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Arthur Matherne is used to speeding his airboat across a southeastern stretch of the Louisiana coast where lakes and bayous have widened as the Gulf of Mexico’s salty water has moved in, dissolving marshes and swamps.   

But in one tucked-away patch of the Barataria Basin’s 1.6 million acres, the semi-retired tour guide eases off the throttle as he tries to remember his way through channels that have grown tighter by the year. Grasses are overtaking the shallows, and oak branches are spreading overhead, dangling Spanish moss over waterways he once barreled through.

“All this, it’s filling in,” Matherne said after shutting off his airboat’s roaring propeller. “Right here, it used to be three feet of water. Now it’s three inches.” 

What Matherne is seeing is a striking reversal of a pattern that has defined southern Louisiana for the past century. While much of the coastal zone has receded at about 11 square miles per year from erosion and other forces compounded by climate change, the wetlands here are gaining ground.

The reason is just a few miles away. Near Luling in St. Charles Parish, the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion has funneled Mississippi River water into the basin since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built it in 2002 to combat saltwater intrusion. But something unexpected happened. The diversion also carried the muddy river’s sediment into the wetlands, raising the bottom and helping create new land. 

“It’s had this unintended consequence of building land,” said Jacob Berkowitz, an Army Corps of Engineers wetland scientist. “This became one of the strategies that’s considered a key to addressing coastal land loss in Louisiana.”

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scientist Jacob Berkowitz discusses the growth of wetlands south of the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion. Tristan Baurick / Verite News

Yet even as Davis Pond demonstrates the land-building potential of river diversions, Louisiana has abandoned its most ambitious attempt to put that approach to work. Last year, the state canceled the massive Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, a $3 billion project inspired by Davis Pond and once heralded by the state as “the largest and boldest environmental restoration project in U.S. history.” Though it broke ground in 2023, work stopped shortly after Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican and one of the diversion’s most prominent critics, took office in 2024. He officially terminated the project, which would have been located 20 miles south of New Orleans, in July 2025. 

Landry called the diversion a costly and ineffective “experiment” that would harm the commercial fishing industry by flooding parts of Barataria Bay with too much fresh water and sediment, pushing out shrimp and burying oysters. 

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry told state lawmakers in 2024. “It will destroy the shrimping industry — which is already struggling — and destroy the oyster beds.” 

Landry’s administration also canceled a companion project — the $1.8 billion Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, aimed at reviving dying wetlands southeast of New Orleans. 

Despite Landry’s opposition to these projects, his administration is quietly planning more diversions along the Mississippi, albeit on a smaller scale.

Officials with the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, or CPRA, declined to discuss the state’s diversion plans, but a Verite News review of the authority’s budget documents indicates the state plans to spend at least $340 million on five projects over the next several years that would divert Mississippi River water to restore coastal wetlands. That represents a big increase over past spending on diversions. Since 2007, CPRA has completed just three diversion projects totaling $47 million, according to the agency’s 2027 annual plan.

While some state leaders may disparage diversions, CPRA scientists still believe using river water to rebuild land and restore wetlands is a sound approach. At its core, a diversion mimics how the Mississippi functioned before levees walled off its floodplain, preventing the river from overflowing its banks or breaking through them at points called crevasses, according to Brian Gossman, a CPRA coastal scientist, who spoke at a public lecture in March. 

“The natural process that we’re attempting to harness is the Delta cycle,” Gossman said. “It’s the same process that built all of coastal Louisiana over millennia. We’re just using it in a targeted way.”

An airboat travels through a canal south of the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion in Louisiana. Water and sediment from the diversion have helped build land and increased the growth of wetland trees and grasses.
Tristan Baurick / Verite News

Nearly all of the CPRA’s diversion spending would go to one project — the restoration of Maurepas Swamp, a Chicago-sized wetland along the west edge of Lake Pontchartrain, about 25 miles from New Orleans. 

The $334 million project, which broke ground in 2024, will install gates in the Mississippi River levee near Garyville in St. John the Baptist Parish and channel up to 2,000 cubic feet per second of water into Maurepas, which remains one of the country’s largest swamps despite losing thousands of acres of cypress and tupelo forest. Levees built in the early 1900s cut the swamp off from fresh water and sediment, leaving its trees vulnerable to saltwater intrusion.

According to CPRA, the diversion will rebuild lost land and flush out stagnant, salty water, rejuvenating about 45,000 acres. It’s set for completion late next year. 

The authority hasn’t totally given up on diverting sediment into the Barataria Basin. After canceling the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, the agency dusted off an earlier, much smaller version of the project: the Medium Diversion at Myrtle Grove. Proposed more than 25 years ago, the project would divert up to 15,000 cubic feet of river water per second into the basin — about one-third of Mid-Barataria’s typical operating rate. To speed up the creation of marsh, the authority would also dredge sediment from the Mississippi and pump it directly into the basin. 

The Myrtle Grove project’s timeline and budget are unclear. CPRA’s budget documents indicate about $1.7 million could be spent on it between 2027 and 2029, but the full cost will likely be much more. In 2012, the project was estimated at $278 million, or about $480 million in today’s dollars. 

CPRA’s spending plans would also boost the Davis Pond diversion. The agency has proposed spending $3 million, shared with the Army Corps, to study how the diversion could be operated to build more land. 

Research led by Tulane University in 2019 suggested that boosting the diversion’s average flow from 1,000 cubic feet per second to between 4,000 and 7,000 cubic feet per second could deliver more sediment to nearby wetlands. But if the flow is too high, researchers warned, the sediment will be flushed away.  

In St. Charles Parish, home to Davis Pond, finding ways to increase the diversion’s flows has strong support. In its 2025 habitat restoration plan, the parish endorsed the proposed CPRA study, citing criticism that the diversion’s operations were “not being aggressive enough” to maximize its benefits. 

Watching Davis Pond’s silty flows creep past his airboat, Matherne agreed the diversion should release more water and sediment. “Right now, it’s like pissing in an Olympic-size swimming pool,” he said. “We need more flow.”

The Army Corps built the diversion to improve oyster beds that had become too salty as coastal marshes receded. Oyster abundance in the area has fluctuated since the diversion was built, but recent monitoring data suggest populations on public beds were above their 10-year averages in 2024, according to Danielle Richardi, a CPRA coastal scientist. Shrimp catches south of the diversion hit a nearly four-decade high that same year, she said. 

Matherne said he’s seen a marked increase in wildlife. Alligators are more plentiful, he said, pointing out more than a dozen of the reptiles as his boat traveled the maze of waterways near the diversion. “All the alligators you see — that’s a fraction of what’s out there,” he said. “Come back at night, and you’ll see their eyes shining all over.”

Matherne stands on a platform used by scientists to track the growth of new land created by the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion. The semi-retired tour guide says the wetlands south of the diversion are expanding, and wildlife is thriving.
Tristan Baurick / Verite News

Several studies have documented how accumulated sediment has built land near the diversion, although researchers in recent years have reached conflicting conclusions about the overall impact on wetland acreage. 

In 2019, Louisiana State University coastal sciences professor Eugene Turner challenged conventional thinking about river diversions with a study linking Davis Pond to increased wetland loss. Turner found that the annual rate of wetland loss near Davis Pond nearly tripled after the diversion began operating, increasing from 0.36 percent to more than 1 percent. The increase was greater than in nearby wetlands unaffected by the diversion. 

One explanation might have to do with what’s in the water. While the diversion was intended to restore the Mississippi’s pre-levee connections to surrounding wetlands, the river’s water has changed dramatically over the past century. It now carries high concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus, much of it from fertilizer and manure runoff from farms and wastewater discharged by cities upstream. Turner argues that the excess nutrients produce wetland plants that are, essentially, flabby and weak. 

“If your garden is fertilized too much, it puts all its growth aboveground,” he said. “It falls over because its roots never had to work hard.”

Turner believes that lower nutrient levels encourage plants to develop stronger root systems, making marshes more resistant to erosion. He likens some of the apparent land gains from diversions to a “green toupee.” The wetlands may look as though they’re filling in, but strong winds or currents can easily strip away the vegetation.

Read Next Nearly 1.5M people in Louisiana depend on this strip of marsh. But it needs saving. Tristan Baurick

Two of Turner’s colleagues disputed his findings in a 2023 study. John White and John Day, also LSU coastal sciences professors, found that the first 20 years of Davis Pond’s operations had actually led to a net gain of 1.3 square miles of land. Their study said Turner came to an “erroneous conclusion” by incorrectly using data “that was clearly labeled as inappropriate for the task.”

