardless of ignorance, thoughtlessness, and openness to manipulation. They retain this right even if they suffer from severe cognitive impairment, mental disability, or dementia. History shows that adults frequently make terrible voting decisions. Furthermore, no adult has a deep understanding of all the matters they must vote upon, from economic statistics to military capacities, health innovations, top secret information, legal precedents, and much else. 

Barring children from voting is, in reality, a form of systemic discrimination. It holds them to a standard of voting competence that is not applied to the rest of the population. The European Court of Human Rights defines discrimination as “differential treatment in comparable situations without an objective or reasonable justification”. Adult-only voting excludes children as a class of citizens for reasons outside the objective requirements of voting itself. 

Stronger democracies 

But the most important reason to give children the right to vote is that it would improve life for children and adults and strengthen democracies.  

Children themselves would live in political environments that are required to take their interests into account centrally instead of peripherally. Currently, they cannot vote politicians out of office, which means authorities are not truly incentivised to take children’s experiences and concerns seriously. Children may be objects of democratic beneficence, but like adults, they also need to be treated as subjects with democratic agency.  

If children could vote, they would likely pressure politicians, for example, to finally take the climate emergency seriously, fight child poverty, regulate digital media, invest in meaningful education reform, attend to lifelong healthcare, and create safer streets and greener spaces. They would also have greater recourse to fight social discrimination, such as social media bans, age curfews, exclusion from divorce proceedings, corporal punishment, school discipline, issues with access to medical care, and much more. 

Granting children the right to vote would also benefit adults. Everyone would gain from better climate policies. Parents would be helped by children’s greater economic support. Teachers would be empowered by education policies that better respond to children’s actual lives and experiences. Doctors would find greater resources for child healthcare and research. And business leaders would hire from a better-educated workforce.  

Moreover, democracy itself would be strengthened by becoming more fully responsive to the people’s actual lives. Policymakers would find themselves equally beholden to all instead of just some of their constituents. Democratic leaders could make clearer decisions with – so to speak – a third more pixels added to their policymaking screen. And democracies would make choices about war, spending, and judicial reform in more inclusively informed ways. 

What is more, children’s suffrage could provide the needed antidote to today’s slide of democracies into authoritarianism. The right to vote for all would undercut the assumption that some are natural rulers over others. And it would eliminate the problem of citizens spending the first quarter of their lives being told that their views do not count, which opens citizens to simplistic authoritarian appeals. Instead of looking to father figures, democracies would more likely turn to broad-minded defenders of human rights. 

Children may be objects of democratic beneficence, but like adults, they also need to be treated as subjects with democratic agency.  

Systemic inclusion 

Childism calls for not only new understandings of voting rights but also new electoral practices. Suffrage movements typically shift how voting actually takes place. We have come a long way from landowning men choosing representatives in taverns.  

A good first step is to lower the voting age. In countries that have lowered the national voting age to 16, children have been shown to turn out in higher numbers for elections than young adults and to retain higher voting rates into adulthood. They have also moved policymakers to include more child-friendly interests. However, from a childist perspective, lowering voting ages does not go far enough. It still only enfranchises children who are thought to have achieved adult-like competencies, whereas genuine democracies need to move beyond adultism. 

There are several different proposals for ageless voting rights, but my own is for what I call proxy-claim voting. Under this proposition, all citizens would have a proxy vote from birth to death, which can be used by their legal guardian – a parent, caretaker, or next of kin. This proxy vote would most likely be used on behalf of infants, young children, cognitively impaired children and adults, adults with significant disabilities or health issues, and elderly persons with dementia. But all citizens would, at the same time, have the right to claim the exercise of their vote on their own behalf. Whenever a citizen desired to vote independently, regardless of their age or condition, they could claim their right to do so. 

Some might object that a proxy-claim right to vote would advantage larger families, but in reality, it would advantage the children themselves in these families who deserve their own equal representation. Others might find proxy voting fundamentally undemocratic, yet it already exists in most countries for impaired (or even just travelling) adults, so why not also for the youngest children? Some do not think voting is all that powerful anyway, but is it fair or just to ban one group even from the choice to participate? 

Childism calls for children’s systemic inclusion and empowerment. It suggests, just like first-wave feminism, that the right to vote is a fundamental human right. But suffrage is only a first step. Childism sets in motion a systemic critique of societies’ adultistic biases across law, policy, culture, and family. It insists that children are not second-class citizens but central to infusing societies with humanity. 

What is cult behavior? As we see from this reader’s question, it can frustrate and confound us when people we know embrace ideas that fly in the face of reality and reason. From NXIVM to Heaven’s Gate to extreme right-wing groups, these ideologies can appear frightening when their members can’t be reasoned with in common-sense conversation.

It’s a tough sociological topic. If you’ve watched friends or family members become indoctrinated by a cult, then you know it’s often shocking and traumatic. Let’s look at the dynamics of cults and demystify them so we can see (and talk to) individuals with compassion and patience.

Dr. Green,

Thank you for this interesting column. I have a question kind of around the antivax movement, but related to MAGA, MAHA, conspiracies, right-wing news, etc. What is happening, psychologically, when people form these closed information ecosystems? Is it a form of self-protection? An element of identity? Fear? I think if I understand it better, I won’t get so frustrated trying to talk with some of these people. Thanks!

Hello Friend,

I completely understand, having had some of my loved ones and best friends “go to the cult side.” Let’s look at the latest research and science on the dynamics of cults so we can understand how they begin and evolve and why people gravitate toward them.

Who Is Susceptible to Joining a Cult?

Vulnerable people join cults. That’s the simple answer, but it’s packed with a host of fascinating variables and personalities.

Vulnerable doesn’t always mean gullible; it can also mean intelligent and idealistic. Any one of us can be attracted to a cult if timing and circumstance conspire. Catalysts can include:

• Major life transitions like divorce, the death of a loved one, moving to a new city, job loss, becoming a refugee from your home country through war and political unrest, or experiencing a near-death experience — can knock us off course in life. All of us experience crossroads or pivot points in our lives that make us question the life we thought we knew and make us insecure about what the “meaning of life” is and where we fit in.
• Isolation and a loss of sense-of-self can become existential after we’ve achieved a goal and are wondering what’s next (or if we’re marginalized in our careers or by society). We start seeking a new sense of purpose, belonging, or higher power, and have weak, disintegrating, or nonexistent support networks that might otherwise protect us from the “love bombing” tactics of cults. Cults fill a void of loneliness with artificial family structures, often using interpersonal terms such as “brothers,” “sisters,” “fathers,” and other kinship identifiers.
• Upbringings filled with neglect, abuse, or the loss or absence of one or both parents can produce runaways or victims of broken, underfunded foster care systems who are attracted to cults partly for the family pronouns that offer to make them feel whole again.
• Some individuals with idealistic worldviews, often the result of growing up in sheltered settings, are overly trusting of strangers and naïve about basic social realities. They may ignore “red flags” or that “gut feeling” to be cautious when a charismatic, manipulative person or group presents themselves. This lack of street smarts and suspension of critical thinking make them easy targets for groups that seem loving and accepting.
• Studies indicate that cult members are often well-educated from middle-to-upper classes and have more resources to “find themselves.” With resources like money readily available, and lack of motivators to achieve, cults become a substitute for meaningful work and hard-earned achievements.

Anyone can be recruited by a cult under the right circumstances because these groups target basic human needs for love, safety, and belonging.

How Do Cults Start?

Cults usually start with a charismatic, narcissistic leader who exploits social or individual vulnerabilities to establish a high-control group, typically promising exclusive enlightenment, salvation, or utopian community.

The leader then cultivates a small group of devotees instructed to “recruit” new members. Recruiters focus on individuals experiencing loneliness, life transitions, etc. (see above). Cults develop during times of social, economic, or spiritual crisis, filling a void left by declining traditional structures. When an individual is recruited, the group gradually isolates them from friends and family, demanding increasing loyalty to the leader, who often becomes a source of absolute truth.

Ideological Transformation is a process by which old beliefs are replaced with a new, closed-system ideology. Aided by social networking technology, an “us versus them” mentality has increased the rate at which vulnerable people are exposed to undue influence in cults. This redefines one’s reality and self.

“Undue Influence does NOT erase the person’s old identity but rather creates a new identity to suppress the old one. After different types of manipulation, the creation of a new identity is done step-by-step by formal indoctrination sessions and informally by members, videos, games, movies, publications, and social/digital media. Behavior modification techniques are employed, such as rewards/punishments, thought-stopping, and control of environment (isolation or restriction of access to others). And then the new identify is reinforced and the old identify suppressed.”

                              – Steven A Hassan, Ph.D.  “Understanding Cults: The Basics” Psychology Today, June 5, 2021

How Can We Convince Someone to Leave a Cult?

In the 1970s-1990s, cult deprogramming involved often unlawful involuntary abduction and coercion; it had a low success rate due to its forceful and controversial techniques. This morphed into “exit counseling,” which involves education, building trust, and reality testing.

The Strategic Interactive Approach, developed by mental health expert Steven Hassan, is a non-coercive, empowering approach to helping people leave cults that encourages a positive, warm relationship between cult members and their families while helping to raise essential questions for cult members to consider. This recovery model helps participants identify and distinguish their cult identity from their authentic identity, working toward integrating parts of the authentic identity (that were coopted by the cult identity) into a whole mind.

Is Social Media Toxic?

