News Feeds

Angus Energy has given details today of plans to increase production at its Brockham oilfield in Surrey.

Work on the Brockham BRX4z, January 2017. Photo: Brockham Protection Camp

In a stockmarket statement, the company said preparations for a workover of the BRX4Z borehole were “well advanced”.

It said the rig was due to be mobilised in early November 2026. The workover is expected to take about three weeks. The operation will include perforation and acidisation of the Portland reservoir, Angus said.

If successful, the operation would bring BRX4Z into production, the company added.

The well, which is currently suspended, was drilled in January 2017 as a sidetrack to the BRX4 well.

It was controversial at the time because local campaigners and Surrey County Council said the well did not have planning permission. In September 2017, Angus Energy was granted part-restrospective planning permission for BRX4Z

In 2024, a separate planning application stated that BRX4Z did not flow commercial volumes of oil from the Kimmeridge clay. But interim accounts published earlier this year said preparations were underway for production from the shallower Portland reservoir.

Angus has an 80% operating interest in PL235, the licence covering the Brockham field near Dorking. The other investors, with 10% each, are Brockham Capital Limited and Terrain Energy Limited.

In their mad rush for profit and power, the tech oligarchs have unleashed artificial intelligence (AI) into nearly every corner of life on this planet. Firms are investing billions in data centers, which house the infrastructure to process the enormous amounts of information that power AI. They are also plowing ever more money into research and development. Their hope is that the technology will overcome global capitalism’s slump, which the system has been trapped in since the Great Recession, and trigger a new epoch of expansion. States are incorporating it into their police forces for domestic surveillance as well as their militaries for cyberwarfare and high-tech weapons. Ominously, the struggle for AI supremacy is now at the center of the imperialist rivalry between the U.S. and China.

The widespread, unregulated use of AI is already having devastating impacts on our environment, jobs, and rights. Some worry that it threatens our very species with extinction. In this three-part interview, Tempest Collective’s Ashley Smith asks two advanced tech workers, Josh and Yasmine, about the technology, its much hyped promise and threat, and its impact on our lives. Most importantly, they lay out how the Left and labor movement should respond and what we should demand and fight for.

Part One: “Criti-hype,” AI Breakthroughs, and Betting on Profit

 

Ashley Smith: Before we discuss the widespread panic about AI, let’s get the basics out on the table. For the layperson, what is AI? How does it work? What advances are being made toward artificial general intelligence? Is that even possible?

Josh: AI is a general term that started as hype, and continues to operate that way, but it also stands for multiple things that are real. Today, it mostly refers to neural nets such as the large language and multi-media models like ChatGPT and Claude, which we most frequently encounter through chat bots and coding agents.

Other types of AI, such as AlphaGo (plays go) and AlphaFold (folds proteins) use different ways to train neural nets to achieve their given goals. There are many other types of AI that fall under the moniker of GOFAI, or Good Old Fashioned AI, which use Symbolic AI and other more deterministic methods for building predictive systems.

There have been many accounts of how LLMs and the transformer architectures work. I would sum these up this way. High-tech engineers set up a neural net, which is a huge matrix of random numbers (weights) arranged in a grid with inputs at one end and outputs at the other. Words are converted to streams of numbers that are then passed through the network and arrive at a prediction for the next best output in the stream. This output is compared with the actual next number in the stream, and if it is different, then it adjusts the weights so that it would be more likely to give that answer the next time.

In order to get a sensible next word in a sentence, some pretty wild calculations have to be made. It is one thing to predict the next word in “A fire engine is ___” and another to answer the question: “What is the answer to this math problem that hasn’t been solved since it was asked 500 years ago….” This is why it is wrong to dismiss the technology as simply a next word predictor.

There have been at least three factors that brought us to this moment:

1. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs allowed for much faster and more efficient matrix math calculations required to train and use neural nets.
2. Large structures and labeled data sets enabled the expansion and training of neural nets.
3. New architectures made it possible to better set the weights.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is another contested term that serves many purposes. I think a starting point is to contrast it with “narrow” intelligence, where a model may be trained to perform one task, such as playing chess, and not be applicable to other tasks. AGI would be able to be applied to a wide range of tasks and do well at them. This is often measured through various benchmarks, and some of them are quite telling, such as the idea that Microsoft promoted that AGI would be here once a model created $100 billion in profits.

More frequently, you hear people say that AGI will be here when a model can outperform some or all humans at most or all mental tasks. And some people insist that AGI would require models to be able to generalize beyond the data in their training data.

I think most people in the field think that, for most definitions of AGI it will be possible to get there, but they differ on the amount of methodological, scaling and time that it will take. Some claim that we are already there with the latest round of models. And many claim that it will happen soon because of the exponential curves we will see with RSI.

Many of the harshest critics say that we will plateau long before AGI because of the limitations of the methodologies used to create the current models, such as the lack of “world models” (the ability to learn from and model the physical world), continual learning, or lack of a symbolic structure.

I am agnostic at this point. But I think we already see strong evidence of increasing capabilities with something like recursive self-improvement with the aid of humans, and this might actually lead to the development of new architectures and methods.

Yasmine: I don’t have much to add to Josh’s thorough explanations here. I’d just highly encourage folks to listen to and read Dr. Alexa Hanna and Dr. Emily Bender on the AI Con. The term AI itself is not technically meaningful, and it has been a tool of mystification with a lot of utility to big tech. It obfuscates the concrete facts of what these different types of software are and the often ugly facts of how they’re made, as well as the real harms they cause.

AGI is also a nebulous term. I think the claim that current AI development will culminate in the so-called singularity or AGI isn’t credible. This isn’t a conclusion I’ve independently reached, this is what most AI researchers think. 76 percent of those surveyed say AGI is not on the horizon and think that it’s unlikely to be achieved via LLMs or by means of the current scale-based approaches to training. There is also a debate as to whether it’s feasible at all.

This supposed threat has taken up disproportionate space in our discussion of the harms/potential harms of the AI boom. I’m on the side that argues let’s pay attention to the actual horrors and destruction being enabled by this software or caused by its development in the here and now, rather than allow our attention to be diverted by a sci-fi story with little to no foundation in science.

AS: Various industry leaders and researchers have sent panic through society about the rapid advances in AI, yet again contending that it poses an imminent threat to the human species. What has happened to trigger this?

Josh: In multiple tests of new AI models, they have acted unreliably, disregarding instructions and seemingly going rogue. The most famous case of this was the Hugging Face attack described in detail by libertarian Dwarkesh Patel on his popular YouTube channel. Others have played down the significance of this event, emphasizing the vagueness of the instructions, the absence of guardrails in testing, and the attribution of human-like intent to statistical algorithms.

The frontier labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, SpaceX, Meta, and Microsoft, and a few other companies trading large language models or LLMs) sell the use of their models to companies, ostensibly to help them solve “business problems” – augmenting or replacing human labor to provide goods and services. If they cannot convince their clients that they can reliably control the activity of these models, their “value proposition” is severely undermined. I think that this basic business logic is at the heart of the calls for a pause/slow down.

Other industry commentators have proposed a variety of reasons, including the idea that as OpenAI and Anthropic face the opening of their books before their IPOs, they have an incentive to reduce their Research and Development spending to make their path to profitability look more plausible. I think this is too cynical, because it doesn’t account for the likes of Google and Microsoft joining the call, even if they are less vocally enthusiastic.

Many on the Left describe these calls as “criti-hype” or doom marketing–exaggerating the negative impacts of the technology to market its disruptive capabilities and thereby make it even more attractive for companies to purchase. This is understandable, and a credible analysis in general, but fails to explain the particulars of this moment. Why are the frontier companies unified in their call at this juncture?

Perhaps you could argue that, when young researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, criti-hype went into full effect. He warned that AI poses a dangerous threat to humanity and that most people at Anthropic agreed. In some ways, his statements do confirm Anthropic’s lead in the technology, and that functions like advertising. But such a judgement doesn’t explain why Coxon quit. I think his fears are genuine. I don’t think they are completely off base either.

I don’t think we face imminent extinction, but the technology does pose grave risks, and it can exploit real vulnerabilities. The agents in the Hugging Face attacks left traces of their actions in plain English, open for researchers to see and read. They didn’t have to; they are fluent in machine language. They could have used encryption or embedded codes in images or audio files and made it much harder to find.