The researchers asserted that Turner’s satellite data were too imprecise to distinguish small patches of wetlands from open water, potentially making land appear to have disappeared when it hadn’t. 

Turner stands by his findings, arguing they more accurately portray how diversions affect coastal wetlands and warn of the damage they can cause if poorly managed. 

Opponents of the Mid-Barataria diversion regularly cited Turner’s research and added several more concerns, including CPRA’s projections that the huge diversion could bury oyster beds under sediment and that added fresh water would likely push shrimp farther offshore, making them harder to catch. Combined with the project’s $3 billion price tag, those concerns cratered political support.

“Considering the uncertainties and questionable environmental outcomes recognized by various agencies … it was necessary to abandon the current project,” CPRA Chairman Gordon Dove wrote in a column in The Times Picayune. 

Although CPRA has yet to fully explain its new approach to diversions, smaller and cheaper projects appear to be a priority. Turner welcomes that shift, but argues diversions should also operate at lower flows to avoid washing away vegetation that he believes excessive nutrients have weakened. He also recommends building diversions in areas with sandy soils rather than the soft, unstable soil in many marshes.

“It’s not that they won’t work,” Turner said. “These diversions give you lessons. We should learn from them.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Louisiana’s accidental blueprint for restoring its coast on Nov 3, 2026.

Blackstone, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, officially changed the name of its dedicated energy investment fund to include the phrase “energy transition” in 2022, having already ceased investing in oil and gas production five years earlier. The pivot toward a new energy future has not diminished interest in the fund. In mid-October, Blackstone announced that the fund pulled in $8.7 billion in investor money this year, reportedly turning away an additional $3 billion to stay under its maximum investment cap. 

Blackstone’s is one of several energy transition funds at private equity firms that have consistently grown over the past decade. That growth has continued even as general climate-oriented investment has fallen over the last few years. Colloquially, “energy transition” refers to the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy that is necessary to limit the worst impacts of climate change. But on Wall Street, the term can mean something a bit different. Some transition funds — including Blackstone’s — see opportunities for profit in natural gas, data centers, and rising electricity costs.

“I know a lot of the investors out there do consider gas a transition fuel,” said Ryan Loughead, a senior associate and former climate solutions analyst for BloombergNEF, an energy research firm.

Private equity funds take new investor money every few years and then use it to buy existing companies, maximize their profits, and then sell them, returning the money from the sale to investors. Unlike publicly traded companies, whose stocks are available for anyone to buy, private equity firms typically take investments only from large organizations, like pension funds, or very wealthy individuals, and they have faced criticism for prioritizing returns at the expense of workers and the environment.

The transition to renewable energy has been a booming business for private equity firms. “Transition funds” in private equity have raked in $178 billion between 2021 and the beginning of 2026, triple the amount raised by comparable funds dedicated to fossil fuels and general energy, according to Loughead’s research. They’ve maintained their popularity even as other forms of climate-related investments have flagged in the United States, with climate-related venture capital on track to suffer its worst year this decade. (While private equity funds buy out established companies, venture capital funds make smaller investments in startups.) 

These shifts have coincided with changes in federal policy, as well as the overall economy. The Biden administration’s signature climate law once spurred innovation in new technologies, but Republicans in Congress repealed most of that legislation last year. Meanwhile, the tech industry’s data center buildout is creating surging demand for electricity and drawing trillions of dollars from investors.

In the financial industry, the energy transition has grown into a sophisticated economic trend with established players and markets, said Dan Cohn, an energy finance analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank focused on the energy transition. Private equity funds don’t typically demonstrate investor interest in a budding industry so much as a view that the industry is becoming economically important. 

“Investors are sensing oncoming scarcity [of electricity] and are positioning themselves accordingly,” Cohn said. “That speaks to both the moment of rising electricity demand, but also the maturity of clean energy technologies.”

But while these funds seek to capitalize on high demand for electricity, they don’t all show a clear commitment to reducing emissions. Blackstone’s fund is explicit in its view that methane gas, a fossil fuel and the primary component of natural gas, is essential to the energy transition. The fund no longer invests in oil and gas fields, but it does invest in natural gas plants. When Blackstone rebranded it in 2022, the fund’s director, David Foley, explained why natural gas plants were still on the table. “A lot of the capital invested in the energy transition is going into simple renewable power generation assets like solar and wind,” he told an industry publication. “While this is important, just adding renewables to the grid doesn’t necessarily mean you can shut down and remove existing sources of power, such as coal and gas.”

Blackstone, headquartered in New York City, is one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Don Bitzer / Getty Images

This year, the fund announced investments in six companies, including a natural gas plant operator and a data center cooling technology company, alongside a company focused on renewable energy development and some transmission and grid technology companies. Blackstone did not reply to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, the private equity firm Brookfield governs its transition funds partly through an explicit commitment to decarbonization and emissions reductions. The company has said it can invest in natural gas in cases where it replaces dirtier fossil fuels, but Brookfield has also drawn criticism for describing gas expansion as part of the energy transition.

Similar funds in Europe, like Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Energy Transition Fund, are far more focused on clean energy sources like green hydrogen, with little emphasis on natural gas.

“‘Energy transition’ is a flexible term,” Cohn said. “And I’m unsurprised to see either the gas or electrical equipment and data center-related companies in some of these funds. That is perfectly consistent with how I know some investors think about the energy transition.”

BlackRock, another private markets giant unrelated to Blackstone, explicitly defines “transition” investing as something different from “sustainable” investing: “not all sustainable strategies are transition, and not all transition strategies are sustainable,” its website reads. 

That partial overlap could complicate investors’ claims about how sustainable their portfolios are.

At least three major government-managed investors in Blackstone’s energy transition fund have explicit climate investing goals. The Oregon Treasury, Minnesota State Board of Investment, and San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System all have some form of climate-related goal or plan for their investments. These entities have committed a combined $525 million to the fund, according to Private Equity International, an analytics firm.

These investors did not reply to requests for comment before publication of this article, but the wide range of standards for climate- and energy-related investments has already created confusion. In Oregon, a state representative formally asked the state’s treasury this year to more clearly define what it reports as “climate-positive” investments, which it uses as a category in its public reports.

Investors may have a financial incentive to include gas in their view of the energy transition. Transition funds that include gas tend to have slightly higher returns than those that don’t, Loughead said. And Loughead and Cohn both said the massive rush to invest in the data center boom has permeated funds nominally concerned with the clean energy transition.

Off Wall Street, the question of whether natural gas and data centers have a role to play in the energy transition is hotly debated. Natural gas has cut emissions from the power sector when it has replaced coal, while data centers have spurred investment in grid improvements and clean energy sources. But using natural gas still produces significant emissions — both when it’s burned and when it leaks out of infrastructure — and data centers are spurring more fossil fuel use, potentially slowing progress on global power sector emissions. Plus, some grids are already finding ways to provide reliability with cleaner alternatives to gas, like batteries, which can store renewable energy to use when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Most climate and environmental groups argue emphatically that gas should not be seen as a transition fuel.

“Natural gas no longer functions as a credible bridge in the energy transition,” wrote Shruti Shukla, a senior advocate on international energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council in a 2025 article, adding that the fuel “risks slowing decarbonization, raising system costs, and locking economies into avoidable volatility.”

And in the long run, it may not even come to be seen on Wall Street as a questionable investment, according to Cohn. As fuel price spikes continue driving the world toward renewables, fossil fuels may become less and less attractive as investment opportunities. 

“There are other very prominent solutions like solar, wind, and batteries, which will mature and continue to see price declines, and so the view that you need gas is increasingly contested,” Cohn said.

This post has been updated to more accurately characterize the nature of BlackRock’s business.

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline On Wall Street, the ‘energy transition’ includes natural gas and data centers on Nov 3, 2026.

COP31 marks a critical juncture in the global effort to translate diplomatic pledges into tangible climate action. 

At the start of the Iran conflict, the price of sulfur was about $500 per metric ton for sulfur originating from the Middle East. It now sits above $800.

The economizing individual knows how to relish what one has, delight in the savvy of frugality, and thrive while doing so.