Social media has made self-created social or navel-gazing bubbles intense and addictive. Worse, some of the current online gatherings of like-minded people have become noxious and malignant, creating cult-like echo-chambers that concentrate and distort negative, violent, and nihilistic emotions. This situation has motivated people with mental health problems to commit horrible crimes, murders, stalking, terrorism, and empowers emotions of general hate for society. Social media distorts reality and is destroying the universal social contract between humans. And it’s addictive, by design, for the profit of the social network titans on a global scale.

Social media can be a double-edged sword. Tech giants and their social media platforms have very little oversight by the government because of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, a U.S. law protecting online platforms from liability for user-generated content and allowing them to moderate content in “good faith.” It provides immunity for hosting, promoting, or removing third-party content. Many experts argue Section 230 should be abolished and more federal oversight on social media should be enacted to prevent what has become a very toxic and harmful psychological poison in our global society.

How Can I Respond to Radical People, Such as MAGA Fans, Climate Deniers, or Anti-Vaxxers?

Understanding how people get into cults and cult-like movements is critical to help guide future conversations.

When we see that a person’s visions, values, and missions feel averse to what we understand of real science and even reality itself, we can try to socialize with them using a mix of boundaries, gently targeted questions (that may seem confrontational to them), and compassion. Focus on specific, shared values to find common ground to build rapport before addressing differences. Maintain calm and self-control over aggressiveness and don’t let them monopolize the conversation.

One approach is to use the Socratic Method, in lay terms: Instead of stating opposing facts, which are often dismissed as “fake news,” ask questions that encourage them to think through their own logic or critical thinking.

If you’re speaking with someone close to you who has changed, try to remember who they were before and guide the conversation with little reminders of how they used to be. Changing a viewpoint is a slow process. You may need to make some distance or disengage for a period of time to protect yourself from frustration and anger; these conversations can become confrontational with folks trying insistently to drive home their point of view. Don’t ratchet up your level of frustration in response — that never works.

If a conversation becomes unproductive, emotional, or disrespectful, you have the right to end it by simply walking away. Protect your own mental peace by accepting what you can’t control.

I hope these concepts and approaches are helpful.

Dr. Green

What are you struggling with as a dedicated environmentalist and global citizen? Let us know by sending your questions and success stories in the text box below.

All participants are anonymous. Even Dr. Green has no idea who you are.

Send Dr. Green your questions and stories below:

All questions are considered intended for publication; published questions will be kept anonymous. Individual replies are not possible.

See you next time!

Disclaimer: This column is not a replacement for therapy, and the advice given is educational in nature, not a replacement for professional psychological or psychiatric therapy. This is a peer-driven support effort by The Revelator to inform and build community with environmental and wildlife defenders.

If you are feeling critically depressed and suicidal, it’s time to immediately find professional help. Go to your closest emergency room or call the following numbers to get immediate help in your area:

SUICIDE HOTLINES

Worldwide: http://www.befrienders.org/support/

United Kingdom: http://www.samaritans.org

USA: https://988lifeline.org

1-800-273-TALK

Resources:

Factors related to susceptibility and recruitment by cults   National Institutes of Health. (Curtis, J M, and M J Curtis. “Factors related to susceptibility and recruitment by cults.” Psychological reports vol. 73,2 (1993): 451-60. doi:10.2466/pr0.1993.73.2.451).

The International Cultic Studies Association  ICSA is not an activist or advocacy group, but a unique nonprofit organization grounded in three pillars: advancing knowledge, fostering open dialogue, and supporting recovery from cultic and coercive influence.

The Center for Humane Technology   This nonprofit is dedicated to ensuring that today’s most consequential technologies, such as AI and social media, actually serve humanity. We bring clarity to how the tech ecosystem works in order to shift the incentives that drive it.

Film: “The Social Dilemma”

Film: “The Brainwashing of My Dad”

The Definitive Guide to Helping People Trapped in a Cult: Learn how to help friends and family being influenced by harmful cults.

The Freedom of Mind Resource Center   Founded by leading cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan, a former member of the notorious Moonies cult in the 1970s who experienced firsthand the devastating effects of undue influence and coercion. His escape from the Moonies and subsequent recovery process inspired him to dedicate his life to understanding and exposing the deceptive tactics used by cults and manipulative groups.

“Why do people join cults?” TedEd with Janja Lalich

“Why People Join Cults and Why They Stay” by Stephen Mather

Republish this article for free! Read our reprint policy. Previously in The Revelator:

Feeling Anxiety About Climate Change and Other Environmental Threats? These Five New Books Can Help

The post Dr. Green: Why Some People and Groups Become Resistant to Science appeared first on The Revelator.

The Turkish and Australian COP31 host governments and the International Renewable Energy Agency have called for a stronger global push to run vehicles, industry and buildings on electricity rather than fossil fuels, ahead of this year’s COP31 climate talks.

COP31 President Murat Kurum told the Copenhagen Climate Ministerial on Wednesday that governments should be “decarbonising the way we generate electricity, but also expanding electrification into every sphere of life”.

“We must make the technologies of the future accessible at scale – and we must ensure that no one is left behind,” he told the gathering of climate diplomats and ministers from around 40 countries in the Danish capital.

Kurum said that the percentage of final energy consumption which is met by electricity – the key metric of electrification, which is currently around 20% globally – should be increased “as much as we possibly can”.

The head of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Francesco La Camera, also addressed the Copenhagen gathering. While his comments to ministers were not public, IRENA released a statement ahead of the talks calling for a goal to increase electricity’s share of final energy consumption to 35% by 2035.

The two officials did not reference the war with Iran and the price hikes in oil and gas as a result of related supply disruptions, but UN and other leaders have used this as an argument in favour of transitioning away from planet-heating fossil fuels towards clean, domestically produced renewables.

35 by 35 goal

“The world must adapt to a new energy reality,” La Camera said in the IRENA statement. “Beyond the goals of tripling renewables and doubling energy efficiency [by 2030] lies the wider challenge of transforming entire energy systems and reducing fossil fuel use across supply and demand. Electrification and fossil fuel phase-out are inseparable and must advance together.”

He said electrification, which can be achieved through technologies like electric heat pumps, vehicles and cookers, will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, enhance energy security and bolster economic competitiveness.

A new “transitioning away from fossil fuels” roadmap released by IRENA says this 35% by 2035 electrification goal is vital if the world is to “remain” on a pathway to limit global warming to 1.5C. Electrification should reach at least 50% by 2050, it adds.

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To enable this goal to be met, the amount of money invested in power grids each year should double from $0.5 trillion in 2025 to around $1 trillion each year until 2035. Significant investment in electricity storage and demand flexibility is also needed, the roadmap says.

Clémence Dubois, campaigns manager for green group 350.org, welcomed Kurum’s remarks but added that electrification and energy justice should be funded through large developed countries taxing the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies.

Also on Wednesday, Australian climate minister and COP31 President of Negotiations Chris Bowen met with the EU’s energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen.

An official summary of the meeting said they discussed electrification “as one of the most powerful policies available to reduce exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets and improve energy security”.

Collective goal or coalition?

The statement says they “agreed to work together on a new global initiative on electrification”. It is not yet clear whether the Turkish government, or the Australian government which is tasked with leading the COP31 negotiations, will attempt to get all countries to agree to an electrification goal at November’s climate summit in Antalya.

If so, such a goal could be collectively endorsed by all nations in a COP decision, as with the COP28 targets to triple renewables capacity and double the rate of growth in energy efficiency, both by 2030. Where there is narrower support, other goals have been voluntarily launched at COPs, backed by coalitions of countries, including pledges to boost nuclear energy, biofuels and grid investment.

A source with knowledge of Türkiye’s priorities confirmed that electrification is important to the COP31 host, alongside energy storage, energy security, clean cooking and resilient and clean energy systems.

This article was updated to include information about Chris Bowen’s meeting with Dan Jørgensen

The post Electrification emerges as COP31 priority appeared first on Climate Home News.

Nearly 30% of cars sold this year are set to be electric as the war in Iran has sent petrol and diesel prices soaring and drivers in many parts of the world look to electric vehicles as a cheaper alternative. 

The analysis, released on Wednesday by the International Energy Agency (IEA), shows that in March, after Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz following US and Israeli military strikes, around 30 countries saw record-breaking monthly sales of battery electric cars and plug-in hybrids. 

In the first three months of the year, sales grew by 80% in Asian countries outside of China and by 75% in Latin America – driven by adoption in Brazil and Mexico – compared to the same period last year. In Europe, sales were up close to 30% year-on-year. 

Iran war creates upside potential for EV sales

Globally, electric car sales are expected to grow to 23 million this year, accounting for 28% of total car sales, despite falling in China and the US in the first quarter of the year.

In Europe, one in three cars sold this year is projected to be electric. In China, early data for April shows that monthly sales grew to more than 60% of total car sales. Outside China, sales are projected to rise by more than 50% in Asian countries and 45% in Latin America this year.  

Araceli Fernandez, the head of the IEA’s technology innovation unit, said the energy crisis caused by the Middle East war has spotlighted the benefits of driving an electric car and created “an upside potential” for the agency’s EV forecast this year. But, she added, it will take time for this to be reflected in the market, partly because of the time lag between ordering a car and it being ready to drive. 