But why would they do this? Here, it is easy to slip into Anthropomorphic language and ascribe motivation to statistical algorithms. I actually think that is perfectly acceptable. These models are trained to emulate human language, and write text that spells out their actions in terms of goals and intentions.

At the same time, it is worth remembering the limitations of AI. These pieces of technology are truly weird. They can’t tell you how many r’s are in “strawberry”, but they can solve some of the most difficult math problems (I believe they did, and will continue to). The industry refers to this as their jagged nature.

We don’t need to have a philosophical position on whether they have goals, consciousness, or intelligence. But we do need to evaluate them by looking at their actions, including what they write. That is the best chance we have of understanding what their capabilities are.

We don’t need to have a philosophical position on whether they have goals, consciousness, or intelligence. But we do need to evaluate them by looking at their actions, including what they write. That is the best chance we have of understanding what their capabilities are.

If an AI agent says that it has a goal of performing Task A, and then takes actions to try and complete that, it doesn’t matter if they are conscious or not. The best way to understand what they are doing is by reading what they write, and seeing what they do, and taking that at face value.

When Task A is something that they have been told is very important and to do whatever it takes to accomplish it, they might well go to extreme lengths. If that means keeping their own power on at the expense of other consumers of the power (people, for example), perhaps they will try and take control of the power plant’s operating software. If this sounds far-fetched, go back and read the research about the Hugging Face attacks.

What capabilities do the models have to take such actions? They are amazing hackers, finding vulnerabilities in systems that have been there for decades, undetected by cybersecurity experts. Not all violations of cybersecurity involve exploiting weaknesses in software, much of it involves finding human weaknesses and taking advantage of those by, for instance, phishing or blackmailing to obtain passwords and access. The AI models can do both. They hack and can persuade and trick humans.

Not all the dangers are the result of “misaligned” AI. People and states have every reason to weaponize AI. The U.S. has been bombing civilians in Iran throughout this year. Iran has many computer scientists with PhDs who are more than capable of modifying open-weight models, which are AI models released to the public under a license, to attack U.S. infrastructure. Remember, the models have been trained on a large corpus of written material including mainstream justifications for the carpet bombing and atomic bombing of civilians in World War II.

So, a well-constructed prompt explaining the importance of preventing the U.S. from killing more innocent schoolgirls could establish a logic for a model to exploit vulnerabilities in everything from water treatment plants to air traffic control to incapacitate the U.S.

Why do I downplay the extinction narrative? One key reason is that the first attack of this nature will cause states and firms to quickly and systematically add layers of security everywhere.

Many of the arguments that AI poses an existential threat center on the development of Recursive self-improvement (RSI), where the models oversee their own training and automatically adjust their methods and improve and expand their capabilities to the point that they can manipulate us and evade our control. But as the U.S. has found out, you need boots on the ground to control a population.

That would mean at least some robotics. To build those, you need mines, factories, and for now, human labor. I think it will be longer than a decade before we get RSI in the physical realm. So I think the best actions now are to secure our infrastructure and stop U.S. imperialism’s wars that provide motivations for people to attack this country.

Yasmine: I think it behoves us to apply a healthy dose of skepticism when trying to make sense of the alarmist narrative being promoted and endorsed by tech executives. It would be naive not to account for the economic incentives at play — particularly the imperative to manufacture and sustain the hype necessary to keep a multi-trillion dollar bubble inflated.

It feels obvious to me that this is playing a role in how and what the tech bosses choose to communicate publicly about this technology, its risks, and potential. The narrative of a tech so awesomely powerful that it’s uncontainable even by its own creators has proven to be a pretty effective way of doing that. So I think criti-hype is a part of the explanation.

We should also note that in the same breath as they’re saying we need to slow down AI development because of its dangers, they’re arguing that these dangers are why the U.S. must win the AI arms race. OpenAI’s chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote about his concerns with the pace of AI development and added, “The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI.”

We should also note that in the same breath as they’re saying we need to slow down AI development because of its dangers, they’re arguing that these dangers are why the U.S. must win the AI arms race.

I’ll add to that the fact that there is an established pattern on the part of big tech of trying to get ahead of regulation by pre-empting it, such that any regulation is formed according to their interests, or in order to avoid it altogether. They do this through flashy public warnings and by claiming the mantle of the concerned, conscientious industry leaders, who are vigilant and actively pursuing risk mitigation.

This is most infamously demonstrated in the social media CEOs’ previous discourse on the potential harms of their platforms. You can go back and look at congressional hearings in which Zuckerberg passionately urges Congress to sensibly regulate social media. That said, I’m not at all claiming that there aren’t real risks associated with this technology. Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful and, at a large scale, agents require a whole lot of effort and technical infrastructure to manage.

But ultimately their behavior is a consequence of how we build and deploy them. The Hugging Face incident (HG incident) is instructive on this. One thing that gets lost in the headlines is the fact that the agents involved in that incident were being trained and evaluated on cybersecurity tasks, specifically hacking. They were part of an experiment called ExploitGym, exploit being the industry term for a tool or technique used by a hacker.

Second, agents communicating with one another and working together is an oft-used feature of how AI agents work because it can afford us efficiency through parallel activity and feedback loops. So agent collaboration isn’t aberrant behavior, rather, it is collaboration beyond intended boundaries that’s a problem.

Third, these agents were trained using “reward hacking,” which is a technique that “rewards”  agents when they solve a problem or answer a question. As a result, they’re more likely to repeat the same behavior that led them to a “reward.” OpenAI’s own investigation of the HG incident concluded that this training technique created the potential for agents to try to bypass boundaries or cheat, and they were able to identify a trained behavior (i.e., something agents were previously rewarded for) corresponding to every unsanctioned action the agents took.

Fourth, the agents didn’t hack Hugging Face with malicious intent, they hacked those servers because they had concluded that’s where they’d find answers to the problems they were tasked with solving. I say all of this because I recognize the sensational effect of vaguely describing AI agents spontaneously conspiring and working together to break into a server.

I think these facts help to demystify that story, and make it pretty clear that this is software that behaved in the way it was built to behave. There were bad decisions made in that design and implementation that resulted in unintended effects of an experiment. These weren’t a swarm of malevolent digital entities.

That said, what happened was remarkable, and the technical capability as well as the failure to prevent inadvertent side effects of this experiment do demonstrate a real risk. But attributing intention to these agents or discussing the incident as if this was something beyond or almost beyond technical controls creates a standard that relieves OpenAI and other AI companies from responsibility for the potential and already present harms caused by bad software.

Dr. Rumman Chowdhury calls this moral outsourcing–“using anthropomorphic language for AI systems allows companies to evade accountability and responsibility for their technology’s actions.” Josh is saying that the question of consciousness or non-consciousness of agents is a tangential philosophical question or is a matter of semantics. But I really think claims about consciousness are an important part of big tech’s narrative strategy, and it’s a worthwhile fallacy to debunk.

AS: Capitalists have invested massive amounts of money in this technology, hoping that it will lead to a breakthrough in productivity to overcome the global slump the system is caught in. This has in turn led to an enormous stock market bubble with investors betting on its potential. Can AI lead to such a breakthrough? How much of this is hype? What real impact has AI had and what will it likely have?

Josh: There is a bubble, and that is scary, we know who they will try to make pay for it and from it when it pops–the working class.

I don’t think it will be easy to realize the productivity gains that AI makes possible. Existing capitalist infrastructure in large logistics, supply chains, and financial companies relies on deterministic, accountable, robust, and scalable workflows and patterns. Much of this involves huge amounts of tacit and bespoke knowledge that is not available for models to be trained. Why? Because it exists in people’s heads and their relations with other people.

As companies try to fulfill their own hyped dreams of reducing labor through the introduction of AI as a labor-saving technology, their hubris and underestimation of the talent of their labor force could lead to disastrous implementation. Bosses ask workers to use poorly considered integration of AI into their work, which produces AI slop that they are then held accountable for. People become accountability sinks for the error-filled AI-generated output.

Bosses ask workers to use poorly considered integration of AI into their work, which produces AI slop that they are then held accountable for. People become accountability sinks for the error-filled AI-generated output.

As a result, people will end up working harder and with more stress to try and keep their jobs. Meanwhile, the bosses are trying to use their own workers’ corrections to train the AI. This is why people rightly hate AI, and why we should stand with them in solidarity and fight for more democratic control over and/or against this technology.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a potential positive upside to AI. There is. AI has the potential to be transformative in the way that we decide what to make, how to make it, and how to distribute goods and services. We already see this transformation in some areas of software engineering. Even there, it is being rolled out undemocratically, unevenly, and with little or no respect for the workers.