CALGARY — As tariffs, trade uncertainty and concerns about economic sovereignty are reshaping investment decisions, carbon pricing is playing an increasingly important role in industrial competitiveness. Canadian businesses are facing growing...

At a time when tariffs, trade uncertainty and concerns about economic sovereignty are reshaping investment decisions, carbon pricing is playing an increasingly important role in industrial competitiveness. This report by the Pembina Institute and...

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Who would have imagined a few years ago that masses of people around the world would be reading, praising, arguing over, and condemning a book about an obscure Jewish socialist organization that effectively came to an end nearly 80 years ago?1https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-the-story-of-the-jewish-bund/ A book about an uncompromisingly anti-Zionist organization? Who would have imagined such a book having rave reviews in the New York Review of Books 2Adam Hochschild, “A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth”, New York Review of Books, 28 May 2026; https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/a-dream-of-a-socialist-commonwealth-the-jewish-bund/ and The New York Times and being on the latter’s bestsellers list? 3Max Strasser, “What Does Judaism Look Like Without Zionism?” New York Times,  April 6, 2026; https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/books/review/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-molly-crabapple.html

The Israeli state is carrying out a genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, and increasing apartheid laws inside Israel. Not only does the world stand by and allow this—the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia (where I live) support, arm, and encourage the Israeli government, and succumb to pressure to cancel and criminalize pro-Palestinian activity. The conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism means not just a distortion of Zionism and what it stands for, but a loss of the historical reality of antisemitism. It also results in a distortion of Jewish history, a loss of the history of the majority of European Jews of the first half of the twentieth century, who were socialists, not Zionists.

At a time like this, we need more than ever books that rediscover the other Jewish tradition, the history of radical struggle, opposition to Zionism, and socialism.

The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, generally known as the Jewish Labor Bund or just simply the Bund, was founded in 1897 in Vilna (Vilnius, now in Lithuania) in the tsarist empire. It is one of the most important but least recognized socialist organizations in Europe.

In its early years, the Bund was revolutionary. It was the first socialist group to turn away from narrow circle work to agitation among workers in the late nineteenth century. It was also the first organization in Russia to implement many of the features we see today as characteristic of the revolutionary party: an agitational paper, professional revolutionaries, and the need for the party to be rooted among workers. The Bund also took the lead in organizing systematic self-defense against pogroms, which were endemic in the tsarist empire.

Because of its resources and organizational skills, the Bund was central to organising the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1898. By the Second Congress in 1903, it had 30,000 members, compared to 8,400 total for the other affiliates. Before the 1905 Revolution in Russia, one third of the prisoners in the Siberian labor camps were Bundists, and the party played a key role in that revolution.

At the 1903 Congress, the Bund opposed Vladimir Lenin’s concept of the party. However, after the 1917 revolution, a sizable group broke away from the Bund and joined the revolutionary movement. The remaining Bund organization relocated to newly independent Poland, where it affiliated with the Second International.

But there was little scope for reformist careerism under Józef Piłsudski’s authoritarian regime, and even less during the increasingly fascist period after he died in 1935. Subservience did not save the Polish Communist Party from destruction by Joseph Stalin. With Trotskyism virtually nonexistent, many of the best working-class activists were to be found in the Bund and in the Polish Socialist Party, also a member of the Second International. As they had done previously, the Bund continued its working-class-based activities, organizing workers into trade unions and leading self-defense groups against increasing fascist antisemitism.

During World War II, the Bund also played a critical role in resistance to the Nazis, most notably during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943.

So much of this story appears to have been forgotten or relegated to footnotes. While there is a significant body of literature on the Bund, it has been treated as a niche topic, one for specialists in Jewish history.

In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple has written a work of popular history. Although the author has undertaken original archival research, the book is unapologetically non-academic. To read it is more like reading a novel, a thriller, or a family saga. It is a page-turner, with a large cast of actors and vigorously drawn characters. Events are fast-paced, and the story unfolds against a backdrop of wars, revolutions, civil unrest, and local conflicts.

Above all, this is a book about people’s personal experience. Crabapple is a visual artist, and reading this book is like watching a series of vignettes passing before your eyes. Central is her great-grandfather Sam Rothbort, who at 15 became an activist Bundist in the small town of Volkovysk (present-day Belarus). Rothbort participated in Bund-led strikes and gatherings in the forests, but eventually fled to the United States in 1904.

Crabapple never knew her great-grandfather, but she did have a wonderful source of material in a shoe box of memorabilia, handwritten memoirs, and hundreds of paintings he left behind. This treasure trove inhabits the book almost as a living entity. Throughout the book, she draws on memoirs, letters, and personal accounts of many Bundists, men and women, young and old, leaders and rank-and-file members. She shows them to us as living human beings who were active players in history.

Far from using an authorial distance and objectivity, Crabapple tries to enter the minds of her protagonists, to write subjectively. She speculates about how individuals must have felt and thought.

Here is an example from the 1905 Revolution, sparked by the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. Crabapple creatively describes the experiences of the Bundist soap box orator Anna Lipshitz:

Soon, to move between neighbourhoods, Anna would have had to weave around overturned tramcars and slip behind barricades…She would have witnessed the beatings of police officers…and likely heard the explosion of anarchist bombs. It must have thrilled her. This moment was meant to be hers…

Anna Lipshitz heard the news alongside the rest of the city. A battleship named Potemkin had just dropped anchor…It was flying a red flag.

Hoarse, bleary, her dress stiff with dried sweat, Lipshitz would have pulled herself off the floor of her safe house and joined the crowds clambering toward the port. The ship gleamed like a dream.

It is this sort of creative writing that animates this book, bringing to life the experience of revolution, war, and pogroms in a deeply effective way. We know, without it being articulated, that the dream that ends this passage is the possibility of a new world, one that inspired many participants in the revolution.

Some reviews have criticized this approach. But in my view, Crabapple’s use of this form of creative nonfiction is valid, as long as it’s clear what is actually factually based and what is imagined by the author. The book offers something sometimes lacking in historical writing, and helps the reader imagine historical events as they were lived. It gives the sense that revolutionaries and socialists are actual human beings with enthusiasms and foibles, strengths and doubts, dreams and hopes. And that they live without the benefit of hindsight and the analytical books that came after them. The personal experience approach takes us to a particular time and place, and gives the reader the feeling that they are accompanying the protagonists on this journey.

For example, when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there were scenes of chaos. Crabapple brings these to life through realistic detail: the scramble to get news, organize meetings, make decisions, find food, locate relatives, and organize transport and visas. Their agonised debates: “All around Warsaw, rank-and-file Bundists were making similar calculations. Should they stay or run?” Crabapple does not take a position on this. She simply describes the dilemma.

The events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 are already well-documented, but Crabapple gives us telling details. On the day it started, April 19, the Jewish Combat Organization battle squads mobilized at 2.00 am. “From balconies and windows, the fighters watched the nazis goose-step down Nalewki Street, singing a cheerful march. [Marek] Edelman had taken care to dress well that night, in a red angora sweater and two leather bandoliers, crossed like Pancho Villa. As he saw the convoy enter the ghetto, he imagined the Germans’ thoughts.”

We know quite a bit about Edelman, who is famous for his account of the Warsaw Ghetto.4Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, Bookmarks 2014 (and many other editions). But who knew he was wearing a red angora sweater at that moment? The book is enlivened on every page by similar less well-known details.

Viktor Alter, who “liked the ladies,” was nicknamed “the Cary Grant of labor.” Bernard Goldstein is well-known for strong links to the criminal underworld, but he showed a softer side while in hiding during the Uprising, when he gave a young couple privacy in his apartment. Sophia Dubovna, when young, had a crush on the family maid (Sophia came from a rich family) and had briefly dated the right-wing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky. In 1934 she gave talks about love and sex at the Bund youth group, Tsukunft (Future). As a small child, Edelman had attended protests on the shoulders of comrades, “red flag in his tiny fist.”

The accounts of pogroms and the suffering and destruction in the book show very vividly what antisemitism actually is historically. In so doing, they reveal contemporary attempts to reduce the concept of antisemitism to uncomfortable feelings in the presence of political slogans or keffiyehs as a horrifying trivialization of the historical oppression of Jews.