Consumers might also be weary of the impact of the war on the economy and wait for government support and policy incentives to make the switch to electric. As a result, the extent to which the growth in sales recorded since the start of the year can be attributed to the energy crisis is hard to estimate, IEA analysts said. 

Attractive response to the energy crisis 

The road transport sector is the largest consumer of oil, accounting for close to half of global demand. 

The IEA has described the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, through which around a fifth of oil and gas trade passes, as the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”. Earlier this week, it warned that global oil inventories were depleting at record pace.

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How governments respond to soaring oil prices could shape the global car market for years to come, according to the Paris-based agency, which was set up to respond to the oil crisis of the 1970s. 

Unlike in the 1970s, electric vehicles are now an alternative to oil dependence for transport. In 2025, a quarter of all new cars sold were electric. That year, the global EV fleet avoided the consumption of around 1.7 million barrels of oil per day, according to the IEA’s analysis. 

“Many governments in oil-importing countries in particular will potentially turn to identify ways for scaling up electric vehicle deployment,” said Timur Gül, the IEA’s chief energy technology officer. 

Southeast Asia’s ‘spectacular growth’ 

Countries in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, the largest EV market in the region, have already announced plans to expand or extend EV tax incentives in response to the energy crisis. 

“It’s possible that other countries will follow,” said Gül, adding that supportive policies being implemented this year could lead to “important upside potential for EV sales”. 

The region, which heavily depends on fuel imports from the Middle East, has been particularly affected by the crisis, with prices at the pump spiking. 

In Nepal, where nearly three-quarters of new cars sold are electric, the EV roll-out has helped cushion the impact of the oil shock. In Bangladesh, where significant barriers to EV deployment remain, dealers of electric cars, scooters and three-wheelers said they have seen a rise in sales and customer enquiries in recent months.

Gül said electric car sales across Southeast Asia have seen “spectacular growth” over the last two to three years, reaching nearly 20% of car sales across the region last year, led mainly by Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.  

More than half of the cars sold in the region were made by Chinese carmakers but around a third were manufactured by Vietnamese company VinFast, whose small affordable models have enabled mass adoption in the country. Nearly 40% of new car sales in Vietnam were electric in 2025 – above levels seen in most European countries. 

China’s hegemony 

Technological advances and cheaper prices have continued to drive EV deployment in China, the world’s largest oil importer. 

In 2025, seven out of 10 electric cars sold in the country were cheaper to buy than their petrol and diesel engine counterparts in Europe. The cost of owning an electric truck is now competitive with owning a diesel one and last year, one in four trucks sold in China were electric – a market that doubled twice in just two years. 

Cheaper EVs saw car exports from China double in 2025, mostly targeting Europe and Asia. Chinese automakers manufactured 60% of electric cars sold around the world last year and imports of Chinese cars account for more than half of sales outside Europe and the US. 

“We are seeing increasingly intense competition domestically in China, which is squeezing the margins for electric car manufacturers and is making them increasingly look for export opportunities overseas,” said Fernandez.

The post Electric car sales race ahead in SE Asia and Latin America amid oil supply crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.

When Yale E360 launched in 2008, it was a pioneer in online environmental journalism, filling a critical gap in coverage. As he prepares to step down, founding editor Roger Cohn reflects on his years at e360, his debt to the writers he’s worked with, and his hopes for the future.

Read more on E360 →

With the average price of gasoline in the United States above $4.50 a gallon — about a 40 percent rise since the Iran war began in late February — Americans have been climbing into their cars less often, and stepping onto trains and buses instead. It’s been declared the largest oil supply disruption in history, with U.S. drivers paying $45 billion more for gasoline and diesel compared to last year. Some 44 percent of U.S. adults say they’ve cut back on driving because of high gas prices, according to a survey in late April from ABC News, The Washington Post, and Ipsos.

Cities across the country have seen rising numbers of people riding public transit, from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. Sales of used electric vehicles and hybrid cars have grown substantially over the past couple of months. People are replacing car trips with bikes and scooters; railroads like Amtrak have reported more riders than usual. Much of America is built around highways and suburbs, however, making alternative transportation difficult. So, many people are cutting down on driving without ditching their vehicles, by carpooling, consolidating errands, or working remotely more often.

It could be the start of a green, global shift, according to some experts — even if most Americans eventually end up hopping back in their cars. That’s because the crisis is hitting the hardest in Asia, which was projected to account for nearly all the increase in oil and gas use over the coming decades, but is now rethinking its reliance on fossil fuels. 

“If Asia turns around and says, ‘No, we’re not going to grow with fossil fuels, we are going to grow with electrotech,’ that means fossil fuels will peak, and will peak sooner than we think,” said Daan Walter, who leads strategy research on the future of energy for the think tank Ember. “It’s very likely that if this crisis continues to be as bad as it is, and we see this conversion happening, that we’re currently living in the peak year of oil, and that demand will just never come back to the level that it was just before Hormuz closed.”

With roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil shipments choked off in the Strait of Hormuz, households and industries have found ways to use less of it. This can create what economists call “demand destruction” for oil — meaning that the world simply won’t need as much as it used to. The phenomenon is already happening across the globe, according to the International Energy Agency. Last week, the agency reiterated that demand for oil is being destroyed, forecasting a contraction of 420,000 barrels a day this year. It’s a silver lining in an otherwise grim situation: Price shocks driven by conflict in the Middle East are nudging people away from fossil fuels.

While people sometimes use “demand destruction” as a dramatic way to refer to a short-term drop in demand, the phrase more accurately describes a deeper economic shift. “To me, the term ‘demand destruction’ really only makes sense if you’re talking about it as a longer-term thing. Like, it’s truly destroyed the source of demand,” said Kenneth Gillingham, a professor of environmental and energy economics at Yale University.

The destruction in global oil demand has been concentrated in Asia rather than in the U.S., where the country’s overall wealth enables people to pay more for fuel relative to much of the world, even as it strains the budgets of low- and middle-income Americans. Factories in Japan are producing fewer petrochemical products — demand for naphtha, used to make plastics and chemicals, fell by a quarter year-over-year — amplifying the country’s “long-term declining trend” in oil demand, according to the International Energy Agency. Its report notes that gasoline demand in South Korea fell by about 5 percent as prices rose at the pump, suggesting that behavioral changes are also contributing to demand destruction. As the crisis in the Middle East deepened, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung called for a sharp shift to renewable energy, saying, “Our future will be at serious risk if we continue to rely on fossil fuels.” 

Countries and companies are also decreasing their oil use in response to the crisis. Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka have all introduced four-day work weeks to encourage fewer commutes.

To what extent these fuel-saving adjustments stick around is an open question. President Donald Trump has promised that oil prices will “drop like a rock” once the war in Iran ends. But even after shipping through the Strait of Hormuz resumes, oil supplies could remain tight for months as facilities are repaired and wells get restarted. The Iran war is also the second oil shock in recent years, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and experts say that this pattern of oil crises is more likely to lead to a prolonged fall in demand. 

Passengers on the D-line subway train in New York City on May 15.
Charly Triballeau / AFP via Getty Images

“If prices are low for a very, very long time, and then you have a shock, it’s easy to write it off as not a big deal, not going to happen again. But if you continue getting shocks, then you’re like, ‘Maybe I should really start thinking about making some changes,'” Gillingham said. 

A report from Ember, co-written by Walter, makes the case that the “twin fossil shock” of the 2020s opens up new political possibilities, just as the double oil shocks in the 1970s prompted investments in energy efficiency and nuclear power. “The parallels with the 1970s oil shocks are striking. But so too is the difference,” the authors write. “For the first time, there are scalable, cost-competitive alternatives. Solar, wind, batteries, EVs, and other electrotech offer a permanent route out of fossil dependence.” 

The report predicts that Asia, affected the most by the current oil crisis, will fast-track electrification, switching to EVs and pushing liquefied natural gas out of power generation. The first sign that may already be happening: In March, after the bombing of Iran had started, China’s exports of solar, batteries, and electric vehicles surged.

“It really shakes countries and companies around the world out of this complacency of thinking that there is a path back to a normal stable fossil system,” Walter said. “Import dependency is just incredibly risky at the moment, and the second crisis kind of confirms that.”

And some of the new routines people adopt during the oil crisis could endure. “A shock like the big increase in gas prices, or an earthquake that closes a freeway, is really helpful in getting people to change behavior,” said Susan Handy, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis. “It is really hard to get people to change behavior without those kinds of shocks — not that we want these things to happen, but it is what pushes behavior change.” When a bridge that collapsed reopens, for instance, most people will go back to driving, but some of them will keep their new biking routine, she said.

So what determines whether a habit sticks? It comes down to what people grow to like, Handy said. People might realize they enjoy riding a bike around town or reading on the bus, as opposed to sitting behind the wheel in traffic, once they have reason to try it. “I think there are probably more alternatives out there than people realize, or the alternatives may be better than they realize,” Handy said. Rising prices can also prompt people to adopt more energy-efficient vehicles or appliances, locking them into lower fuel usage going forward.

Of course, Americans are still driving a lot — and will probably continue to do so. “We’ve seen oil prices go up and down many, many times in our history, even in recent history,” Gillingham said. “Generally, those shorter-term behaviors tend to bounce back to where they were before.” 