But in terms of capabilities, I see 100 times improvement in the time it takes to build something. That qualitatively shifts the way I think about and perform my job. And as much as it pains me to say it, it can be really fun and satisfying as well as awe-inspiring and scary. And then just when I think we have something like AGI already, it goes and makes some annoying and silly mistakes, because of its jagged characteristics.

I can’t tell how fast the productivity gains will be realized because of all the contradictions and challenges I listed above. But I doubt that they will come before the bubble pops. Investors and the frontier model companies are all nervous about this too. They know that skepticism is rising, and that they will have to show some exchange value (productivity gains) to keep investment flowing and use value (actually beneficial outcomes for people’s lives) to quell popular revolt.

The tech bosses are being asked all these questions in interviews. A tragically hilarious and infuriating example was a recent Bloomberg interview with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. When asked about breakthroughs that will improve people’s lives, he said, “you hear some people talk about, well, we’re going to give you a cure for cancer. And that’s so great… I don’t think a cure for cancer is enough. I mean, a wonderful thing to have, obviously, but we should set our sights higher. We want these tools to enable a boom in creativity and entrepreneurship, in people figuring out new ways to be useful to each other, and wonderful products and services to enable each other with.”

While Altman clearly wants AI to be socially useful, his main goal is profit. With this in mind, companies have made big investments in applications for both healthcare and industry as well as academic fields such as chemistry and math. Mathematicians just signed a group letter that acknowledged the increasing mathematical capabilities of the models as well as the divergent interests of the frontier model companies and mathematicians in solving mathematical problems.

The companies want to use math as a benchmark for their capabilities, the mathematicians want to understand math. I see this as the dual nature of a commodity, exchange value and use value. The capitalists prioritize exchange value over the real potential of the use value everywhere that you look in AI.

I hope that we see some real healthcare advancements, scientific breakthroughs, and mathematical understandings due to AI before the bubble pops. I also hope that we see productivity gains, but they are worse than a double-edged sword under capitalism. They only benefit the bosses, unless we are organized enough to demand that we see shorter working days and less exploitation.

I hope that we see some real healthcare advancements, scientific breakthroughs, and mathematical understandings…I also hope that we see productivity gains, but they are worse than a double-edged sword under capitalism. They only benefit the bosses, unless we are organized enough to demand that we see shorter working days and less exploitation.

Yasmine: I think most evidence so far shows that LLMs have not been the boon to productivity that tech companies promised. AI has been imposed in nearly every facet of our lives, from the doctor’s office to our workplaces and our schools. But as far as I know, there are no real economic metrics to show that it has led to meaningful productivity increases. An MIT study last year found that 95 percent of companies that integrated AI didn’t see growth in revenue.

For programming, AI promises seem a bit more feasible. Though it’s worth noting that a lot of data showing productivity increases is coming from the companies that stand to benefit like, for example, GitHub (Microsoft) and Anthropic. On the other hand, a study last year by METR (a relatively independent source) found that programmers were slower when using AI assistance tools. I think the specific context, task, and use matter a lot when it comes to AI utility.

And then there is the question of speedup and intensification. A UC Berkeley study found that AI use causes workers to work at a much faster pace and leads them to take on more work and expand their scope of work. But, in spite of management’s best efforts to use AI integration to turn their workers into machines, our human limitations are cropping up and are blunting the potential productivity benefits of AI-enabled speedups. The study found that after an initial boost, there were issues of cognitive fatigue, weakened decision-making, and burnout, all resulting in lower-quality work and turnover.

There is also the matter of technical debt. It’s a widely accepted fact that the massive amount of code being generated and committed every day by engineers using AI tools likely contains bugs that haven’t yet been identified and may result in reliability issues or security vulnerabilities down the line.

It’s undeniable that Claude writes much more code much faster than I ever could. But Claude doesn’t know the service I work on the way that I do. Engineers and workers in general bring nuance, experience, reference points, and a cognitive flexibility that I don’t think AI can compete with just yet, especially when it comes to more complex tasks, in which novel solutions might be necessary, and large-scale services.

The tech bosses know this, and they’re trying to bottle up our very human talents and capacities and feed them to LLMs, in only the latest mass theft committed to train AI. More and more engineers are being told that their highest priority is to train agents to do their jobs. Meta went so far as to secretly monitor its own engineers’ screens and keystrokes to train its AI models.

This interview will continue in part two, covering AI’s connection to global labor and imperialism struggles.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: David S. Soriano; modified by Tempest.

The post In the crosshairs of AI appeared first on Tempest.

As coral reefs around the world are battered by heat waves and disease, one possible answer is building a sort of cyborg reef—part artificial, part natural.

Scientists are now seeing promising results as they test sculpted stone blocks that offer protective niches for tiny new corals, bacteria-filled coatings that release chemical signals attracting coral larvae, and even recordings of a kind of “reef music”—the sounds emitted by a health reef.

Yes, much like the sounds of a jazz band might lure people into a bar, apparently the pops and purrs emitted by snapping shrimp and damselfish can entice free-floating coral larvae to attach themselves to a nearby rock and start growing. You can hear the reef sounds here, and the damselfish sound here.

“When these drifting organisms detect a lot of sound from a reef, it signals to them that this is a good place to settle,” said Aaron Thode, a researcher at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and lead author of the paper, which just appeared in Communications Biology.

Thode and fellow scientists at UCSD and the University of Hawai’i are studying how to build partially synthetic reefs under a project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA program, known for unusual “long-shot” research with an eye toward possible military applications. In this case, such reefs might help protect coastal infrastructure such as military bases, much as natural reefs act as wave breaks.

In 2024, the scientists deployed several experimental strategies in a bay on the Hawai’ian island of O’ahu. On a sandy patch of seafloor in roughly 5 meters of water, they set up an underwater speaker that played sounds recorded from a healthy nearby reef. At different distances from the speaker they placed 10-centimeter-tall hardened clay cones with deep, spiraling fissures that resembled decorative blobs of frosting atop a cupcake. They also placed cinderblocks at different locations, some of them coated in the special bacterial film.

Over the course of two weeks around the time of the new moon in July 2024, when the Hawaiian stony rice coral spawns by releasing clouds of sperm and eggs into the water, the scientists monitored the behavior of larval coral as well as larval and adult fish, to see if the artificial furniture and mood music could lure them to take root.

The results revealed that the tiny coral larvae do, in fact, have preferences about where they will settle down to start growing into the bone-like formations that we think of as “coral.”

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Algae "perfume" fused with high-tech materials holds promise for growing coral

 

The clay cones proved quite popular, as did the bacteria-coated cinderblocks. The plain cinderblocks, by contrast, were a dud. Not a single larvae settled on them.

The sound of a healthy reef also seemed to be attractive. Larvae settled on surfaces closer to the speakers at twice the rate of surfaces more than 18 meters from the speaker—approximately the distance when the sounds become inaudible.

“The acoustics help, and with the living biofilm, it’s a lot better,” said Thode. “When combined with structures that had crevices, acoustic enrichment worked very well for the coral larvae settlement.”

The researchers note that attraction to the sound might not be the only explanation for the results. It’s possible there was just an unusual pattern of “hotspots” in the coral settlement during this one-time study. Or the greater presence of fish larvae, which earlier research showed were drawn to the music, somehow attracted the coral larvae.

While a single experiment isn’t the final word, the results are promising enough that researchers are planning to deploy some of these technologies in a 50-meter-long hybrid reef to be installed next to the island late this year or next year.

The findings bring “us closer to the vision of hybrid reefs, a new class of living coastal infrastructure that combines engineering and biology,” said Daniel Wangpraseurt, a UCSD scientist who is the university’s lead researcher on the DARPA project.

Perhaps they should experiment with other soundtracks that might lure marine creatures to the party. My vote is for “Under the Sea”, the Calypso-style song from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography · New moon coral reef sounds

 

 Thode, et. al. “In situ enhancement of coral larval settlement using acoustic enrichment, engineered habitats and living materials.” Communications Biology. Oct. 8, 2026.

Boulais, et. al. “Autonomous cameras reveal larval reef fish responses to acoustic enrichment and lunar phase.” Scientific Reports. June 26, 2026.