The wonderful politics of the Bund shine throughout the book: its internationalism, its commitment to fighting antisemitism and to self-defense, to struggle, and to the working class. While the Zionists argued that antisemitism could never be defeated and so advocated emigration, the Bund promoted remaining and fighting against their oppression. But they took it even further. Using a biblical comparison, one Bundist declared that Jews should “stay and fight there, amongst the Egyptians, until they won a freedom that encompassed even their oppressors.”

Bund leader Henryk Erlich made a similar argument. In 1937, against a backdrop of rising antisemitism and daily attacks by Polish fascists, increasing immiseration, and a clearly imminent war, Erlich urged his audience to look past their own concerns:

You must briefly step out of the confines of your Jewish misery… Look about and you will see– the Jews are not the only ones who are suffering. The overwhelming majority in the country, whether Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, or others, is suffering from the economic crisis…scarcely able to eke out a daily existence.

Shift your gaze beyond the borders of Poland toward the wide world and you will see: Seventy million people are languishing under the heavy boot of Hitlerism. Not only the 500,000 Jews – the whole German people has been transformed into a nation of slaves… Forty million Italians have been turned into a footstool for the ‘great’ Mussolini… millions of working people in other, smaller countries which have become areas of reaction are sunk in privation and bondage.

Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Federation in the interwar years, wrote in 1903 that their hardest struggle everywhere was conducted against the Bund. In return, the Bund described Zionism as “the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat.”

In 1933, Erlich wrote:

If Jewish nationalism, as a general rule, is not bloodthirsty, this is only out of necessity, not virtue; if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations.

No we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of other nations.

In an open letter in 1938, Erlich summarised how they were the party that truly fought for the Jewish people: they had organized self-defense groups in tsarist Russia and in Poland, called protest strikes against pogroms, and argued against attempts to deport Jews.

In relation to Palestine, he wrote:

If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine… Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?… Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?

Concentrating on personal experience gives Here Where We Live Is Our Country strengths. But the method also has its weaknesses. Foremost is a lack of analysis. One should not read this book expecting an evaluation of the 1905 Revolution, the Bolshevik/Menshevik split, the role of the soviets in the 1917 revolutions, the growth of Stalinism, the civil war, the coming to power of the Nazis, or the causes of World War II.

This is not the book’s objective, and these matters are very well covered elsewhere, but the lack of context is at times frustrating. While Crabapple features quotes and summaries of discussions, I wanted her book to engage more fully with the organizing principles and politics of the Bund. Consider the seminal event when the Bund sided with the Mensheviks in the famous split in 1903. Crabapple is dismissive: “Medem ruefully listened to rumors that the Iskrites had begun to fracture over the question of party membership. Should the RSDLP be a mass party of workers, as Martov envisioned? Or should it be the top-down conspiracy Lenin wanted, in which a central committee commanded and a full-time cadre obeyed? ‘Lenin had bared his teeth,’ Medem wrote.”

Crabapple goes on to describe Lenin’s “personality traits that would shape the coming century.”  Quoting Medem, she concludes Lenin resembled “a crafty Russian grain dealer… When you speak to him, he looks at you with his small eyes…(and) cunning devilish smile.”

As Donny Gluckstein asks, “whether or not that characterisation was true, was Lenin right to believe a decentralised RSDLP facing the most centralised authoritarian state in the world was ‘a recipe for failure’?”5Donny Gluckstein, International Socialism Journal (forthcoming). Nathaniel Flakin also points out how the focus on Lenin’s personality prevents Crabapple from seriously grappling with the Bund’s political weaknesses and strategic mistakes.6Nathaniel Flakin, https://www.leftvoice.org/bundism-zionism-bolshevism/.

The concentration on personal experience also results in a lack of appreciation of collective experience and of competing social forces. This is particularly obvious in the account of the 1905 Revolution, in which her depiction of the turning of the tide is graphic but occurs for no apparent reason. The same happens with the growth of antisemitism in interwar Poland.

This lack of social context results in an absence that is significant. Although the Bund became the leading Jewish organisation in Poland, it was not the only outlet for Jewish radicalism: Jews were prominent in other Left organizations. There was significant Jewish membership in the Polish Communist Party and the Polish Socialist Party. The left Zionist group Poale Zion joined in self-defense groups. None of this appears in the book.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country has been rightly celebrated for its account of the Bund’s commitment to “Doykait” (“hereness”), meaning that Jews should not go elsewhere to escape discrimination but were entitled to equal rights and justice wherever they lived. Most writers seem to assume this meant that the Bund itself could be at home in any country. Yet it is abundantly clear that, although they were internationalist in spirit, the Bund’s roots were essentially in the Eastern European Yiddish-speaking working class, in particular in Poland by the 1930s.

The Bund did not, in fact, transplant well. In the United States, with its more than two million Jewish immigrants, the Bund organization was small, mostly active in raising money to send to Europe and in the welfare-oriented Workman’s Circle and focusing mainly on cultural work and the promotion of the Yiddish language. While Bundists were likely involved in the mass strikes among Jewish clothing workers in New York before World War II, among which socialists were very active, the Bund played no clear role as an organization.

Although there were individual Bundists in the United Kingdom who participated in a range of activities with other socialists, their work concentrated on collecting money for Poland and promoting Yiddish education.7Benjamin Nadel, “Bundism in England”, Jewish Socialist Group, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/jsg-bundism-uk.pdf The story is similar in Australia.

This explains why the book ends when it does. The Holocaust destroyed the Bund’s roots among the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class of Eastern Europe. As the war-torn regions of Europe slowly reorganized after 1945, the remaining Bund members tried for a time to hold on to their principled politics, particularly anti-Zionism. In two articles in 1948, the Bund leadership warned its readers that “the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish State would lead to a new catastrophe, not only for the Jews in Palestine but for the Jews all over the world” and “the country became from the very start a source of Irredentist movements, Jewish-Arab conflicts, and an open threat of war.”8“Jewish Labor Bund and the Jewish-Arab war in Palestine”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, April 1948 pp3-5; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-4.pdf. “The Jewish Labor Bund and the state of Israel”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, August-September 1948 pp 1-4; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-8-9.pdf.p

These articles generated a “veritable deluge” of condemnation from the entire Jewish press and the Jewish community as traitors. The Bund response was to argue, “We shall not be diverted by any temporary nationalist trend.”9 “We will not be bulled”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, August-September 1948 p 4; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-8-9.pdf

Unfortunately, the trend was not temporary. With the state of Israel firmly established, and the core organization in Poland destroyed, remnant groups in other countries faced a dilemma. The historian of the post-war Bund, David Slucki, shows how the movement came to a pragmatic accommodation with Zionism.10David Slucki, “The Bund abroad in the postwar Jewish world”, Jewish Social Studies, Vol 16, No 1, 2009, pp 111-144.

Paradoxically, new international organizing principles allowed the local Bund groups to focus more on local activities, where they tended to straddle “the divide between mainstream Jewish communities and the non-Jewish socialist left.” Despite continued talk about socialism, bundists in the post–World War II era now saw “cultural continuity as their chief mission.” Thus, despite the formal opposition to Zionism, pragmatism led to an accommodation with Zionism, leading Bundists in Australia and elsewhere to send money to Israel.

The political consequences became evident following the events of October 2023. Although some members of the Australian Bund are conspicuous and principled supporters of Palestine, the organisation has forefronted defense of Israel, publishing only three very short and weak statements (and none since 2025).11https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-on-events-in-gaza; https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-enough; https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-regarding-the-ongoing-horror-in-gaza. Writers associated with the Bund have even criticized Crabapple’s book as seeking to “delegitimise Israel” and even as “hijacked by anti-Zionists.” 12Allan Preis, “The Bund Lives”, 20 July 2026 https://michaelgawenda.substack.com/p/the-bund-lives.

It is sad to see contemporary Bundists repudiating their own history.13Janey Stone, “The International Jewish Labor BUND and the State of Israel”, Verso blog, 12 March 2025 https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-international-jewish-labor-bund-and-the-state-of-israel-1?srsltid=AfmBOoqwvfG38HoXxzCSde4smFpBwKNyL929gYVG_m05MSqmf_bGmnFF But this history remains available to the rest of us. Its existence and predominance stand against the Zionist claims to represent Jews historically. The Bund’s internationalism and its position on Zionism prior to 1948 are beacons to contemporary anti-Zionists.