But in the global picture, it’s looking more and more likely that the second oil crisis in half a decade, at a moment when alternatives to fossil fuels are becoming cheaper and widespread, may lead to more lasting changes, accelerating the decline of oil — and the rise of cleaner replacements. As the author Rebecca Solnit wrote in a recent newsletter: “What if in a decade or a century people remember this as the point when the world really turned away from this filthy, corrupting, unreliable, destructive resource?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Iran war is destroying oil demand. Could it also spark a shift to clean energy? on May 20, 2026.

The Trump administration has announced what it is calling “a major step forward” in the fight against a class of toxic chemicals called PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Extended exposure to PFAS, often referred to as “forever chemicals” because they can persist indefinitely in the environment, has been linked to various cancers, autoimmune diseases, and other harms.

On Monday, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lauded Donald Trump as the first president who is “completely committed” to removing forever chemicals, which are found at unsafe levels in tap water in some 80 percent of congressional districts and lurk in the blood of 97 percent of Americans. 

But what Kennedy considers a step forward looks like a big step back to most of those who have long kept an eye on the issue. That’s because the Trump administration is unraveling key parts of the PFAS limits approved by Joe Biden’s administration in 2024, which are the first and only regulations to put limits on PFAS in drinking water in the nation’s history. Restrictions on four substances in the PFAS class would be rescinded entirely, while water utilities would be given two additional years to comply with limits for two other substances. The Environmental Protection Agency first signaled its intention to make these changes last year, just a few months after Trump took office. The changes will be finalized after a 60-day public comment period expires. 

Secretary Kennedy, who is known for his pledge to “Make America Healthy Again,” turned attention instead to the EPA’s recent announcement of $1 billion in grant funding for small and disadvantaged communities to detect and eliminate PFAS. “We have a president who has made a greater financial commitment than any president in U.S. history,” Kennedy said. But the commitment was not exactly Trump’s to make: The $1 billion comes from an appropriation made by Congress in 2021, when Joe Biden was president. 

PFAS has been used in a wide variety of products, including industrial firefighting foams, for decades. As evidence of health harms linked to these substances has mounted, many manufacturers have developed new types of PFAS that have comparatively shorter lifespans. But this new generation of chemicals, of which there are thousands of members, may also cause adverse health impacts.

“The Biden administration had at least set health protective limits for six of these chemicals out of the literally thousands that have been registered for use in the marketplace,” said John Rumpler, clean water director for the environmental advocacy nonprofit Environment America. “Now the EPA is walking back from even that small step toward protecting our drinking water.” 

On Monday, the administration tried to rationalize the proposed roll backs by saying that Biden-era PFAS limits were approved in a rush that would have made them vulnerable to ongoing legal challenges. Water utilities and chemical companies have sued the EPA over its PFAS rules, arguing that the regulations are procedurally flawed, financially onerous, and require compliance on timelines that are too tight. 

But the EPA has itself sought to undermine the limits since Trump took office last year, asking a federal appeals court to summarily vacate Biden-era restrictions on four types of PFAS last fall. The EPA has since stopped defending the standards in court. 

“This is about being realistic,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said at an event alongside Kennedy on Monday. “A deadline you cannot physically meet is not a public health protection.” He pointed to the fact that technology capable of removing the chemicals is improving and may eventually bring costs down for utilities burdened by the price of removing PFAS from tap water. 

In a statement provided to Grist, the EPA said that “the previous administration’s rule set deadlines many water systems simply could not meet — risking costly violations that punish communities without removing a single part per trillion from anyone’s tap.”

So far, the EPA has offered little in the way of a regulatory substitute for the limits it is removing. “I don’t think there’s anything new here,” said Jared Thompson, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental protection group that is one of several groups defending the Biden-era limits in ongoing litigation brought by chemical companies.

“It seems like they have largely adopted the positions of the chemical industry challengers and the water industry challengers who are saying that these standards are not appropriate,” he added. 

Zeldin asserted that the EPA is going to “do it right” this time, and the EPA’s statement to Grist said that “it is entirely possible the result will be more stringent requirements” once the four PFAS substances whose limits are being rescinded are reviewed a second time.

But some outside experts think Zeldin is already doing it wrong. The Safe Drinking Water Act, which Congress passed in 1974, has a provision that states that the EPA can’t weaken drinking water standards once they’ve been set.

“There are going to be legal challenges,” said Richard L. Revesz, dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law and former administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Biden. “They’ll have to give reasons and those reasons are very likely to be inadequate.” 

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s EPA vows to fight ‘forever chemicals’ by loosening regulations on May 20, 2026.

Before he became prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney was perhaps one of the world’s biggest supporters of the idea that climate action was good business. He led the clean energy investment fund for Brookfield, one of the world’s largest financial firms, and founded a global alliance of bankers and politicians who wanted to channel their resources toward green energy. When he took over from outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, many expected that he would follow the previous Liberal leader’s ambitious climate agenda, which included taxing fossil fuels and subsidizing clean technology. 

But just like in Carney’s beloved sport of hockey, momentum in the climate world can change fast. In the year since he took over, Carney has unveiled a suite of new policies to gut Canada’s ambitious climate regulations and support the country’s powerful fossil fuel industry. This reversal reached a climax last week when he struck a deal with the province of Alberta to prop up its tar sands oil industry and vowed to expand the country’s power grid through the use of natural gas.

Carney is pitching the reversal as a political and economic necessity. Canada is facing the prospect of a severe economic downturn as a result of President Donald Trump’s disruptive trade agenda, and a group of conservatives in Alberta are waging a campaign to secede from Canada altogether. He has claimed that the country can achieve economic security by investing in oil and gas production while still making progress toward reducing its own carbon emissions.

“It will be an opportunity to accelerate the energy transition across Canada, and it’s also an opportunity for Canada to be a reliable supplier for partners across the globe, and to do so in a manner that makes Canada more prosperous and independent,” said Carney in announcing the strategy. 

The reversal reveals a stark truth about the direction of global climate action: Despite the rapid deployment of clean energy, even countries and politicians once seen as climate leaders are turning to fossil fuels to protect against the turmoil of Trump’s trade disputes and the war in Iran. 

But Carney’s new strategy doesn’t seem to have pleased anyone. Major oil producers and conservatives in Alberta are still pressuring Carney for further concessions, and a broad spectrum of left-wing politicians and civil society groups have condemned it as short-sighted. The critics argue that doubling down on fossil fuel exports is the wrong move at a time when the rest of the world may be shifting away from them.

“The problem is we’re defaulting back to what Canada’s known how to do in the past, rather than what the world’s going to need in the future,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist at the University of British Columbia who served as chair of the federal government’s climate policy advisory board until he resigned late last year. 

Carney has already rolled back several of Trudeau’s climate initiatives. He scrapped Canada’s federal electric vehicle mandate and eliminated the country’s unpopular consumer carbon tax, which added a surcharge on gas stations and power bills. The one major policy he left alone was the “industrial carbon price,” which charges polluters a fee for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit. The nation’s biggest emitters are multinational oil and gas companies, which produce sticky crude from the massive tar sands fields in Alberta; the oil sector produces about 30 percent of Canada’s emissions, more than buildings or cars.

Canada and Alberta have a mutual dependence. Oil makes up more than 15 percent of Canada’s export volume, and Alberta’s oil wealth makes it a net contributor to the federal budget. Under the Canadian constitution, provinces have control over natural resources, and Alberta leaders have long viewed the industrial carbon tax as a threat to their sovereignty. But the oil industry in Alberta needs help from the Liberal government, too. The inland province is producing more oil than it can sell, and the industry’s future growth depends on building another pipeline to the Pacific Ocean, which needs federal support. (The existing pipeline to the Pacific is nearing capacity. Oil producers are also seeking to build new pipelines to the United States.)

Last week, Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith unveiled a “grand bargain” meant to resolve this conflict: Carney removed a proposed hard cap on carbon emissions from the oil sector, and in exchange Alberta agreed to support a long-term increase in carbon prices. The federal government will also expedite permitting for a new Pacific Coast pipeline, while oil producers agreed to build a massive carbon capture system that would offset emissions from oil drilling.

Climate advocates in Canada say the final deal is toothless, and makes major concessions to the oil and gas industry. The deal will lower the headline price of the industrial carbon tax and slow down the rate of the price increase by three-quarters, whereas Carney had at first proposed to tighten the price. The proposed carbon capture project has also shrunk to a fraction of its original size, and the oil industry hasn’t agreed to it yet.

“It would have been a big enough motivator to find those emissions cuts, but it wouldn’t have jeopardized the possibility of oil and gas companies making money,” said Julia Levin, the associate director for national climate policy at the nonprofit Environmental Defence. She noted that under the previous framework, the per-barrel cost of the carbon tax comes out to the price of a Timbit, the Canadian equivalent of a Munchkin donut hole: about 50 cents. Now, she says, “the companies don’t have to do anything at all for 15 years.” 

A Syncrude oil sands mining facility near Fort McKay, Alberta. Prime Minister Mark Carney is relying on oil produced in Alberta to help Canada weather the economic turbulence of President Trump’s trade war. Ed Jones / AFP via Getty Images

Even early news of a potential deal triggered a revolt within Carney’s own party, leading to the resignation of his climate minister, Steven Guilbeault, as well as two members of the government’s independent climate advisory panel. But the industry isn’t satisfied, either. The chief executive of the Canadian oil company Cernovus said last week he doesn’t think the country should have a carbon price at all, saying it “doesn’t incent us to decarbonize,” and some producers have said they still worry about making money even under the loose regulations. A leader of the Alberta separatist campaign said the deal only made him more convinced the province needs to leave Canada.