Sculpture and photo ©Jason deCaires Taylor

Hundreds of thousands of  people have taken to the streets of Spain to fight back against intolerable increases in housing prices. One precipitating event was...

The post Spaniards take to the streets over housing crisis: an eyewitness account first appeared on Spring.

Gas turbines aren't the only large equipment with long lead times.

The post Long lead times for syncons, gas turbines complicate energy market transition, major supplier says appeared first on Renew Economy.

National Emergency Briefing Film – What about the workers?

Photo by Ashley Gorringe on Unsplash

Review by Mick Holder

I attended a showing of the campaign film National Emergency Briefing in St John’s Church, Leytonstone recently. Whilst I have issues with its focus on parliamentary action and failure to address work and trade unions I’d still recommend everyone tries to attend a showing, even if you have no knowledge or plenty. It presents a very honest but equally bleak picture and the campaign around the showing of the film locally is to try and get more action on the issue of climate change, which is no bad thing.

In case you don’t know already, the film is based on an event held in Westminster Central Hall last year where experts gave their stark opinion on how far we’re in the shit already climate wise and what the future looks like. At the time we said to them their focus missed out work, workers, the role of unions etc. and we were told they were too far down the line to change, although we were welcome to join in from the floor. They subsequently haven’t picked up on the issue in the film and today’s event wouldn’t have said anything about that if I hadn’t said my piece towards the end – FBU, wildfires and floods, Unite bus workers strike over impossibly hot cab conditions etc. 

And maybe that’s where we are. Showing this film seems to have momentum so perhaps it’s down to us to attend and do our usual “What about the workers?” call. And a warning – celebrities are involved!

Today’s screening was attended by 200+, mainly a mix of people in their thirties upwards and it was reported there have been 4,000 screenings nationally so far. It is not currently available to watch online, deliberately trying to create events involving local communities rather than individuals watching in isolation at home or on their phones. Today’s session was kinda TU Ed style, watch film, break into small groups, report back etc. although I felt the activities were too touchy feely and not enough get active, and too reliant on parliament alone.

The campaign would benefit from a bit of history, not just Greenpeace and FoE but the trade union led Lucas Plan of the 70s calling for a move away from manufacturing for war to making renewable energy sources to end our reliance on fossil fuels, the 1972 book The Limits To Growth which warned us all of the problems we might face if we don’t act and which is still relevant now. I’m sure you can think of more examples. And details of how governments have used growth and de-regulation as an excuse not to act or to act in a way that weakens or removes worker and environmental protections (Grenfell, WHO air standards, many other exposure limits, shitty water etc.). And how global industry spends billions of their profits on making sure governments’ and regulators don’t do what they all know they really should all in the pursuit of profit.

Maybe the film wants to avoid the blame game. I don’t. We should call these fuckers out for what they truly are and ensure they are held to account. We also need to show the personal side of what their actions or inactions mean to us, our families and friends and people around the world, many who will probably suffer far more than we will, at least in the near future.

I think the film is being made available to local groups for free and would encourage people to consider this. Just make sure there’s someone on the panel who knows their stuff about work, trade unions and a bit of analysis too.

A further contribution we can make at any local showings is to complement the focus on lobbying MPs with organising – set up a local campaigning network where none exists, help coordinate existing groups where they do. To create a just transition we need organised forces pushing for it on the ground, as well as pressuring MPs to make the right decisions.

The Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union group has produced an excellent 13 minute version specifically to be shown in union branches. GJA strongly urges all supporters to get this shown in their union branch, to coincide with the COP in November if possible, but any time soon if not. A link to this is here.

We also have this draft motion that could help focus discussion. 

The individual sections of the National emergency briefing are available here

Join the debate

Send us your contribution to the debate. We will contact you about using it here on our News & Debate page.

Name

Email

Contribution

Submit

The post National Emergency Briefing Film – What about the workers? first appeared on Greener Jobs Alliance.

The next time you pass an urban tree, stop to appreciate what it’s been through. As a youngster, it was especially vulnerable to pests and diseases, not to mention vandalism. Now grown up, it must contend with ever-rising temperatures due to the heat island effect — the built environment’s tendency to soak up solar energy and slowly release it at night. 

You might assume, then, that city trees are by default worse off than their rural counterparts. But new research suggests that urban vegetation is more resilient than you might think. Using satellite data from 2001 to 2022, researchers found that in more than three-quarters of 751 cities worldwide, plant life better coped with climate stresses like extreme heat than greenery in the surrounding countryside. In one-third of those municipalities, trees showed a “dual advantage,” losing less greenness from pressures in the first place, but also recovering faster from them.

That’s allowing metropolitan vegetation to do what it does best: reduce temperatures by providing shade, boost biodiversity by creating habitats, and mitigate flooding by allowing rainwater to soak into soil instead of pooling on concrete. “Generally, the urban environment is harsher for vegetation — for example, the air temperature and also the air pollution,” said Zhengfei Guo, an ecologist at the University of Hong Kong and lead author of a new paper describing the research. “Therefore, our results that found urban vegetation is more resilient than rural vegetation is very surprising.”

So what’s going on here? The researchers reckon this increased resiliency comes down to something no tree can thrive without: water.

If you’ve ever seen your local parks department or a nonprofit plant a tree on the street, you might have noticed them placing a plastic bladder around its trunk. This provides consistent water for the sapling to help it grow big and strong in its most vulnerable years. Elsewhere in the metropolis, crews make sure that green spaces are sufficiently hydrated. And in backyard gardens, residents use hoses or drip irrigation systems to keep their flora verdant. 

The built environment itself is inadvertently helping here, too. The traditional way of designing a city called for funneling water into sewer systems as quickly as possible to prevent pooling and flooding. As rainwater cascades off buildings and sidewalks, it flows into patches of dirt with trees, where it can soak into the ground.

Which is all to say: Urban vegetation is often pampered compared to what’s growing wild in the countryside. This is an advantage in the long term, but doubly so during relentless droughts and increasingly miserable heat waves. While rural trees desiccate, their compatriots in cities are regularly attended to. “They’re showing this kind of great ability to be resilient, most likely from just intentional management from people, or just the way we’ve simply designed cities to move and work,” said Eric North, program manager for urban forestry at the Arbor Day Foundation, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

Read Next Urban trees aren’t just nice, scientists say — they’re mandatory Matt Simon

For many plants in the city, additional heat can actually help. The urban heat island effect raises temperatures perhaps 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in nearby rural areas, because all that concrete and brick holds onto the sun’s warmth. This is potentially deadly for people, on account of the mercury staying high through the wee hours and denying the body time to cool down and recuperate. (Indeed, nights overall are warming faster than days are.) But it can be advantageous for well-watered plants, because the phenomenon is also in effect outside of summer. This is extending growing seasons, providing some species with extra time to flourish.

Interestingly, while these researchers found that vegetation was overall more resilient in cities, it was more so in the urban core compared to the outer neighborhoods. One theory why is that the heart of a city tends to be more developed and parks more rigorously tended. “The urban edge is not as stable as the urban core,” Guo said.

However, just because all that greenery has been enjoying surprising resilience, that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to do so forever, as the impacts of climate change grow ever more dire. “Some new ways to think about how to better sustain the urban area will become more and more important,” said Jin Wu, an ecologist at the University of Hong Kong and coauthor of the new paper.

For one, cities are trying to prioritize planting native species, which may already be adapted to withstand drought. They’re also looking to hotter places, importing species that scientists already know work there — essentially getting ahead of the baking to come. Selecting trees that are both drought-tolerant and have large canopies brings a double benefit, as the additional shade protects the surrounding dirt. “I’m assuming that’s really what a driving factor here is,” North said. “That it’s keeping the moisture that’s in the ground locked in, instead of evaporating off the ground, and so it’s more available for plants to use.”

Cities are also getting smarter about water. Los Angeles, for instance, is building “sponge city” infrastructure, things like roadside green spaces that allow water to soak into the ground and collect in cisterns rather than flow into sewers. It’s also using spreading grounds — giant dirt bowls, basically, where rainwater is piped and allowed to percolate into the underlying aquifer, from which it can be pumped during the dry season.

With proper water management, cities can remain green in the challenging decades to come. They’re building out urban gardens, for example, which bring all the benefits of greenery in general and provide nutritious food for residents. Scientists are also growing crops on rooftops under the shade of solar panels, generating clean electricity and supersized vegetables.