And it’s clear that people are responding to this beacon. Jacobin applauds what it sees as the Bund’s “growing relevance,”14Grant Morgan, “The Jewish Labor Bund Stood Against Zionism”, Jacobin 22 April 2026; https://jacobin.com/2026/04/jewish-labor-bund-crabapple-review/ noting that where “the Bund has long been regarded as a historical artifact, it’s now reasserting itself as a living tradition.” New groups are springing up under the auspices of a body called the International Jewish Labor Bund (IJLB),15Joseph Mogul, “The Bund is Back”, The Progressive Magazine, March 31, 2026, https://progressive.org/latest/the-bund-is-back-mogul-20260331/; International Jewish Labor Bund Website https://jewishbund.org/ following its declaration in 2023.16“Today We Remake the Jewish Labor Bund”, https://derbund.org/#today-we-remake-the-jewish-labor-bund There are now 11 chapters or organizing committees in the United States and six in Europe, 17https://jewishbund.org/chapters plus an online journal, Der Spekter.18https://www.derspekter.org/?shem=aimgspe (Interestingly, the remnant groups in Australia and elsewhere are not part of this movement.)

The renewed interest in the Bund, its history, and its ideas, not surprisingly, has not been welcomed by everyone. Many of the negative responses to the book are trifling. Objections to Crabapple’s Puerto Rican roots, questioning whether she really is Jewish, and her past work as a burlesque dancer have only added fuel to the fire.

Not surprisingly, Zionists have led the counter-attack. Their responses are defensive, and often abusive. Their fire is directed not at the book’s primary readership, but at a Zionist audience among whom this book (or the publicity it has generated) might raise doubts. A review in Haaretz is typical.19  Joseph Hillyard, “A Missed Opportunity to Learn From the Legacy of the Bund” Ha’aretz, September 18, 2026; https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-09-18/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-missed-opportunity-to-learn-from-the-legacy-of-the-bund/000001a0-b4db-d91d-afeb-fcdb5c980000?gift=8d084db683a8479ba5304dc323911bd1

One strategy is nit-picking very small errors: Eliezer Aryeh, for example, devotes several articles to a forensic analysis of Crabapple’s nearly 2,000 endnotes and comes up with four errors.20Eliezer Aryeh, “What the Footnotes Don’t Say: Here Where We Live Is Our Country gets the Bund right and Palestine wrong” and other articles, May 29 2026 and subsequent dates, https://eliezeraryeh.substack.com/archive?sort=new Others complain that Crabapple “oversimplifies,” is “selective,” or makes “no attempt at representing historical accuracy. Seth Mandel, a conservative anti-Trump Republican, hardly touches on the content of the book at all, but claims (without evidence and despite many of the rave reviews being written by Jews) that the prevailing opinion among Jewish writers is that Crabapple’s book “exhibited a heartfelt nostalgia for a time and place that never really existed…it is a fictional story.”21Seth Mandel, “So You Want To Be a Bundist”, Commentary 7/4/2026; https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/so-you-want-to-be-a-bundist/?shem=aimgspe

Writing in the Jewish Review of Books, Allan Arkush goes further, claiming Zionism “has by and large been rooted in humanitarianism, led by noble men and women dedicated to constructing and sustaining a Jewish state for the benefit of their own beleaguered people and, indirectly, for others.”22Allan Arkush, “An Abusable Past”, Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2026; https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/20334/an-abusable-past/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwY2xjawUixP1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABwZG9mAWJyaWQRMU9rcld4elZHTjFpV01IdjRzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeGMZdDT0dDz9ZAqrLpDKj2K2lAkxDIWrd8iO5N1lnIYFE9XL5FcUol7cmiVM_aem_hpiD7t7BnHx3PQckSppt1A The Wall Street Journal review, written by a British Trump supporter apparently with the use of AI, regurgitates standard support for Israel for a non-Jewish audience.23Dominic Green, “Here Where We Live is Our Country Review: Defiance in the Diaspora”, Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2026; https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-review-defiance-in-the-diaspora-4b2b2b88

This book is not an academic study. The bibliography is small. Crabapple certainly carried out extensive new archival research, resulting in fascinating personal detail about her protagonists. But the book is rightly focused on introducing the Bund to wider audiences. The need today is not for more academically rigorous studies, to be read only by a limited audience, but for the core ideas in this book—struggle, resistance, solidarity, social justice, and above all socialism—to be spread further.

Whatever its limitations, Here Where We Live is our Country is a wonderful new addition to the history of the Bund and, through this, to the broader tradition of Jewish radicalism and socialism of which it is a part. This history is a part of our collective story, and its legacy belongs to all of us. Read this book in that spirit.

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: Unknown; modified by Tempest.

The post The Bund, anti-Zionism and the Jewish Left appeared first on Tempest.

This is a republication of November’s edition of The Climate Agenda – a subscriber-only newsletter designed to keep you informed of the key events, negotiations and announcements happening every month. If you want to receive The Climate Agenda straight to your inbox at the start of each month, sign up as a subscriber today.

COP31 begins in one week, and we’ll have five specialist reporters on the ground in Antalya, Türkiye, bringing you every development as it happens. From the negotiations to leaders’ speeches and side events, we’ll be there to dissect what it all means for international climate policy on electrification, just transition, adaptation finance and much more.

Here’s what you need to know for November, why it matters and what to expect.

US midterm elections Tuesday 3 November – United States

The geopolitical highlight for the first week of November is the US midterm elections, which will show whether American voters are in any mood to forgive President Donald Trump for failing to bring down the cost of living. From an energy perspective, his pro-oil and gas stance hasn’t led to cheaper prices for consumers, pushed up by the US-instigated Iran conflict. And his diesel deal with Russia won’t yet have made a difference at the pump.

The key issue for climate and energy policy is whether the Republicans hold onto their governing trifecta. If so, then expect continued dismantling of regulations that protect the environment, as well as strong backing for fossil fuel production. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, which polls suggest is possible, it could trigger a push to restore Biden-era clean energy tax credits, and support states wanting to restart mothballed wind and solar projects. 

Data centres have been a hot-wire issue, with growing community opposition to their expansion – partly due to concerns over rising utility bills as the facilities gobble power. Whether Republicans or Democrats win Congress, both are likely to make tech firms pay for the extra electricity production they need, with the latter favouring renewable sources.  

Governor races are also taking place in key states for climate issues, including Democrat-run California, which has used the courts to fight Trump’s attacks on clean energy.

Read more: National climate plans now promise half the emission cuts expected by UN

Read more: The more Europe relies on the US for energy, the more it’s vulnerable to pressure by Trump

Brazilian President Lula da Silva, speaks next to the COP30 President and COP 30 CEO during the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belem, Brazil on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/COP30) Brazilian President Lula da Silva, speaks next to the COP30 President and COP 30 CEO during the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belem, Brazil on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/COP30) COP30 Deforestation and Fossil Fuel Transition Roadmaps Tuesday 3 November – Brazil

Brazil is set to unveil two global roadmaps: one for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the other for ending deforestation.

The COP30 presidency promised them in the dying hours of the Belém summit last November as a last-minute fix to break a political impasse. Since then, it has been consulting with countries, experts and campaigners around the world to gather ideas and sketch out the elements to include in these blueprints. 

Don’t expect the roadmaps to offer any new global targets or give direct instructions on what countries must do, either to cut fossil fuel production and consumption or better protect forests. Rather, Brazil has said the documents will identify barriers and priority actions, highlight existing mechanisms and present a range of options that can be adapted to different national contexts.

It remains unclear what will happen with the reports once they are delivered on Tuesday. At the Bonn talks last June, a group of European and small island nations called for the roadmaps to be brought into the official negotiations, warning that a one-off report won’t cut it. But such efforts would undoubtedly face stiff opposition from fossil fuel-producing nations that objected to drafting the energy transition roadmap within the formal UN process last year. 

Read more: European, island states seek clear future for global roadmap to cut fossil fuels

Read more: COP30 roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to draft domestic plans

Read more: What we need to see in the roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels

Leaders will visit a Green Climate Fund-backed coastal resilience project in Tuvalu during the Pre-COP31 meeting in the Pacific. (Photo courtesy of the Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31) Leaders will visit a Green Climate Fund-backed coastal resilience project in Tuvalu during the Pre-COP31 meeting in the Pacific. (Photo courtesy of the Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31) UNEP Adaptation Gap Report Wednesday 4 November – Nairobi, Kenya

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) will publish its annual assessment of how well the world is planning, implementing and – crucially – financing measures to cope with worsening climate impacts.