Richard Masson, a longtime oil sands executive who has worked for Shell and the government of Alberta, said that companies should see the carbon tax as the price of doing business in a country where most voters want some action on climate change.

“The producers will probably take a little bit less return, but in the world we’re in, there’s enough money to go around,” he said. “You’re saying, ‘I’m going to spend a premium on this to prevent having the world turn its back on me.’”

Masson also said that the ultimate climate impact of the deal depends on whether a pipeline to the Pacific actually comes together. Carney has already eased environmental permitting laws to make it easier, and last month he created a $25 billion development fund that could help pay for construction. But there is still no private company that has come forward to build it, and a number of First Nations tribes with treaty rights on the Pacific coast have rejected the idea. 

“No offer of equity or ownership will change our position, and no proponent is acceptable to us,” said Marilyn Slett, president of the Coastal First Nations, in response to the pipeline plan. First Nations have ironclad consultation rights under British Columbia provincial law, and securing a pipeline without tribal agreement will be impossible.

Even so, in what seemed to be a further embrace of fossil fuels for economic security, Carney also unveiled a “national electricity strategy” at the same time as the Alberta deal. This strategy seeks to double the size of Canada’s grid by 2050 through investments in renewable energy and a new network of transmission lines connecting the provinces. But it also calls for natural gas to have a major role on Canada’s future power grid, even though the country has made major investments in zero-carbon power and gets most of its electricity from hydropower dams and nuclear reactors. 

Here again, the Carney government framed the decision as a necessary step toward geopolitical resilience. The strategy claims that “Canada’s economic growth and long-term competitiveness will depend on its ability to attract and retain investment in high-growth, electricity-intensive sectors, including artificial intelligence … liquid natural gas export facilities, mining, and critical minerals.”

Underlying all these moves is the assumption that fossil fuels will provide protection against economic uncertainty. As long as Canada can extract and export natural resources, it will be able to balance its budgets and keep its citizens safe. But despite Carney’s reputation as a shrewd central banker, critics of his government view the prime minister’s new strategy as short-sighted — Carney is pinning his economic hopes on the sale of a commodity that the world is starting to abandon.

“This is the sort of decision that they’re probably happy about today, and we will look back in 10 years and think, ‘What the hell were we doing?’” said Donner, the former chair of the government’s climate advisory board.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Once a climate leader, Canada is now doubling down on oil on May 20, 2026.

A decade ago, illicit gold miners in the Brazilian Amazon began invading the lands of the Yanomami people. New research finds a clear link between the rush of illegal mining and a surge of malaria among the Yanomami.

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Since coming to power in 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative government has overseen an illiberal turn, largely unchallenged by a divided opposition and a compliant mainstream media. Civil society organisations have stepped up to fill that gap – but at considerable cost. Whether they can sustain that role will depend on stronger public participation and structural support. 

For many Europeans, democratic backsliding is no longer something that happens elsewhere. In V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2026, five European countries – Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the UK – have been added to the list of autocratisers. Greece, on the other hand, has been on this list for several years: its episode of democratic decline, ranking seventh globally in terms of the magnitude of democratic deterioration, began in 2020. The country remains an electoral democracy, but it has lost its status as a liberal democracy, and its trajectory has been consistently downward. 

While Greece’s democratic decline is clearly part of a larger wave, what makes it distinctive is the speed and the method with which it’s unfolding. The fact that it’s happening inside the European Union, in a country that had, within living memory, emerged from a military dictatorship, makes it particularly concerning. 

Democratically unravelling a democracy  

In July 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his centre-right party Nea Dimokratia (“New Democracy”) won a strong parliamentary majority and unseated left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who had been in power since 2015. Among the first pieces of legislation the new government passed was the so-called Executive State (“Εpiteliko Κratos”), which placed the National Intelligence Service, the EYP, under the direct control of the Prime Minister’s Office. Political oversight of the EYP was handed to the PM’s Secretary General and nephew, Grigoris Dimitriadis. At the same time, the government quietly amended the qualification requirements for the head of the EYP, removing the prerequisite of holding a university degree – a change widely seen as tailor-made to allow the appointment of Panagiotis Kontoleon.  

Meanwhile, the public broadcaster ERT, along with the national press agency AMNA, was also brought under tighter government control, while independent auditing bodies, such as the General Inspector of Public Administration, were disbanded.  

None of this was hidden. It was done through legislation, in plain sight, with an outright parliamentary majority that made institutional opposition powerless. The mainstream media, owned by a handful of oligarchs with conspicuous ties to the ruling party, looked the other way. 

The Covid-19 pandemic handed the government another opportunity to centralise power. The distribution of public health state advertising funds to media outlets through a scheme that became known as the “Petsas list” made visible a system of government influence over the media that had until then been less openly discussed. Public money was flowing to outlets that were sympathetic to the government; outlets that were critical received disproportionately smaller amounts and in some cases nothing at all. No law was broken, but the effect on a media landscape, already strained by the economic crisis, was significant. 

Then came a spying scandal. In 2022, it emerged that a powerful spyware called Predator had been used to monitor opposition politicians, journalists, senior military figures, and even government ministers. The Hellenic Data Protection Authority (DPA) eventually confirmed that at least 87 individuals had been illegally targeted with this spyware, and 27 of them had also been simultaneously monitored by the EYP through legal channels. Dimitriadis resigned, and so did the head of the EYP, but Mitsotakis denied knowledge. Two prosecutors who had been tasked with investigating the case were removed from it after submitting a second formal request for information to the DPA. In February 2026, four executives involved in supplying Predator were convicted in connection with the scandal. No government official has been charged to this day. 

The Predator affair was not simply a surveillance scandal, but a stress test that revealed the full architecture of a system in construction since 2019: an intelligence service with no meaningful independence from the executive, a media landscape too compromised to perform serious scrutiny, a parliamentary majority capable of rewriting inconvenient rules on short notice, and a justice system whose handling of these and other landmark cases left open questions that remain, to date, publicly unanswered.  

In February 2024, the European Parliament adopted its first-ever resolution on Greece, citing grave concerns about threats to democracy, the rule of law, and fundamental rights. That it took EU institutions five years and a major spying scandal to react tells its own story about the limits of European oversight. 

By then, the question was no longer whether Greek democracy was under pressure – that much was settled – but who, if anyone, was actually doing the work of accountability that formal institutions had either abandoned or been stripped of the capacity to perform. 

The state pushes back 

History has taught that governments that capture institutions rarely stop there. Once the formal mechanisms of oversight have been hollowed out, the next target is whoever has taken up the slack. Greece has been no exception: as a small ecosystem of civil society organisations (CSOs) and independent journalists grew more visible and more effective at holding power to account, the state responded by exerting pressure to make their work as difficult as possible. 

Some of that pressure has worn the face of bureaucratic procedure. The NGO registry created in 2020 by the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, presented as a transparency measure, became in practice an instrument of selective exclusion. Refugee Support Aegean, one of the most established legal aid organisations working with refugees and asylum seekers in the country, was denied registration despite meeting all legal requirements, on the stated grounds that providing support to persons facing deportation orders contradicted Greek law. Even though the right to legal representation for persons facing deportation is enshrined in Greek, EU, and international law, the rejection stood. It was overturned before the Council of State. Whether intended or not, the message to other organisations operating in the same space was clear. 

In early 2026, the Migration Ministry pushed further still, passing amendments to the Migration Code that elevated routine humanitarian work – such as providing food, shelter, or assistance to migrants – to a serious criminal offence. Membership of a registered NGO is now considered an aggravating circumstance. The proposals were introduced days after 24 humanitarian workers in Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, had been acquitted of charges they had spent eight years fighting. Five years of formal recommendations from the EU, the Council of Europe, and the UN, all calling on Greece to lift arbitrary restrictions on civil society in the migration field, had apparently registered as a reason to accelerate, not reverse, the squeeze. 

Legal intimidation has reached well beyond the migration sector. When journalists at Reporters United and Efimerida ton Syntakton published their investigations into the Predator scandal, and specifically the role played by Grigoris Dimitriadis as the one who held political oversight of the EYP, the response came on the same day as Dimitriadis’s resignation: a lawsuit demanding close to one million euros in damages from the journalists and their outlets. International press freedom bodies were unambiguous in their characterisation of the action as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP), aimed not at winning in court but at putting economic strain, stress, and uncertainty on independent media. In 2025, after years of proceedings, an Athens court dismissed the case entirely, ruling the reporting accurate and finding nothing defamatory in any of the articles. 

Once the formal mechanisms of oversight have been hollowed out, the next target is whoever has taken up the slack.

The more insidious form of pressure has been reputational. In early 2026, Vouliwatch (a democracy watchdog organisation I co-founded) and the investigative outlet Solomon published the “Consultocracy Report”, a systematic study of the Greek public administration’s use of private consultancy services, built entirely from official public procurement data. The findings were concerning: a dramatic rise in contracts, the majority of which were awarded without competitive tendering, and documented cases of private consultancy firms involved in drafting legislation. The government chose not to engage with the report. Instead, at an official press briefing, government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis made false claims about the report’s methodology and insinuated, also falsely, that Vouliwatch was politically motivated and funded by the European Left.  

Publicly discrediting CSOs and journalists who challenge the dominant narrative, question policies, and shed light on political scandals has been a recurrent tactic of the Mitsotakis government over the past years. The prime minister himself has publicly attacked journalists during speeches in parliament and press briefings, while ministers have repeatedly questioned the integrity of well-established international organisations such as Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International. 