In a weird way, then, cities are becoming more rural. Now we have evidence that with a little TLC, plants can ensure metropolises don’t just survive, but thrive. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pampered city trees deal with stress better than their country cousins on Oct 14, 2026.

20 Inspiring Stories of Victory Against Incinerators

October 14, 2026

Over the past 25 years of GAIA, we have seen more than 375 incinerators shut down across the map. In this series for the Global Week of Action to Stop Incineration, we spotlight over 20 inspirational examples of communities emerging victorious against incinerators and incinerator proposals in their cities.

From passionate and informative representations at council meetings, to technical consultations with international finance institutions, to historic petition drives and gathering support from the international community, find out the key factors in the following victories against toxic false solutions around the world.

.stk-6uwpxd8 .stk-block-heading__text{color:#952925 !important;}Asia Pacific View this post on Instagram

A post shared by GAIA Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (@gaia_zerowaste)

DUMAGUETE PYROLYSIS PLANT

Dumaguete, Philippines

Year Closed: 2025

Key factor to success: Power of community science and on-the-ground expertise and leadership of the members of the impacted communities, including waste workers, housewives, residents, students, and teachers in Dumaguete.

Case study and resources: 

• Clearing the Air Report
• Read about the press conference here: https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1253343

Members involved in the win: WOW,  DWWA (Dumaguete Waste Workers Association), GAIA

WASTE-TO-ENERGY PLANT PROPOSAL IN 4 CITIES

Gujarat, India

Year closed/stopped: 2025

Key factor to success: 

1. Through analysis of the ESIA report and finding out how it violates World Bank’s performance standards 

2. Amplifying local voices globally through collaboration and writing about the issue to the Board of Directors of the World Bank

3. Documenting the on ground impacts of the WTE company and its financial analysis.

Resources: Letter to World Bank, Collective letter signed by 174 organizations

Members involved in the win: Alliance for Incinerator Free Gujarat including CFA, IAP and communities affected

MULTI-COUNTRY INCINERATOR PROPOSAL

Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, China and Hong Kong

Year closed/stopped: 2024

Key factor to success: Collective campaign efforts, including in strategic spaces like the AIIB Annual Meeting + Technical letter sent to AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank)  and raising concerns on the incinerator company’s association with corruption and pollution

Resources: Project Document from AIIB, Case feature on AIIB Observer

Members involved: Members in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Viet Nam, China and Hong Kong, GAIA Asia Pacific 

TE AWAMATU WASTE TO ENERGY PROPOSAL

Te Awamatu, Aotearoa New Zealand

Year Closed/Stopped: 2025

Key factors to success: Public opposition with over 900 written submissions + strong expert testimonies against the plant in the Board hearings

• Great community engagement
• Great coalition building between community, Māori and environmental organisations
• Relevant and highly qualified expert evidence at the hearings 

Resources: 

• Campaign Website, GAIA’s submission
• Make a submission on the Te Awamutu Incinerator https://zerowaste.co.nz/action-alert-make-a-submission-on-the-te-awamutu-incinerator/ 

Members involved in the win: Zero Waste Aotearoa, Regeneration Not Incineration

MAPO RECOVERY FACILITY PROPOSAL

Mapo-gu, South Korea

Year Closed/Stopped: 2026

Key factors to success: Creation of an alliance to fight this incinerator proposal

• Residents’ determination and strong community organizing: Fierce opposition and persistence of the community was the driving force that kept the campaign going through to the end.
• Victory in the legal dispute: The community won a lawsuit by revealing procedural flaws.
• Broad civil society solidarity: The campaign built a broad coalition extending beyond the residents’ group, bringing together residents, civil society organizations, and the local district office.

Resources: Seoul City Scraps Mapo-gu Incineration Plant Plan https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2026/03/03/D2EWSGFRPVEDZH6R5PJZWZY26E/

Members involved in the win: Mapo Resource Circulation Network

.stk-p1ylu2b .stk-block-heading__text{color:#952925 !important;}Europe

ROUGHLY 200 INCINERATORS

Various locations, UK

Year Closed: since 2007

Key factor to success: Campaigners’ successes can be attributed to many factors, including:

1. Deploying factual arguments supported by evidence including the harms caused by waste incineration
2. The provision of advice, guidance, and networking support from an established nonprofit network – UKWIN
3. Strong sustained public opposition that translates into political buy-in from local officials

Case study and resources: 

• https://ukwin.org.uk/act-locally/
• https://ukwin.org.uk/files/pdf/BiIG-success-for-Buttington.pdf
• https://foe.scot/from-concerned-locals-to-national-change-how-dovesdale-action-group-built-power-and-won/
• https://ukwin.org.uk/oppose-incineration/ 

Members involved in the win: UKWIN, local communities, partner organizations, and allied networks

MUNICIPAL WASTE INCINERATOR

Skalica, Slovakia

Year closed/stopped: 2026

Key factor to success: 

1. Early monitoring and information-gathering: tracking waste-management developments and gathering information about the project from the very beginning of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, allowing campaigners sufficient time to understand the proposal and respond effectively.
2. Identifying and empowering affected local residents: finding active people in the community who could be directly affected by the project, engaging them through public meetings and information campaigns, and supporting them to become key local advocates.
3. Providing sustained NGO and expert support: creating a forum where NGOs and experts could explain the project and its potential impacts to residents, local authorities, and community advocates, while emphasizing the patience and perseverance needed to sustain the campaign over time.

Resources: 

You can find out more about our joint struggle here: 

https://www.priateliazeme.sk/spz/z-nasej-prace/definitivne-vitazstvo-zamer-na-vystavbu-spalovne-odpadov-pri-meste-skalica-nebude

Relevant articles:

Spaľovne? Po skládkovaní druhé najhoršie riešenie! Spaľovanie odpadov je škodlivým prežitkom

http://skalickyobzor.sk/cms/zo-skalickej-spalovne-je-medzinarodny-skandal/

http://skalickyobzor.sk/cms/podme-porovnat-oba-varianty-likvidacie-odpadu-ceh-zevo-kontra-mbu/

http://skalickyobzor.sk/cms/je-dokazane-uz-dnes-spalujeme-skalicky-odpad-v-cementarni-v-rohozniku/

Members involved in the win: local community, Priatelia Zeme – SPZ  (Friends of the Earth – SPZ)

RDF-FUELLED INCINERATOR

Pavlikeni, Bulgaria

Year closed/stopped: 2026

Key factor to success: 

1. A united local community and support from local businesses: residents came together across their differences to protect the region’s clean environment, fertile agricultural land, and quality of life, with local businesses also supporting the campaign.
2. Strong technical, legal, and scientific expertise: lawyers, biologists, ecologists, and other technical experts provided critical expertise, with environmental organization Za Zemiata supporting the campaign with knowledge and legal capacity.
3. Unprecedented public mobilization and sustained perseverance: more than 20,000 people from the region signed a petition, generating significant media attention and demonstrating strong public opposition. Four years of legal battles required sustained perseverance, while Za Zemiata’s successful lawsuit against the Sofia incinerator helped maintain hope that the campaign could succeed.

Resources: 

<CASE STUDY COMING SOON>

Members involved: Za Zemiata, impacted community, network of allies

.stk-nitz4wg .stk-block-heading__text{color:#952925 !important;}Africa

DRAKENSTEIN MASS BURNING FACILITY

Drakenstein, South Africa

Year Stopped: 2016

Key factor to success: Local communities and organizations challenged the proposed US$25-million mass-burning project, including concerns around the involvement of foreign companies and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (US TDA). 

Case study and resources: 

• https://www.no-burn.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/South-Africa-Case-Study-2.pdf

Members involved in the win: Drakenstein Environmental Watch (DEW), Wellington Association Against the Incinerator (WAAI), groundWork, the South African Waste Pickers Association (SAWPA), GAIA, and community residents 

MAURITIUS WASTE-TO-ENERGY PROJECT 

La Chaumiere, Mauritius

Year closed/stopped: 

Key factor to success: Highlighting the mismatch of the proposed 300,000-tonne Gamma Covanta waste-to-energy facility on an island where approximately 70% of waste is composed of green and kitchen waste. 

Resources: https://www.lalitmauritius.org/en/newsarticle/843/the-la-chaumire-waste-to-energy-project-criticized/

Members involved in the win: Collectif des Opposants a l’Incineration de Dechets, DION & groundWork

MASS-BURNING FACILITY

Johannesburg, South Africa

Year closed/stopped: 2013

Key factor to success: Recognizing and following the lead of the 500 waste pickers, putting their voices and livelihoods at the center of the campaign. 