Past editions have made for grim reading. Last year’s report warned of a widening gap between what developing countries need for adaptation and what they can access. It estimated they will need $310–365 billion a year by 2035, which is 12 to 14 times current international flows. The report also found that a goal of doubling international public adaptation finance by 2025 was likely to have been missed.

This year’s edition will be closely watched with adaptation expected to be a big-ticket item at COP31. Governments are likely to discuss the specifics of a commitment to triple adaptation finance for developing nations by 2035, agreed at COP30 last year – particularly what the baseline for that pledge is. Negotiators will be debating how to track progress against the 59 indicators of the Global Goal on Adaptation.

Read more: Editor’s Desk: Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap

Read more: Bonn climate talks end in “gridlock” on adaptation and emissions-cutting

Read more: New data shows rich nations likely missed 2025 goal to double adaptation finance

Photo: IRENA@COP31 Photo: IRENA@COP31 COP31 Climate Conference Monday 9 November – Friday 20 November – Antalya, Türkiye

The climate community’s attention turns this month to Antalya for the annual UN climate summit. From the outset, COP31 will have an unprecedented, and potentially explosive, set-up: Türkiye is COP president overseeing the non-negotiated Action Agenda, while Australia runs the negotiations. 

Billed, once again, as an “implementation COP”, the talks come amid a global energy crisis largely sparked by the actions of the US government, which is not expected to show up on the Turkish Riviera. It is also the first COP in the era of climate overshoot, coming just weeks after the UN officially confirmed the 1.5C warming limit will be breached and set out a narrow pathway to bring temperatures back down to the most ambitious Paris goal.

Unlike most recent COPs, the formal negotiations lack a clear headline item. Countries are due to establish and define the scope of the Just Transition Mechanism agreed in Belém last year, including its rules, governance and possible funding arrangements. On adaptation, vulnerable countries want a clearer path to delivering last year’s pledge to triple finance by 2035 and to putting the new progress indicators to work on the ground.

Governments are also likely to clash over next steps on the transition away from fossil fuels, and especially over whether the mitigation work programme – the forum dedicated to emission-cutting measures – has any future beyond this year.

Notable events to look out for in Antalya:

Opening session (9 November): The summit kicks off with the customary first-morning plenary. After the usual pageantry from the host nation, negotiating blocs and individual countries will deliver statements setting out their stall for the next two weeks. Watch out for a potential fight over the summit’s agenda – perhaps on issues relating to finance and trade following submissions requesting additional items – also a COP tradition. 

Electrification (10 November): On Energy Day, the Turkish presidency is expected to formally launch its flagship electrification pledge, revealing which countries have signed up. Signatories will voluntarily commit to raising electricity’s share of global final energy consumption to 35% by 2035, though the current text does not require that power to come from clean sources. There is also a question mark over whether and how this can be included in the political cover decision the COP co-hosts have said they will aim to produce. 

Leaders Summit (11-12 November): Heads of state and governments will jet into town for the traditional high-level segment in the middle of the first week, where world leaders typically talk up their climate record, air their grievances and call for more action.

Relatively few powerful leaders are on the list this time. Brazil’s Lula is set for another star turn this year, fresh from his surprise election win in October. The UK’s Andy Burnham, Spain’s Pedro Sanchez and China’s vice-premier Ding Xuexiang are expected, alongside Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Australia’s Anthony Albanese. In addition, African and small island nations will feature prominently.

Our COP31 Briefing newsletter will offer a more in-depth preview of the talks later this week.

Read more: Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31

Read more: COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment

Read more: From Belém to Antalya – gains, gaps and challenges for a new Just Transition Mechanism

International Maritime Organization (IMO) Shipping Talks Monday 23 November – Friday 4 December – London, United Kingdom

One year on from explosive talks in which Trump’s officials teamed up with Saudi Arabia to delay a deal to make the shipping industry greener, governments will gather on the banks of the Thames for another attempt to reach agreement.

The Net Zero Framework, provisionally agreed in October 2025, includes a series of emissions reduction targets for the owners of large ships along with penalties for not meeting them, rewards for doing so and measures to make the maritime transition fair.

The framework is likely to be either tweaked or radically rewritten so that it’s more acceptable to the US and Saudis. Brazil and Japan have submitted compromise proposals. Analysts find those will move shipping further away from being able to meet its climate goals. 

There will be closed-door talks between November 23-27 and a second week of talks open to accredited media from November 30 to December 4. Agreement on a proposal, perhaps decided through a vote, is expected after long and technical negotiations. The shipping industry’s 3% share of the world’s emissions is at stake.

Read more: London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal

The post What’s on the climate calendar for November 2026? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Step into Oakland Chinatown, and you are immediately welcomed by the heartbeat of a community shaped by generations of history, culture, resilience, and belonging. The sounds of neighbors greeting one another in multiple languages, the laughter of families gathering in Lincoln Square Park, the activity of local businesses, and the vibrant rhythms of lion dances and community celebrations reflect a neighborhood deeply rooted in tradition yet continually evolving.

In Summer 2024, APEN, Friends of Lincoln Square Park, the City of Oakland, and The California Endowment launched the Rooted and Resilient initiative through the Partners for Places Round 21 Grant Program, building on this enduring foundation in Chinatown. More than a climate resilience initiative, it reflects a community that has spent decades investing in relationships, preserving cultural identity, and working together to shape its future.

This report documents the engagement, partnerships, lessons, and outcomes that shaped the Rooted and Resilient initiative and the Lincoln Recreation and Resilience Center. It also shares adaptable lessons for communities, governments, funders, and practitioners advancing community-centered resilience. Use the buttons below to access the full report, or to download a short Community Brief with highlights in English or Chinese.

 

View the full report View the community brief (English) View the Community Brief (Chinese)

The post Rooted and Resilient: Climate and Community Resilience in Oakland Chinatown appeared first on Asian Pacific Environmental Network.

Satellites are catching huge pollution events from the oil and gas industry in New Mexico. These events are going largely unreported by companies. The state’s new rule would hold them accountable.

New Mexico’s Environmental Improvement Board will hold a hearing to help hold polluters accountable on December 1-8. Here’s what our analysis shows and how you can help.

SIGN THE PETITION

Most of the pollution coming from oil and gas operations, like methane, is invisible to the naked eye, but not to satellites now orbiting Earth and observing New Mexico. For years, operators in the Permian Basin and San Juan Basin have reported their own emissions to the state. Satellite data now lets the public check that work. Unsurprisingly, self-reporting is not working.

In October, Earthworks and the Gas Leaks Project released Plumes in the Permian, to review pollution in the New Mexico Permian Basin, part of the most productive oil and gas region in the country. Oil and gas companies are required to report pollution from their facilities to the state. In this report, we used publicly available satellite observations and our own optical gas imaging (OGI) field work, and compared it with that operator-reported data.

What did we find? In short, operators are NOT reporting. New Mexicans deserve more. A super-emitter program is the best answer right now.

The report findings:

The study covers January 1, 2025 through April 30, 2026.

• 166 super-emitter events (plumes of methane and toxic pollutants so large you can see them from space) were linked to 121 oil and gas facilities in the New Mexico Permian.
• One in three plumes was an extreme point source, meaning it released more than 500 kilograms of methane per hour. If the emission event were to last an entire day, that would be enough to power 70 homes for an entire year.
• Midstream operations: compressor stations, gas plants, and pipelines accounted for 105 of the 166 events.
• At 6 facilities, our OGI footage suggests emissions ran far longer than a single satellite pass captured. 
• Modeling of 29 events found nearly 37,000 people in Eddy and Lea counties may have been at risk from unsafe benzene exposure. Benzene is a volatile organic compound created as a byproduct of the oil and gas extraction process; it is a known carcinogenic.

The most troubling finding is what operators told the state.

• For permitted facilities, only two percent of the plumes lined up with an excess emissions report filed with the New Mexico Environment Department. 
• Only ten percent of facilities reporting venting and flaring data logged a significant event on the day a plume was seen. 
• And forty-seven percent of facilities filing monthly venting and flaring data reported venting zero gas at those sites for the entire month.

The biggest polluters are midstream giants. Energy Transfer accounts for twenty-one percent of emissions observed, followed by Targa at thirteen percent. 