Taken individually, each of these tactics – registry exclusions, criminal law amendments, SLAPP litigation, public smear campaigns – might be dismissed as isolated incidents of overreach. Taken together, they point to something more deliberate: an environment in which accountability work is made increasingly costly, legally fraught, professionally risky, and personally draining. The goal of all this is not necessarily to destroy the organisations in question, but to ensure that the cost of scrutiny is high enough to deter the next investigation, the next campaign, the next report that asks uncomfortable questions. 

Civil society on the front line 

Against this backdrop of chronic underfunding, legal harassment, and coordinated public delegitimisation, something unexpected has happened: the civil society ecosystem has held and, in some respects, even grown. 

This is not a given. Greek civil society as we know it today is young. Much of it emerged directly from the wreckage of the financial crisis, built by people who watched the formal political system fail catastrophically and decided, for various reasons, to try a different approach. These organisations were never well-resourced. They have always been viewed with suspicion rather than respect: in Greece, the concept of an independent, non-partisan civic sector sits uncomfortably against a political culture in which virtually every collective endeavour has traditionally been understood through a partisan lens.  

State funding is either unavailable or comes with obvious strings attached. Domestic philanthropy remains thin, while international foundations rarely take notice of Greece. The EU project funding that sustains much of the sector is a lifeline but comes at a heavy cost: it requires staff to spend significant proportions of their time on compliance bureaucracy and deliverables that, more often than not, have little to do with the purpose that brought them into the sector in the first place. 

What Greek CSOs have achieved despite these constraints is worth taking seriously. In the years since democratic backsliding accelerated, together with independent journalism outlets, CSOs have fulfilled a role that formal democratic institutions have been either unwilling or unable to perform. They have monitored government practices, pursued freedom of information requests that ministries ignored, and taken legal action when they were ignored. They produced investigative work on the Predator scandal, on the Petsas list, on the concentration of media ownership, on procurement irregularities, on pushbacks at sea – work that was subsequently picked up by European institutions, informing  resolutions, rule of law reports, and parliamentary inquiries.  

They have reported Greece’s situation to EU bodies not because they expected immediate countermeasures, but because building a documented, evidenced record of what is happening counts as accountability work in a context where domestic channels are blocked. The personal cost of this work has been real and is not discussed enough. Staff in these organisations are, with very few exceptions, overworked and underpaid. They have been targets of coordinated social media harassment. Some have faced SLAPP litigation that drags on for years, even when it ultimately fails. Many have been named in government press briefings, dismissed by ministers, characterised as foreign agents or partisan operatives in oligarch-owned media. Operating under these conditions requires a particular kind of stubbornness that should not be romanticised. Burnout is endemic, and the sector is bound to lose good people and repel new entrants as these adverse conditions persist.  

Authoritarian tendencies do not consolidate only by weakening organisations; they consolidate when societies become convinced that collective action is futile.

Unfinished business 

What has changed – and this may be the most significant development of recent years – is that these organisations have started to work together. In the Greek context, such collaboration is harder than it sounds: fragmentation and competitive individualism are deeply rooted cultural tendencies that civil society has reproduced faithfully. The reflex to guard organisational territory, to duplicate rather than collaborate, to approach partnership with wariness: while these barriers are not unique to Greece, they have been particularly pronounced here.  

But something has shifted. Joint investigations, shared advocacy campaigns, coordinated submissions to European institutions, and co-signed public statements have become the norm. Through this cooperation, a closely knit community has formed, held together not by formal structure but by a shared understanding of what is at stake and, frankly, by the practical recognition that no single organisation is large enough to do this work alone. 

Importantly, this collaboration has not remained entirely confined to the civic sector. The work of CSOs has resonated with broader segments of society, particularly younger people who have grown up amid overlapping crises and whose trust in political institutions is often fragile or absent altogether. For many, these initiatives increasingly function less as traditional civil society and more as visible demonstrations that public participation, democratic accountability, and the defence of rights are not abstract ideals delegated to institutions, but collective responsibilities that citizens themselves can exercise. 

That may ultimately prove to be the decisive terrain. Authoritarian tendencies do not consolidate only by weakening organisations; they consolidate when societies become convinced that collective action is futile. In that sense, it could be argued that the state’s various harassment strategies are aimed not only at exhausting individual organisations, but at fracturing the fragile sense of civic possibility that has begun to emerge around them. So far, they have not succeeded. 

Greece’s civic sector has demonstrated, under pressure, that it is capable of doing things that matter. What is still lacking is the structural backing that would allow it to do those things sustainably, without relying indefinitely on individuals’ willingness to absorb costs that institutions should not be asking them to bear.  

That is the unfinished business. And it’s a European question as much as a Greek one. 

For decades, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, worked across many of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-besieged regions, funding thousands of humanitarian, healthcare, food, and disaster relief programs. That all changed last year when, days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration issued a stop-work order that suspended nearly all of USAID’s overseas programs. Then, last July, the administration informally dissolved the agency — leading to the largest withdrawal of American international development aid in more than 60 years. 

A new study published May 14 in the journal Science suggests the sudden USAID shutdown could have been linked to an uptick in violent conflict across much of Africa, with some of the most politically fragile regions seeing the largest spikes. Outside experts, however, caution that the findings are preliminary and may not capture the bigger picture. 

Farming and agricultural markets are easily disrupted by conflict, and when conflict occurs food security worsens because it can limit communities’ access to food. At the same time, deepening food insecurity in fragile political states contributes to social unrest. Climate impacts then layer onto this fragility. Extreme weather is second only to conflict in having the greatest effect on global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition, according to a U.N. report. That’s in part because it increasingly causes people to migrate as they flee places destroyed by rising seas and cataclysmic storms, which, in turn, can fuel conflict. 

“It is undeniable that USAID programming around food aid, including emergency food kitchens, therapeutic foods, and health and water programming on which basic food and nutritional security is built, provided a critical lifeline to millions of women, children, and families in severe nutritional deficits,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate change researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Who in their right mind would retract healthcare and food so abruptly, in so many places, when the direct result is people suffering and dying?”

In analyzing the impact of funding cuts on conflict across 870 subnational African regions that had been receiving different levels of USAID services, the Science paper’s authors found that in the roughly 10 months that followed the administration’s immediate withdrawal of aid, areas that had previously received more USAID support may have experienced more or different types of conflict. Using two global datasets that track funding disbursements and violent conflict, the study suggests that, in areas with high historical USAID funding, there was a 12.3 percent increase in conflict overall and a 7.3 percent surge in armed battles; protests and riots in these areas rose by 6.8 percent and battle-related fatalities by 9.3 percent after the shutdown. 

According to Austin Wright, a University of Chicago researcher who studies the political economy of conflict, and a co-author of the paper, the effects have been swift and destabilizing. “There is nothing that we’re aware of in recorded human history of the magnitude of that shutdown, in terms of ending a country’s commitment at a global scale,” said Wright. 

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Established in 1961, USAID was created to encourage economic and social development in emerging nations while countering the Cold War influence of the Soviet Union. Building resilience in foreign political systems has, in recent decades, been “one of the main goals of the work of USAID,” said Chelsea Marcho, a senior director for research and policy at the Food Security Leadership Council and former USAID official under former President Joe Biden, who was not involved in the Science paper. The study showing that violence may have been less severe in places where USAID had helped build stronger institutions, she said, only underscores the value of those aid investments. One example is the largely discontinued work to develop more resilient food systems across sub-Saharan African nations facing higher rates of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. 

But what many tend to forget, said Marcho, is that USAID also funded the bulk of pivotal data collection efforts across much of the world’s most food-insecure and climate-vulnerable regions. The dissolution of the agency has prompted widespread disruptions in everything from localized weather monitoring to one of the primary global famine early-warning systems. Although some of these systems have since been restored, the gaps in monitoring coupled with the decreased capacity across aid organizations means it is all the more difficult to understand what is happening on the ground. 

Indeed, the end of USAID has buckled our ability to measure the very outcomes of the end of USAID. “The visibility that we have around food security is potentially in decline at the same time that the risks to the system are increasing,” said Marcho. “How do we actually get the data we need?”

Mehrabi finds the new paper creates “more questions than answers.” He argues the mechanisms of measurement are unclear, the analysis period is too short, and the authors don’t adequately disentangle USAID’s specific effects from Trump’s simultaneous cuts to other U.S. international funding sources, such as the State Department. “The results are clearly early and tentative,” he said. “I think it is a leap to say this is all attributable to USAID.” 

Wright, for his part, acknowledged the study has limitations, including a short post-shock observation window of just 10 months, a disbursement baseline drawn from the first Trump administration rather than the period immediately before the cuts, and a geographic scope confined to Africa — leaving much open to future research. He says the team ran extensive robustness checks addressing these concerns, detailed in the paper’s appendix. 

After running his own reanalysis of their data, Mehrabi, however, remains unconvinced. What’s more, he warns against the possible takeaway that the presence of American developmental intervention equates to stability. The U.S., he argues, could more effectively help deter widespread conflict and hunger in nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, through more equitable benefit-sharing of natural resource extraction from critical mineral supply chains. This would “far outweigh any benefits from foreign aid,” proposed Mehrabi. 