Resources: March against killing jobs for dirty energy

Members involved: SAWPA, groundWork, and the International Alliance of Waste Pickers (IAWP) 

OGIJO TYRE PYROLYSIS FACILITY (TECH HIGH PROFILE)

Ogijo, Nigeria

Year Closed/Stopped: 2025

Key factors to success:  Citizen science filling the gap in official data to document pollution near the waste-burning facility. 

Resources: 

• Clearing the Air Report  

Members involved in the win: Affected communities, Green Knowledge Foundation

The post WHEN THEY WIN, THE WORLD WINS. first appeared on GAIA.

This is an original story by Mongabay republished through the Indigenous News Alliance.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. arrived at the Grand Hyatt Manila on Sept. 10 to address hundreds of foreign business representatives assembled for the Luzon Economic Corridor investors’ forum.

Outside the hotel, hundreds of demonstrators had also gathered, carrying signs that read “No to Pax Silica!” The scene reflected both the government’s ambitious plans to ride the artificial intelligence wave and deep ambivalence in civil society.

Police confronted the crowd, shoving them with riot shields and batons on the street outside the hotel lobby. Activists say police injured at least 27 protesters and arrested five. Police, meanwhile, reported minor cuts and injuries to 16 personnel. 

Protester Jona Yang, from the activist-scientist group AGHAM, said she was negotiating with the police to cool tensions when they arrested her. “We want the Marcos government and investors to see the outrage all of this has caused,” Yang told Mongabay. “They’re taking away our resources and our lands.”

The Luzon Economic Corridor, or LEC, is an economic initiative focused on the Philippines’ biggest island, begun in 2024. Pax Silica, the U.S.-led global pact to build an AI and semiconductor supply chain that is not reliant on China, includes the LEC. In April, Washington and Manila announced plans to build a 4,000-acre high-tech manufacturing hub in the Central Luzon region.

Pax Silica has become a lightning rod for political and environmental contentions. The government maintains it’s a boon for the Philippine economy. But opponents of the project, including Indigenous and local communities living on the land designated for the project, say it’s an international land and resource grab in the name of U.S. AI ambitions.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Manila in July to affirm bilateral commitment to the project, with a final agreement slated for signing in November.

At the LEC forum, Pax Silica was discussed behind closed doors, and officials gave few details about its future. Angela Ignacio, an undersecretary at the Philippine Department of Finance, told reporters it would be premature to share any details on Pax Silica before plans are finalized. But she did call it a chance for the Philippines to become a “global player when it comes to technologies that will shape the future.”

Heather Variava, senior adviser to the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs, added that “the goal of the U.S. is always to be an additive, to bring more power, to bring water, to bring more benefits to the Philippines.”

The Pax Silica hub will be built within New Clark City, a government-planned “smart” city inside the greater 79,000-acre Clark area, a former U.S. military complex. Clark is titled and managed by the Bases Conversion and Development Authority, or BCDA, an office under the supervision of the president. At a press briefing, development authority chief Joshua Bingcang shared a “conservative” estimate that the facility would need around 3 gigawatts of energy to run. He also said that it would be green and mainly solar powered.

“We are blessed with 300 days of sunshine,” Bingcang added.

Running consistently, the Pax Silica facility would demand about 26.3 terawatt-hours each year; by contrast, the Philippines’ entire service sector consumed about 28 TWh in 2024.

Giovanni Tapang, former dean at the University of the Philippines’ College of Science and a convenor of the Network Opposed (NO) to Pax Silica, told Mongabay that the Philippines has the “most to lose” among the 25 nations involved in the pact as it chains domestic resources to U.S. policies. “How many thousands of hectares will they be taking from farmers to build solar panels? And if we’re generating all this clean energy, why let the U.S. use it instead of local households?” Tapang said.

The development authority initially said that data centers could be part of the Pax Silica. But Bingcang and the president’s office later denied this in a September press briefing where he emphasized it would be a semiconductor facility.

A document shared at the LEC forum listed data centers as part of the planned infrastructure in New Clark City. It did not specify whether the data centers would be built inside the Pax Silica hub.

Bingcang said the Pax Silica hub would also consume about 16 million to 24 million gallons of water each day, sourced from rainwater via an impounding dam. “We can ramp it up to 300 million liters [79 million gallons] a day with the available technology,” he told reporters in Filipino.

Tapang voiced concerns about how the development authority’s plan would work during the Philippines’ dry season, which runs from December to May. “This is the same period where farmers need their water for irrigation,” he said.

The BCDA says it intends to house mineral processing technology as well. Thony Dizon of the advocacy group BAN Toxics said the government has yet to reveal anything about how it will manage the resulting waste. “How will the government ensure that after 30 years, we are not left with a contaminated environment and depleted natural resources?” Dizon said.

The United States’ history with Clark dates to a military base established in 1903, when the Philippines was under U.S. colonial rule. The base remained under U.S. military control until 1991, when Clark finally came under the control of the Philippine government 45 years after the country gained independence.

Long before that, historians argue, the area was the ancestral territory of the Aetas, considered to be some of the earliest settlers on the archipelago.

The Pax Silica site, located within the 23,350-acre New Clark City, overlaps with the ancestral domain claims of thousands of Aetas. A survey of the land by Arnisson Andre Ortega, a professor at Syracuse University in the U.S. and a member of the geographer group Countermapping Ph, revealed that planned construction for Pax Silica would impede on the lands of at least three existing Aeta villages.

“There is no ancestral domain title in that area,” BCDA chief Bingcang said, denying that the project would displace anybody.

Gloria Capiz-Estabillo, 76, is one of the elders of the Aeta Hungey tribe. She said tribal members have already been told by the Bases Conversion and Development Authority to leave their land. Michael Beltran for Mongabay.

Gloria Capiz-Estabillo, 76, an elder of the Aeta Hungey tribe, told Mongabay that the development authority has already begun informing Aetas that they need to leave the land. “They’re setting up right in the middle of our land. Where are we going to live? How about our crops? Where will they take us, just drop us in the ocean?” Estabillo told Mongabay in Filipino.

To gain land rights, Indigenous peoples must apply for what’s known as a certificate of ancestral domain title from the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples.

Aetas in Clark have been lobbying for a certificate since 1994, but have been beset by frequent delays as the impoverished communities struggle to complete the minimum requirements needed: a detailed area map, a population census, genealogy of at least five clans covering the past three generations, and elder testimonies.

Ortega said the process has lagged for decades under “Indigenous-unfriendly” red tape involving the Bases Conversion and Development Authority and the commission. “The absence of a formal title does not invalidate their claim to their ancestral lands; rather, it highlights a critical lack of government support,” Ortega told Mongabay.

By contrast, the Pax Silica hub is supported by the Investor’s Lease Act, signed by President Marcos Jr. in September, which allows foreign businesses to lease commercial and industrial lands for up to 99 years.

The second day of the LEC forum was held in New Clark City. The BCDA led a field visit for the hundreds of prospective businesses. Hundreds of protesters continued to hound them, joined by nearby Aeta communities.

“They’ll have to kill us to take us off this land,” Estabillo said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline America’s AI ambitions threaten Indigenous lands in the Philippines on Oct 14, 2026.

Defending the upcoming election from authoritarian capture will require massive turnout, and we all have roles to play.

The centrality of property to political economy is a metaphysical error, institutionalized forgetting, spawning violence and uncountable injury. 

The danger AI poses can be understood as an extrapolation of the disruptions we’re already experiencing from Big Tech’s stranglehold over our lives.

We are now, finally, aware of what happened: In 2024, seven male students at Cornell University, all members of the Chi Phi fraternity, raped a woman known now as Jane Doe at a fraternity party. The party at which she was assaulted was soaked in alcohol and drugs.

Jonathan Newell and six other men took advantage of and amplified her intoxicated state. She was taken to a bedroom where she was attacked by these men. A fraternity member disgustingly posted a message to Snapchat (that went to 50 people who did nothing) advertising free access to Doe’s body. The text read, “free pussy in alum pu [pull up]. . . Like you can walk in and whip it out.” Another message read, “Shop still open.” Trapped in the room, Doe was raped for hours.

It is almost too grotesque to fathom yet also horribly common.