The San Juan Basin has long been one of the country’s most visible methane hotspots from space. Satellite monitoring continues to show large releases from aging wells and processing infrastructure across the region, which sits beside Navajo Nation and Pueblo communities. Earthworks has also observed plumes consistent with satellite data in the Four Corners region, which also go largely unreported.

Why This Matters Now

These leaks waste a public resource, worsen climate change, and expose families to benzene and other toxic air pollutants. And most of them are going unreported. Many of these problems could have been stopped months sooner.

At the same time, the federal government is retreating. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin used a visit to New Mexico in October to propose canceling the federal Super Emitter Program, the main tool that lets independent monitors flag large leaks and requires companies to respond. 

New Mexico does not have to wait on Washington DC. The New Mexico Environment Department has proposed a state Methane Abatement Rule that would:

• Create a “super emitter program,” letting certified third parties using satellites, aircraft and other report sensing report large leaks to NMED.
• Set a low pollution threshold, so more serious leaks get caught.
• Require operators within 50 meters of a detected plume to investigate and repair the source.
• Require zero-emission pneumatic controllers, eliminating a major routine source of methane.

This rule is a common sense solution to a widespread problem that harms thousands of New Mexicans and our climate. Industry groups are already fighting to weaken or delay it, and the Board needs to hear support from the public and those who live with the consequences.

Take Action

The Environmental Improvement Board will hold its public hearing on the rule December 1-8, 2026. Members of the public can give comments in person or online.

1. Sign the petition urging the Board to adopt a strong Methane Abatement Rule.
2. Email me at asackett@earthworks.org to get more information about the December hearing, including talking points and logistics on how to participate. Share this post with your community. 

It’s time we hold polluters accountable in New Mexico instead of relying on self-reporting.

SIGN THE PETITION

The post New Mexico Super Emitter Program Would Hold Oil & Gas Accountable appeared first on Earthworks.

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

This week I listened to a fascinating Catalyst episode with Olya Irzak of Frost Methane, which featured the eye-opening estimate that 50 GW of new behind-the-meter gas could result in 380 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent over 18 months once methane leaks are taken into account.

This is a real problem. In their rush to power data centers are building the least efficient fossil gas generation, often with high equipment gas leakage, many of which are located in gas production regions that are in turn characterized by high leakage rates.

But its also a problem with a reasonable achievable near-term solution: if we are going to build data centers, we should ensure that they are connected to the grid rather than building dirty off grid gas generators. But to make this case, its important to understand just how much worse off-grid gas turbines are from an emissions standpoint, as shown in the figure below:

Here we examine four potential gas combustion technologies that off grid data centers could use. According to Cleanview’s tracker, simple-cycle turbines are planned for around 46% of off-grid data centers, reciprocating engines ~34%, fuel cells ~14%, unattributed generation around 6%, and on-site combined cycle plants effectively 0% today. These values are weighted by planned datacenter size, but only ~30% of planned capacity has identified equipment, so take these numbers as directional rather than precise.

The calculations here are also a bit generous to off-grid gas, as they use a nation-wide average 2.3% of methane production leaked upstream of generation based on Alvarez et al. 2018 (though more on that assumption later!). The grid numbers are 2023 averages from EPA’s eGRID for ERCOT, PJM and the US as a whole. They include the grid’s own upstream gas leaks, coal-mine methane and 3% transmission losses, all of which push the grid number up. Engine slip comes from EPA’s reporting factors for lean-burn engines, about 2.8% of the methane going in.1 Heat rates come from manufacturer data sheets for the equipment showing up in Cleanview’s tracker of behind-the-meter projects.

Reciprocating engines come out at about 740 kg of CO2-equivalent per megawatt-hour (MWh) and simple-cycle turbines at about 705. That is 63 to 80% more than average grid power in ERCOT, PJM or the US. Methane leakage (including engine slop) adds between 70 and 190 kg per MWh to that gap. But even without methane leakage the gap would be large; on CO2 alone, engines and turbines are 31% to 63% above the grid, because they are quite inefficient at turning gas into electricity.

There are more efficient options that are closer to grid emissions, but these are much more rarely installed today given longer build times or lower equipment availability. Fuel cells (mostly Bloom’s, which represent about 14% of identified behind-the-meter capacity in Cleanview’s data) and an on-site combined-cycle plants only emit 7% to 10% more than the US grid average, and are similar to what a utility would build to serve the same load.

That being said, US electricity grids are decarbonizing over time with the rapid deployment of clean energy. Existing gas that is grid connected can reduce capacity factors when low-cost renewable generation is available in a way that off-grid generators cannot (at least unless they also build on-site renewables or grid connect in the future). There is a real risk that off-grid gas generators become locked in over long periods of time while the rest of the electricity generation system decarbonizes.

Emissions also depend on where the data center is

Off-grid projects are clustered in a few specific regions, and both the local grid and the local gas supply differ a lot in terms of generation mix and leakage rates. So I reran my comparison for seven different datacenter hotspots in Cleanview’s tracker. For each region I used the 2025 grid average from EIA’s hourly grid data (counted on a consumption basis so that imported power is included). Each region also gets an upstream leakage rate for both on-grid and off-grid gas generation measured in the gas basin most likely to supply it, which are measured from aircraft and satellite surveys (e.g. MacKay et al. 2026, Varon et al. 2026, and others).2

The figure below shows how each option compares with the local grid average:

Engines and simple-cycle turbines emit more than the local grid in six of the seven regions, by between 36% and 95%. The exception is Cheyenne, Wyoming, where coal still generates nearly 60% of the grid’s power. There, engines and turbines are comparable to the grid average, but they still emit 55% to 64% more than a new gas combined cycle plant on the grid would. Large new loads can also delay coal plant retirements, which would make plugging into that grid worse than its average suggests.

So what is the path forward here?

Engines and turbines off-grid are the most polluting way to power new load in six of the seven hotspots where data centers are being built today. Fuel cells and efficient on-site plants are roughly as bad as building new gas on the grid, but relatively few data centers are planning on building them near-term.

Data center developers would generally prefer to connect to the grid than build their own off-grid systems. Off-grid systems require more redundancy and higher costs; low-efficiency gas generators or turbines run constantly are very expensive (and high emissions) form of generation. But in many cases its the only option they have, as the timelines associated with getting grid connections are too long or there simply is not sufficient generation available on-grid.

Ultimately we need to make our grids more robust – with new generation met by low-carbon energy sources, a modernized transmission grid, and lots of grid-scale storage – if we want to avoid a world where massive amounts of islanded gas generation gets built in the coming decade. In the meantime we should ensure that any off-grid data centers that are built meet existing air pollution regulations, encourage them to supplement gas with on-site solar and storage, and pursue broader efforts to reduce gas leakage (many of which, unfortunately, have been recently rolled back by the Trump administration).

In case its helpful, I’ve put the code and data to reproduce this analysis on my GitHub here.

1 Engine slip (often called methane slip) is fuel gas that passes through an engine without burning and leaves in the exhaust as methane. In reciprocating engines, some of the fuel-air mixture gets trapped in small gaps around the pistons where the flame can’t reach. Some also blows straight through while the intake and exhaust valves are both open. The lean fuel mixtures these engines use to cut NOx also burn less completely. EPA’s reporting factors for four-stroke lean-burn engines works out to about 2.8% of the methane going in, while modern gas turbines leak only around 0.02%. Running engines at partial load also can raise slip, and Olya Irzak said she has seen measurements as high as 12%, though most off grid data centers are expected to have relatively high capacity factors.

2 Note that for accounting purposes all gas leakage in a basin is being counted against gas production in the basin rather than being counted against oil production, even if the gas produced is associated with oil production.

By Jan Morrill, Earthworks and Diana Martin, MiningWatch Canada 

This month representatives of communities living in the shadows of the Pueblo Viejo gold mine and their allies traveled almost 30,000 kilometres around the world to draw attention to the impacts of its mining on their homes and families. They are calling for action to protect their health, safety, and to defend the rights of their communities. This shouldn’t have to be the case. 

These Dominican activists visited Belgium, Panama, and Canada calling for more transparency and accountability from the Canadian company operating the mine, Barrick Mining, better oversight from the Canadian government, and the safe relocation of 450 families who say they are already suffering environmental and health impacts. 