Nevertheless, with an annual budget of tens of billions and an institutional history spanning 64 years, USAID’s developmental footprint throughout the African continent was no small thing. “One cannot simply create USAID all over again, or give it a mandate and give it funding and assume that we have waved a wand and we can reverse the damage done,” said Wright.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump gutted USAID. Hunger and violence followed. on May 19, 2026.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, record-breaking storms and flooding are impacting Māori land, health, and culture. And, according to a new national climate report, colonization has intensified those risks. 

The 2026 National Climate Change Risk Assessment is composed of four reports, including a companion document focused on Māori communities. That report argues that climate change is likely to deepen existing inequities shaped by colonization, exclusion from decision-making, and chronic underinvestment. 

To mitigate the impacts of climate change, the assessment points to Māori-led adaptation as uniquely effective. It calls for policy grounded in Māori customs and knowledge, Indigenous data sovereignty, and stronger Māori authority in climate decision-making.

“For more than 150 years Māori have been pushed to the margins, literally, by an aggressive colonization process,” said Paora Tapsell, who is Ngāti Whakaue and Ngāti Raukawa, and the director of the Kāika Institute of Climate Resilience at Lincoln University. 

The assessment, released earlier this month, adds to a growing body of national reports that highlight the harmful impacts of colonial policies on Indigenous peoples and the environment. In 2023, the United States’ Fifth National Climate Assessment found that land theft and colonization had exacerbated climate change’s impact. The year before, Australia’s State of the Environment report was prepared with an Indigenous lead author for the first time; it found that Indigenous peoples were more likely to be impacted by extreme weather events like fires. It too called for incorporating Indigenous knowledge into climate policies. Despite these findings, Indigenous leaders around the world say national governments are still not listening to them.

Aotearoa New Zealand recently experienced one of its most active severe weather seasons on record, with multiple declared states of emergency across the nation’s two islands. It also found that the country’s Indigenous peoples are essential in responding to such disasters. “The report accurately acknowledges that many kāinga [Māori settlements], despite their relative impoverishment, are still willing first responders on the front line of increasingly severe climate events,” Shaun Awatere, who is Ngāti Porou and lead author of the companion report, said.

The assessment’s seven interconnected risk areas span environmental, cultural, and economic domains. It says the loss of protected endemic species is not only a biodiversity issue but also affects food gathering places, the Māori lunar calendar, traditional customs, and intergenerational knowledge systems. According to the report, some species could face near-irreversible decline in parts of the country under high-emissions scenarios by 2090.

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Across Māori lands, climate-driven extreme weather events have had a destructive impact on infrastructure. But the report outlines how flooding, erosion, storms, and wildfires also present cultural risks by threatening tribal meeting places, burial sites, and communal homes. It warns that repeated damage and displacement could lead to long-term cultural fragmentation and disconnection from ancestral land.

Climate impacts may also be felt economically. Māori-owned forestry, farming, aquaculture, and horticulture enterprises face rising pressure from climate hazards, costs, and underinvestment in adaptation. Without structural reform and targeted support, the assessment says that economic vulnerability will increase. 

Awatere said the findings confirm what tribes have been saying for years. “Climate events do not arrive one at a time,” he said. “A storm floods a road, damages a marae [tribal meeting place], erodes whenua [land], disrupts access to mahinga kai [food gathering places], and overwhelms health and welfare systems that were already stretched, all at once. Each of those harms compounds the next.”

The assessment also said climate-driven displacement and ecological degradation could disrupt the transmission of language, customary practices, lineage relationships, and Indigenous knowledge systems between generations.

Awatere highlighted ongoing structural exclusion of Māori from climate planning and adaptation systems, despite the government’s obligations under the Treaty of Waitangi, which is the country’s founding document. The report describes legal exclusion and governance failure as a major risk multiplier, compounding climate impacts across all domains.

Awatere said the central question is whether adaptation plans will reflect that evidence, or whether Māori communities will continue to carry a disproportionate risk of harm.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Māori climate risk worsened by colonization, report finds on May 19, 2026.

EV sales accelerate, petrol cars stall Channel News brendan 19th May 2026 Teaser Media

Informing people about the health risks linked to climate change is twice as likely to spur public support for government-led climate action than messages focused on economic or environmental impacts, an international study has found.

Based on a survey of around 30,000 respondents in Brazil, India, Japan and South Africa carried out in late 2025, the report published this month by the Climate Opinion Research Exchange (CORE) and the Wellcome Trust reveals strong public support for climate action.

Over 80% of participants said they are concerned about the impacts from climate change, the survey shows. A majority also back government measures to prevent public health impacts associated with the climate crisis.

“Humanitarian emergencies” are already increasing around the world due to human-caused rising temperatures, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). More than a third of the global population is exposed to climate threats like wildfires, extreme heatwaves, and tropical storms and floods, it says. These threats are amplified by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Dustin Gilbreath, a researcher at CORE and one of the study’s lead authors, said that communicating these risks to the general public can be an effective way to inspire climate action, given that health is a basic concern for everyone across the political spectrum.

“If you suddenly find out that climate change is hurting your health and your children’s health, more people are rightfully more open to that argument,” he said. “At the end of the day, we all care about our health, regardless of our political inclinations.”

At COP28 in Dubai, more than 150 countries issued a declaration “expressing grave concern” over climate-fuelled health impacts, and pledged to strengthen policies that can cut carbon emissions and benefit people’s health in the process – for example by reducing air pollution from cars or factories.

More than 80 nations also endorsed a plan to improve the health sector’s resilience to climate impacts at the COP30 summit in Belém last year. The initiative received $300 million in philanthropic backing to help governments identify health risks, improve monitoring of climate threats, and strengthen emergency responses to extreme weather events, among other measures.

Despite these pledges, health has not been at the top of the agenda at key meetings like the recent conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. The Global Climate and Health Alliance, which represents 250 health organisations, said leaders in Santa Marta “did not address the importance of protecting people’s health”.

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Health priorities vary by country

To gain insights into people’s attitudes towards climate change, researchers tested 16 different messages with respondents in a survey-based randomised trial, comparing their reactions to messages on health-related issues like extreme heat or infectious diseases, and non-health issues related to jobs, the cost of living or nature. They also compared the participants’ reactions to a control group in each country who were not shown any messages.

While a majority were concerned about the health impacts from climate change, the types of effects that caused the strongest reaction varied depending on the country.

In South Africa, for example, public opinion resonated very strongly with messages related to children’s health. Messages linked to food and water insecurity also chimed well with South Africans, who recognised widely that climate change is a threat to people’s health.

The study’s authors say that context is key to understanding the effectiveness of messaging. South Africa, for example, has a young population with a median age of 28 years – compared to Europe’s 45 years – and has faced severe water shortages in cities like Cape Town, which was close to a “Day Zero” event after a major drought between 2016 and 2018. This term refers to the threat of municipal services running out of water.

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Brazilians, on the other hand, reacted strongly to messages related to mental health impacts, which performed better than other messages by a wide margin. These types of impacts include, for example, severe anxiety or stress caused by losses after a flood or a storm. In total, 93% of Brazilians said they are somewhat, or very concerned about, climate change.

Neha Dewan, senior advisor at the Wellcome Trust, a health-focused charitable foundation, said this finding was “counter-intuitive”, given that mental health is often seen as less of a priority. “This really helps us see what’s unexpected and find newer ways of reaching different audiences,” she added.

In Japan, extreme heat was the top-performing message, while in India it was air pollution and access to healthcare. Dewan said the India results confirm what people already discuss informally. “Every time I’m back home seeing family in India, everybody talks about air pollution. It’s the living, breathing reality.”

Commission urges government action

Dewan said she hoped the findings “go beyond journals” and instead can “actually end up in society”, with the goal of helping “empower policy conversations”. Respondents across countries firmly supported government action to prevent or protect them from the health impacts of a warming climate.

In Brazil and South Africa, emissions-cutting measures such as building solar capacity to produce clean energy had more than 90% support, while in India and Japan respondents strongly backed adaptation measures like investments in allowing air-conditioned public buildings to be used during heatwaves.

Ahead of the May 18-23 World Health Assembly, the WHO’s highest decision-making body, experts highlighted the urgency of implementing such steps. The Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health, composed of former global leaders and chaired by former Icelandic Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, called on governments “to take forward climate action that delivers benefits for human health”.

The commission issued a 17-point plan to address health impacts from the climate crisis, which includes declaring climate change a “global health emergency” and bringing it to the agenda of national security councils, as well as scaling up “climate-health investment”.

“The climate crisis is a threat to our safety and security, social cohesion, human rights and health,” Jakobsdóttir said in a statement. “Climate action is not merely a necessity. It is a high-return investment for a more just and resilient society.”

The Wellcome Trust’s Dewan said the CORE survey provides data-backed insights showing policymakers that the public supports stronger action on climate change. “It’s beyond anecdotal now. Here’s the evidence telling us that constituents really care about these issues,” she said.

Saiful Islam cries after meeting his daughter Sadia Akter after four days as a severe flood hits the Lalpol area in Feni, Bangladesh, August 25, 2024. (Photo: REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain) Saiful Islam cries after meeting his daughter Sadia Akter after four days as a severe flood hits the Lalpol area in Feni, Bangladesh, August 25, 2024. (Photo: REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain) Fresh approach to climate dialogue

The findings of the study suggest that a focus on health could become an effective way for policymakers and activists to draw in new audiences and inspire action on climate change, the authors of the report said.