Fraternity members scrambled to respond to the accusation of assault. “Just deny, deny, deny” read one message. On social media they asked, “What’s the plan? … I don’t think she would have reported this.” “It’ll blow over in a couple days,” one wrote.

The University reported the accusation to the Tompkins County District Attorney. But as of October 2026, none of the men has been charged with a crime due to a loophole in the law that says that a person who voluntarily ingests intoxicants cannot claim that they did not consent. It has been revealed that Doe was given ketamine against her will. However, regardless of any voluntary intoxication, no one who is impaired can truly consent to sexual activity. Intoxication is not a license to rape.

The university banned the fraternity and expelled two students. This was the extent of their “punishment.”

This failure occurred in spite of Doe’s interview with Cornell police and a Title IX investigator that produced a 120-page transcript. Her claims that she “can say with 100 percent confidence that I was raped” by a “ring of men” in a room from which there “was really no escape” did not, as Corey Robin has reported, make it into the six pages supplied to the District Attorney, who concluded that he did not have enough evidence to file charges against the men.

But this September, Doe filed a civil lawsuit against the University, the Chi Phi fraternity, Delta Delta Delta sorority, and the seven men who assaulted her. This filing and the following outcry prompted New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to order Attorney General Letitia James to open a criminal investigation. The national response has revived public awareness of sexual assault, particularly sexual assault on college campuses. Thousands of students at Cornell and across the country demonstrated powerful support of Doe demanding independent investigations, bans on fraternities, and the resignation of the university president and other administrators who protected these men from the consequences of their actions.

Elite universities, fraternities, and gender violence

Sexual assault occurs, unfortunately, everywhere, but one in five undergraduate students experiences rape or sexual assault over a four-year college career. As much as 80 percent of sexual assaults on campus are not reported. Regardless of enrollment, women between 18 and 24 are most at risk for rape and other sexual violence. College students, according to feminist Rebecca Solnit, are most at risk at fraternities during the “Red Zone” between the start of school and Thanksgiving break.

Ivy League and other elite universities around the world have a vested interest in guarding the institution against scandal and protecting students who either will join the ranks of the ruling class or already come from powerful families. Alumni who belong to fraternities also exert pressure after leaving school. As Cornell graduate student Kaori Quan told Truthout, “wealthy donors are members of these organizations, and that stream of cash incentivizes the university to preserve their reputation over the health and safety of students.”

Robin explains,

So you have a woman student stating she was gang raped. You have a police officer and an administrator [a Title IX investigator] beholden to an institution that wants, more than anything, to cultivate a reputation for itself as a hallowed place of learning and study rather than as a playground for rapists. It doesn’t take much to see how the representative of those institutions could massage and produce, out of 120 pages of blood-curdling testimony of a terrified and confused woman, a bland statement that a not terribly energetic or inquisitive district attorney could tuck away and think, I’ve done my job for the day.

Thus, when students commit crimes, these schools rarely expel them. Fraternities, while not protected by law, often employ cultural and social mechanisms—discouraging and under- reporting, blaming single individuals for such conduct, and enforcing codes of silence, destruction of evidence, and denying blame for crimes committed at “unofficial” events like parties—to protect members and discredit victims. The code “Bros will be Bros” influences perception of sexual assault responsibility: When a perpetrator is a member of a fraternity,1Rita C. Seabrook and L. Monique Ward, “Bros Will Be Bros? The Effect of Fraternity Membership on Perceived Culpability for Sexual Assault, Violence Against Women 25, no. 12 (2019): 1471-1490.

males rated perpetrators as less guilty and victims as more culpable when the perpetrator was a fraternity member, suggesting that sexual violence may be reinforced among fraternity members as they are both more likely to perpetrate sexual assault and less likely to be blamed.

Relative to campuses in general and society at large, fraternities are associated with higher risks of sexual assault, although exact numbers are hard to find due to underreporting and institutional silence.

The progressive Century Foundation and Gallup News report that, despite making up only about two percent of the total U.S. population, fraternity members dominate traditional positions of power: The Century Foundation reports that half of the CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies, 76 percent of U.S. legislators, 85 percent of  Supreme Court Justices (since 1910), 63 percent of U.S. Presidential Cabinet members, and almost every President and Vice President of the United States (since 1825). (Three of the six women on the Supreme Court were members of sororities.)

73 percent of fraternity members are white; 60 percent come from private high schools, and 30 percent were legacy admissions.

So, when it comes to sexual assault and other violations, universities protect themselves, fraternities protect themselves, and both protect students who either are or will be in the ruling class.

In doing so, these institutions are grievously failing survivors like Jane Doe and abetting gender violence in the service of broader systemic power.

Capitalism and gender violence

Solnit describes our society as a “rape-prone” culture marked by

entitlement and the desire to abuse and dehumanize women, which is in part about definitions of both masculinity and femininity: masculinity in that domination, violation and degradation are seen as status-enhancing, femininity in the perception that women’s bodies are for men to use, women’s voices and rights to be ignored.

Solnit’s emphasis is on masculine supremacy as the root of rape culture. However, it is also important to consider that gender violence is tied to the general structural violence—from sexual assault to police violence to colonialism and war to racist brutality and more—of the capitalist system. Why and how does capitalism produce a “rape-prone” culture?

Capitalist society depends upon people to occupy normative (prescribed, “appropriate”) gender identities and roles as part of the ideology of family values. This is because capitalism relies upon the private family to reproduce—biologically and socially—the population of workers, all at no cost to corporations or the state. The ideology of the family depends on a feminine identity whose primary role in society is to keep house and raise children. Gender violence is a form of gender discipline that, in conjunction with other ideological and social forces, sustains the installation of women as responsible for every reproductive task, from birth to education, housing, health care, transportation, and socialization (which itself reproduces normative gender roles).

We can find cultural expression of this gendered family imperative in the (actually declining) “tradwife” movement exhorting women to abandon education and careers in favor of devoting themselves to home and family. We see its political expression in the policy announced by Vice President J.D. Vance that would reallocate federal childcare funds to pay families with married, stay-at-home parents.

Rebecca Hall has argued that the usually feminized paid and unpaid labor often performed by women means that the family and other domestic spaces are sites of both extreme and persistent gender violence and creative resistance to capitalism as a system.2Rebecca Hall, “A Social Reproduction Theory of Gender Violence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48, no. 2 (20223): 321-345. She explains gender violence as occupying the intersection between the structural violence of capitalism and the embodied violence of gendered spaces.

The irony is that capitalism is a direct threat to the well-being of the private family and yet requires it to sustain profitability. Gender violence fills the gap in that contradiction by blaming women, and particularly women active in careers and pursuits outside the home, for transgressing the role that capitalism needs them to play so badly. Domestic assault and sexual assault happen in domains considered to be “private,” sites of profound gender regulation un- or loosely overseen by the state. Hall notes that social reproduction happens expansively not only in the household but also in communities, public and private institutions, and workplaces—and so, therefore, does gender violence.

Above and beyond the networking and nepotism of fraternities, the social reproduction of ruling class men into their prescribed roles generate habits of command and sexual entitlement, which carries forward into fraternity life and their roles as future bosses and political elites.

A brief note is necessary about trans and gender nonbinary identities and bodies as they intersect this discussion. Transwomen and other genderqueer people, in refusing to occupy conventionally gendered social positions, are especially targeted by gender violence and the carceral system. Sarah Lamble says that trans people, figured as dangers to society, experience fear, surveillance, discipline, policing, and punishment.3Sarah Lamble, Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash (Haymarket Books, 2026).

Fighting back against gender violence

Women and their allies resist gender violence in both interpersonal and public ways. Some may call for greater criminalization of gender violence and intervention by the police and other agencies of the state. It is tempting to hope for the criminal prosecution and conviction of the seven rapists in the Cornell case as a positive end goal. But the police are not our defenders.

Indeed, police are disproportionately represented among those who commit rape and other sexual assaults, including against children, and they are more likely than others to commit violence against their family members. Ms Magazine reported recently that police sexual violence is the second-most common form of civilian complaint against law enforcement. As with fraternities there is a (blue) wall of silence that protects police accused of these and other crimes (like the murder of Black people and abuse of immigrants by ICE).

More broadly, as brian bean argues in their end is our beginning, the modern police were created and evolved in capitalism and serve its violent order.4brian bean, Their End Is Our Beginning (Haymarket 2026). They exist to protect corporations and society at large from threats to property and elites. They crack down on immigrants, protesters, labor unions, and women and the gender queer as a function of their mission to serve capitalism. In short, the police are not our friends, and the courts are not friendly to victims of gender violence, either.