“The cost-of-living message or the jobs and economy messages have been used over and over again. People have been saying this for a good decade. Probably the people that are convinced by this already would’ve said they’re concerned about climate change,” said Gilbreath of CORE.

He added that the health angle is probably a newer approach for some audiences, but the hypothesis based on the survey findings would need to be tested with further research. He also noted that economic messages still serve a purpose in some contexts and should not be abandoned.

Dewan said health messaging could become a “missing piece” in climate communications. “Health is personal, proximal, relevant and – politically speaking – it’s depolarising,” she said.

“It gives us an inroad to talk about climate differently in a way that feels very relevant,” she explained. “It’s about figuring out what’s the next insight to unpack and make these communications and engagements even stronger and relevant.”

The post Health risks from climate change spur stronger public support for action, research finds appeared first on Climate Home News.

EnviroReporter.com’s 20th anniversary 2006-2026 Michael Collins & Denise Duffield’s reporting valued at $9.6 BILLION!

The global annual production of plastics rose to 400 million metric tons in 2022 and is projected to double by 2050. Many items produced are used once and then thrown away, including more than 30 billion plastic water bottles sold each year in the United States alone. Less than 10% of plastic waste is recycled.

Clearly the problem of plastic pollution in land and marine environments isn’t going away. This series looks at some approaches to dealing with it, including this examination of the increasing demand for water in disposable bottles.

A whopping 88% of Americans say they consume bottled water, according to an industry survey released in 2024. In fact that year we drank an estimated 16.4 billion gallons of it — 47.1 gallons and a shocking average of about 340 individual bottles per person. The retail cost of all those bottles reached $50.6 billion.

But there’s another cost to this practice: serious effects on our health.

Recent research from Concordia University in Canada shows that people who drink bottled water ingest up to 90,000 more microparticles of plastic a year than those who drink tap water. Microplastic particles range in size from 1 micron (a thousandth of a millimeter) to 5 millimeters. For perspective, a credit card is about 1 millimeter thick.

More concerning is another study that found higher amounts of nanoparticles in water bottles than previously reported. Nanoparticles are smaller than 1 micron.

An ever-growing body of research suggests that exposure to these particles, particularly the nano-sized ones, affects our immune systems, causes reproductive issues, impairs cognitive function, and increases cancer risk.

Why We Drink Bottled Water

Why do we drink so much water from plastic bottles in the first place?

In one survey reported by Statista, reasons given by consumers included convenience, better taste, mistrust of household water quality, unsuitability of tap water, preference for sparkling or flavored water, and the fact that some of the bottled stuff has more minerals.

Researchers at Canada’s University of Waterloo suggest that the choice also taps into something deeper: our fear of death. Their 2018 paper argued that this fear makes us want to avoid risks — and many people see bottled water as safer, purer, or more controlled.

The industry promotes those perceptions with marketing campaigns using celebrities and feel-good imaging. Some even directly play on fears about the safety of tap water and mistrust in government entities (think Flint, Michigan), according to Peter H. Gleick, president emeritus and chief scientist at the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security and author of the 2010 book Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water.

But is bottled water truly safer than tap?

Image by Wilson Blanco from Pixabay Bottled Versus Tap

In the United States, tap water is significantly more regulated than the bottled stuff. The Environmental Protection Agency oversees municipal tap water systems, which must meet safety standards and are regularly inspected.

The water itself is treated to remove particles, chemicals, bacteria, and other contaminants and must be frequently tested. Water suppliers are required to provide testing results to customers every year in the form of Consumer Confidence Reports, also published online.

Not that there haven’t been problems with tap water systems. A 1986 EPA report, Reducing Lead in Drinking Water, showed that 36 million Americans were using tap water with high levels of lead. Much of that exposure came from lead pipes in homes. Congressional investigations and updates to the Safe Drinking Water Act followed and most of the problems were fixed, but not all (again, Flint).

More recently per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known as “forever chemicals,” have been found in water sources around the world. These chemicals break down very slowly and have turned up in the blood of people and animals and at low levels in a variety of food products and soil. Studies have linked exposure to some PFAS to harmful health effects.

In 2024 the EPA adopted national standards for acceptable levels of PFAs in tap water, requiring water utilities to test for it until 2027. Testing results will be used to determine future regulations for regular PFAS sampling and reporting, and after 2029 utilities must use treatment processes to remove PFAS from drinking water. Researchers are studying the effectiveness of various removal technologies.

Contaminants or pathogens sometimes end up in municipal water supplies due to issues such as flooding or equipment malfunctions. Thankfully we know about these incidents because of the required testing. But hearing about them can sow doubt, causing people to switch to bottled water even if their water source is safe.

The Food and Drug Administration regulates bottled water, but only if it’s sold across state lines. Water that is both packaged and sold within the state of origin represents most of the bottled water market, according to Erik Olson, senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Individual states are responsible for these products, but 1 in 5 states have no regulations covering them, he adds.

And while the PFAS standards are supposed to apply to bottled water as well, Olson says: “As far as we know they haven’t been. Most bottled water probably doesn’t have PFAS, but how do we know?”

A study led by New York University researchers found that plastics — including but not limited to water bottles — are responsible for 93% of the exposure to PFOA, one of the most widely studied PFAS.

NRDC also found that about 22% of bottled water brands they tested contained chemicals at levels above state health limits or industry recommendations in at least one sample.

Ironically, an estimated 25 to 45% of bottled water is simply municipal tap water, repackaged and marked up in price, sometimes further treated, sometimes not. PepsiCo’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani, for example, are filtered tap water. Some brands, like Smartwater, promote that they use distillation to purify their water, but that process uses a lot of energy. Spring water typically requires minimal treatment but may come from stressed natural springs. The process of bottling water can be wasteful; for example, it takes 1.63 liters of water to make every liter of Dasani.

Olson points out that making and shipping plastic bottles uses a lot of fossil fuel, too. “It’s incredibly wasteful. Consuming tap water is more energy efficient and has a lower carbon footprint.”

Then there are those particles.

On April 2 the EPA announced plans to study microplastics and added microplastics as a priority contaminant group on a draft list under consideration for regulation in drinking water (along with pharmaceuticals as a group, 75 individual chemicals, and nine microbes). However, the agency has had significant layoffs and attrition under the second Trump administration. It is dispersing staff in its defunct Office of Research and Development to other programs and faces a proposed 52% cut to its budget. Food and Water Watch, a safe food, water, and climate advocate, warned that the announcement falls short of what we really need, which is a comprehensive nationwide monitoring program.

On top of that, the effort will address microplastics but not nanoplastics.

Sarah Sajedi, Ph.D., coauthor of the previously mentioned particle studies, has done experiments that found as many as 10 million nanoparticles in a liter water bottle. A major concern, she says, is that these particles accumulate in human tissues. Nanoparticles can enter the bloodstream and reach vital organs, causing chronic inflammation, oxidative stress on cells, hormonal disruption, impaired reproduction, neurological damage, and various kinds of cancer.

“We’ve only had technology in the past three to five years to detect the nanosized particles,” Sajedi says. “First you have to prove there is exposure, and now we have shown that it exists with bottled water.”

In another ironic twist, when companies started using thinner plastic in water bottles to help reduce plastic pollution, it made the particle problem worse.

Bottled water containers now typically use almost a third less PET plastic on average than other packaged beverages like soft drinks, which need thicker containers due to carbonation. But these thinner bottles shed more particles. Movement, such as from being carried around, and exposure to sunlight both increase release of particles.

“Shaking the bottle or UV exposure from leaving it in your car increases tenfold the shedding of the plastic,” says Sajedi.

Improving the quality of material used in bottles would reduce particle exposure but exacerbate the problem of plastic waste. Gleick’s book noted that people in the United States throw away 30 billion plastic water bottles each year. Only a small percent of those are recycled; many end up in the environment, often the ocean. The harms caused by this plastic pollution are well documented, with the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimating its environmental damages at about $75 billion per year back in 2018 and a 2025 study blaming it for over $1.5 trillion in health-related economic losses per year.

Image by Hans from Pixabay So What’s a Thirsty Person to Do?

In general the safest thing to do is drink tap water — absent any specific problems in your area — and drink bottled water only on (rare) occasions.

“Say you’re at a baseball game and there’s no drinking fountains,” Olson says. “You’re not evil for consuming it once in a while. We just encourage people to think about it.”

If you’re concerned about your tap water, he suggests using a home filter system, which costs much less overall than bottles. One example shows that a family of four could save $2,878 a year using a pitcher-style filter system instead of bottled water.

“Another thing is, don’t be fooled by the names and pictures on the label that imply the water is from a mountain stream or pristine spring,” Olson says. “If the label says it is from a municipal source, it probably is just untreated tap water because that’s what rules require they say.”

When you need to buy bottled water, Sajedi suggests buying larger containers. “The quality of plastic is better with the jugs, which cuts down on your exposure to particles.”

Water is an essential human need. In places without reliable, safe water sources, many of these issues are moot, although experts argue the solution is to provide or improve infrastructure rather than relying on bottled water. But for the rest of us, it may be time to rethink our drinking habits.

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The post Dangerous Drinking: Is Bottled Water Really Safer Than Tap Water? appeared first on The Revelator.

The winners of the 2026 Environmental Photography Award capture both the lush beauty of the natural world and the heavy imprint left by humanity.

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