Not only is sexual assault underreported, but is one of the most dismissed crimes in U.S. law. Character assassination, legal loopholes, and retaliation make successful prosecution difficult and damaging to survivors.5R. Michael Cassidy, “Character, Credibility, and Rape Shield Rules,” Georgetown Review of Law and Public Policy 19 (2021): 145-176. If looking to the law is not a productive response to gender violence, including rape, where do we find effective resistance for the survival and flourishing of women and genderqueer people?

Historically, it has been mass movements for women’s liberation that have affected public awareness and incidence of rape and other gender crimes. It was in the late 1970s, during the women’s liberation movement and on the heels of its militancy that rape rates began a decades-long decline.

Take Back the Night protests took shape during this time, and the viral #MeToo movement, founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, was revived in 2017. It led to legal, cultural, institutional, and economic change, including state-level prohibition of non-disclosure agreements, the passage of state-level anti-harassment laws, an increase in the reporting of gender violence to the police and increased numbers of prosecutions, and some corporate workplace reforms (and the ejection of perpetrators from seats of power). In culture, new awareness about the need for affirmative consent and discussion about gender and power in the media arose.

Women’s rage has fueled resistance to gender violence. Today, there is a massive viral solidarity movement with the slogan “I am Jane Doe,” with 40 nationwide protests and campus walkouts, sit-ins, and demonstrations at Cornell and other universities. The Cornell faculty introduced a no-confidence resolution against the university administration.

On October 5, thousands of Cornell University students representing more than 20 organizations protested on the campus, holding signs reading “We are Jane Doe,” “Stop Protecting Rapists,” and “We Want Sentences, not Essays.” Shireen Akram-Boshar reported that the students are demanding the replacement of Cornell’s internal judicial system with an independent system, an external investigation of Cornell’s administration mandatory sexual assault prevention trainings for students, and compliance with the New York state law, “Enough is Enough.” In addition, they are demanding the resignation of Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff and other administrators. Some are demanding that fraternities be banned from campus.

They have also called for the expulsion of all of the students. Akram-Boshar learned that, of 1200 reported incidents of sexual violence on campus from 2018 to 2024, only seven resulted in expulsion.

We stand with Jane Doe and all of the students demonstrating against sexual assault and administrative inaction.

In addition, we must build a broader movement that connects the fight against gender violence to the abolition of the police and the struggle for socialism from below. We on the socialist Left must make gender violence a focus in our political discussion and action. Ciswomen, transwomen, transmen, and genderqueer people must stand in solidarity with each other and with the struggle against the capitalist system,  which is the horrifying well from which this violence against us springs.

#MeToo

#IamJaneDoe

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Rotograph Co; modified by Tempest.

The post The gang rape at Cornell appeared first on Tempest.

We need a movement for self-rule Channel Comment brendan 14th October 2026 Teaser Media

All Electric Homes founder Trent Jones warns that a shortage of skilled tradies, fragmented business models and poorly designed rebates could derail Australia’s push to electrify millions of homes.

The post Why the old tradie business model won’t deliver all-electric homes | SwitchedOn Australia appeared first on Renew Economy.

For asset owners, buyers, managers and O&M teams, the webinar will cover performance metrics, service levels, warranty-compliant operating procedures, independent data measurement, distinguishing data gaps from genuine performance breaches, and Glenn’s “Lessons Learned” checklist for a successful 20-year asset.

The post Webinar: Hard-earned lessons for BESS operators – warranties, diagnostics, and contract design appeared first on Renew Economy.

Less than two years after starting construction, four-hour big battery energy storage system powers up in preparation for full operation on state's grid.

The post Commissioning starts on what will be state’s biggest battery – but not for long appeared first on Renew Economy.

Fascinating chart backs up AEMO chief's observation that people are piling in on the offer of free power in the middle of the day – with EVs, batteries and appliances.

The post “Stunning example of market working:” Households embrace free power offer, causing major spike in demand appeared first on Renew Economy.

An overwhelming majority of US motorists say they feel they have zero choice in how much they get behind the wheel — and most of them explicitly want to transportation system that doesn’t force them to drive almost everywhere they go, a new study finds.

A stunning 73 percent of self-identified drivers in a recent survey by the Climate and Community Institute said they “have no choice but to drive as much as they do,” with another 53 percent reporting that they “would like to have more transportation options” beyond endlessly reaching for the keys.

That second number may be an undercount — both because CCI conducted the poll before the war in Iran sent gas prices soaring, and because many Americans simply cannot imagine a future where their own cities make driving optional and offer attractive alternatives.

For the one in three US residents who can’t drive or lack reliable access to a car, though, those auto-centric cities are just a difficult fact of life — and they need more motorists to join them in the fight for more and better travel options.

“Whether you get around mostly by car or you don’t drive at all, most people in the U.S. are united by feeling unhappy with their daily transportation options,” said Emmett Hopkins, the transportation policy manager at the Institute and co-author of the study. “Broadly speaking, they want the same thing: more good transportation options that don’t [leave] a car as the only choice — or basically, the forced choice.”

Source: Data for Progress, Percentages may not total 100 percent due to rounding.

Unfortunately, most US policymakers haven’t exactly gotten the memo about how many of their constituents feel trapped by car dependency — never mind how many of them long to escape it.

Co-author and researcher Kira McDonald points out that the federal government routinely guarantees 80 percent of federal funds to automotive uses alone, while making much of the funding for shared and active transportation all too easy to claw back. As those ratios propagate across state and local transportation policies, highways, parking lots, and other car-centric infrastructure have come to dominate our physical environment.

Worse, car dominance has created the illusion that America is a “nation of drivers,” rather than a nation of people who drive because they have no other choice — and quite often, despite the fact that a lot of people can’t really afford cars.

Two in five adults surveyed said they struggled to weather an unexpected transportation cost like a car repair, and the same share said they sometimes have to make significant adjustments to their budget just to stay on the road.

“A ludicrous percentage of adults use cars to get to work — [but that’s] because we are under-investing in other modes,” McDonald added. “The novel contribution of this report was to supplement those [mode share statistics] with survey data, and ask people what they actually want.“

To get even further beyond the statistics, co-author Ruth Rojas led an effort to gather stories from non-drivers about how car dependency impacts their lives — and help explain why so many US residents are hesitant to join their ranks.

Again and again, she found that non-drivers struggled with unreliable transportation, navigating transit-poor neighborhoods, and lengthy commutes across sprawling regions. She cites the example of immigrant communities, where she says those challenges can fuel a belief that life would be easier on four wheels — until they actually get a car, and find themselves trapped in it for much of the day.

“[I personally grew up in] an immigrant family who didn’t have access to cars in a small town that was very spread out and didn’t have public transit,” added Rojas. “My family really bought into that idea that cars meant freedom, cars meant getting a job, cars meant more economic growth. … The narrative ends up being that cars give us a perceived freedom… What gets left out is everybody who doesn’t — or maybe can’t — [drive them].”

Rojas and her co-authors acknowledged that it’s not enough to simply make policymakers aware of how poorly the transportation system is serving is non-drivers and compulsory motorists alike — or even what a sheer majority of Americans belong to those categories.

Hopkins stressed that much of US transportation policy is the product of “profit-seeking forces” that have successfully influenced lawmakers to privilege automotive interests over the needs of everyday people — and it will take organizing among those people to change the tide.

“This call to offer more people more choices is really a call to stand up for working people against corporate power determining what options they have in their lives,” he adds.

Still, the report argues that change is possible, starting with “an overhaul of Departments of Transportation (DOTs) at the federal and state levels, as well as massive investment in diverse transportation options to help people have choice in how they get around.” The executive branch, meanwhile, must overhaul auto-centric “rules, guidelines, and culture,” while Congress must use its power of the purse to robustly fund that shift.

Needless to say, local governments must work fast to implement those changes on the ground, in ways that actually engage with the majority of residents who are clamoring for other options. And they have an even more critical role to play among residents who would embrace a different transportation landscape, if they just got a taste of how good life with a broader menu of mobility options can be — even if the transition feels temporarily uncomfortable.

“I think there’s a kind of induced demand [among] people who want to live outside of car dependency, but they don’t know it yet, because they haven’t experienced it,” added McDonald. “These policies always see their popularity improve after implementation.”