Calling out harm in London

The trips come on the heels of a complaint filed with the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), an accreditation authority for gold, silver, and other precious metals. The complaint alleges the company’s public record of human rights violations and environmental harms is incompatible with LBMA’s internal guidelines, and therefore gold from the mine should not be traded on the London Bullion Market. The complaint highlights the pollution, health problems, and impacts on crops in communities around the mine. According to the lead lawyer filing the complaint, “If you sit in London and you set standards but don’t police them — to enable highly profitable metals trading to go on — then you should expect to be held to account.”

Communities search for answers 

Communities have raised longstanding concerns about water contamination, air pollution, and other health impacts. One of Latin America’s largest open-pit gold mines, Pueblo Viejo has generated vast quantities of mine waste since commercial operations began. Barrick is now pursuing a major expansion that includes a new facility designed to store hundreds of millions of tonnes of additional mining waste and extend operations for decades. 

The Comité Nuevo Renacer (CNR), an organization representing five communities affected by the Pueblo Viejo mine in the Dominican Republic — La Cerca, La Piñita, Las Lagunas, Jobo Claro, and Jurungo — has advocated for years for community relocation in response to the environmental and health problems they associate with living near the mine.

This advocacy includes unsuccessful efforts to obtain essential information from Barrick Mining Corporation regarding the mine’s environmental impacts and tailings facilities. Since 2021, the CNR and its partner organizations have written to Barrick, its CEOs, and to investors, requesting access to information and transparency about the impacts of the mine on communities and families. These requests for information have been ignored or answered with information that is incomplete or not relevant to their requests. 

Calls for more transparency in Belgium

During the first week of October, Fernando Peña from the National Space for Transparency in Extractive Industries (ENTRE) and the Public Policy Observatory from the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo attended the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) annual meeting. Peña, the official representative for civil society from the Dominican Republic,  highlighted the LBMA case and the concerns of local communities during the official event and in other spaces. 

Government accountability in Panama 

On October 27, Casilda Lima, resident of Las Lagunas, member of the CNR and plaintiff in the LBMA complaint, presented testimony before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. As part of a hearing on the international obligations of Canadian extractive companies and their impact on human rights, Ms. Lima shared her experiences of living less than a kilometer from the tailings dam holding back mine waste for the Pueblo Viejo mine. She testified to the many health problems she is experiencing like headaches, nausea and trouble breathing, the dust that blows from the tailings and covers her house on a daily basis, and the noise from mining operations that keeps her awake at night. She highlighted the community calls for relocation, stating “…they should move us …to a place where we have water, where we have rivers, like what we had before [mining], now we don’t have anything.” 

The CNR also presented written testimony as part of the proceedings, calling on the Canadian government to investigate the actions and impacts of Barrick, and to take all necessary measures to remedy the damages. They also asked the Canadian government to work jointly with the Dominican government to implement the resettlement project, which has been on hold for seven years, and urged the Government of Canada to take action to ensure that Canadian companies, including Barrick, comply with international standards and regulations on access to information and transparency, such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management, and others.

Taking the message to Canada 

From October 28 through November 4th, Leoncia Ramos, a representative of the CNR and resident of the community of La Piñita, and another plaintiff in the LBMA complaint,  traveled to Canada to provide a first-hand account of the impacts of extractive activities on agricultural and rural communities in the Dominican Republic. Her testimony was included in a parliamentary press conference and she brought her concerns to representatives of the Canadian government, who committed to looking further into the issue. The Canadian Network for Corporate Accountability, representing over 40 civil society organizations, invited Ms. Ramos as a speaker at their biannual members meeting. 

While Canada expands trade globally, back home the government is narrowing already limited avenues for accountability for abuses by Canadian mining companies abroad. Ms. Ramos leveraged her visit to urge Canadian decision-makers to act on community concerns and address the risks posed by mining expansion. She called on the government to implement due diligence legislation that ensures affected people have meaningful access to accountability and remedy. 

Bringing justice home

There should be measures in place to protect communities from harms associated with mining and ensure they have the information they need to make decisions about what is best for themselves and their families. When communities suffer harm, there should be timely and appropriate remedy taken by companies and national governments. If communities raise concerns, standards setters like the LBMA, and governments where the companies are headquartered should assume responsibility and take action. 

The post The Long Journey to Hold Canadian Mining Accountable appeared first on Earthworks.

This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Tomorrow’s midterm elections are widely viewed as a referendum on Trump’s second presidency. Prior studies have found strong associations between protest and U.S. election outcomes, including the 2010 and 2018 midterm elections. Protests can influence popular opinion on policy issues, boost turnout among eligible voters, and shape how candidates set policy priorities.

At the Crowd Counting Consortium, or CCC, we have tallied an extraordinary number of protests since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. The majority of protests in Trump’s second term so far have named democracy or the presidency itself as a primary claim — think the nationwide Hands Off and No Kings protests in 2025 and 2026. 

But among protests focused on more specific policy domains, one key theme stands out. The administration’s anti-immigration policies and expansive, violent crackdown on immigrants have generated active, grassroots support networks in neighborhoods across the country and fueled a wave of protests in support of immigrants’ rights. During Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and St. Paul, protests took place in over 30 percent of counties containing 80 percent of the nation’s population. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history. A significant proportion of these protests occurred in counties that Trump won in 2024. 

Trends in immigration-related protests since January 20, 2017

Of course, the current wave of protest builds on a longer-term foundation of pro-immigrant demonstrations. Since the CCC started collecting data on protest in the United States in 2017, we’ve seen that protests against the federal government’s immigration policies have been a constant feature of the protest landscape across all three presidential administrations — Trump 1, Biden and Trump 2 (see Table 1). 

Table 1: Immigration protest events as a share of all left/liberal protests

Little more than a week after Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, numerous protests took place around the country in response to his Jan. 27 signing of Executive Order 13769, sometimes called the “Muslim Ban,” which restricted citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. On Jan. 28 and 29, mass protests occurred in and around airports, where immigrant rights groups and community members assembled to ensure the safe arrival of citizens of those countries who were in transit when the executive order went into effect. Protests against the executive order continued in February 2017 under the slogan “No Ban No Wall.” The Trump administration ultimately revised the executive order to a narrower version that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld as lawful; multiple protests followed on June 26, 2018. 

But the biggest jumps in protest participation came on coordinated, nationwide days of action related to the administration’s immigration policies. The first, on June 30, 2018, was a national day of action declaring that “Families Belong Together.” These protests demanded an end to the administration’s “child separation policy” — the practice of separating migrant children from parents and caretakers upon arrival at the U.S.-Mexico border — which was in effect under the Obama administration but escalated under Trump. This protest campaign was highly effective: The pressure placed on the administration led the White House to end the policy through an executive order, though loopholes remained.

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On Jan. 19, 2019, the third annual Women’s March on Washington represented an additional increase in coordinated nationwide protests in which immigrants’ rights were a core issue. And July 12, 2019 saw the Lights for Liberty day of action, which attempted to pressure elected officials (particularly in the newly Democratic Congress) to close detention centers and adopt more humane immigration policies. Ultimately, congressional Democrats introduced legislation in 2021 to reunite immigrant children with their families. In sum, the first Trump administration saw an impressive range of protests on behalf of immigrants’ rights, some of which had powerful impacts. 

Overall, the Biden administration saw a decline in such protests, with about 60 percent fewer than during the first Trump administration (seven percent to 11 percent as a share of overall left/liberal protests, respectively). Notable days of action during the Biden administration included continued protests calling for closure of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention centers, as well as protests against ongoing family detention and separation practices, and protests against asylum restrictions during a major surge in deportations in 2024. 

During the second Trump administration, such protests have seen a breathtaking rise. 

Figure 1 provides a comparative view of the number of immigration-related protests under the second Trump administration, compared to the first. The y-axis, showing the cumulative number of immigration-related protests since Trump’s two inaugurations, demonstrates the massive scale and steady climb of protests during his second term so far.

Figure 1: Counts of pro-immigrant protest events during Trump’s first and second terms

Figure 2 shows the frequency of such events on a monthly basis. There have been more protests in support of immigrants in seven of the months since January 2025 than in any of the 48 months of Trump’s first term. In 10 of the first 17 months of the current term, protests against Trump’s immigration policies made up over 20 percent of total protests. Few other protest claims have animated the public with such enduring salience over time.

Figure 2: Pro-immigrant protests in the U.S., January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Figure 2 also shows clear increases in the number of immigration-related protests during nationwide anti-Trump protests. Spikes in activity occurred on April 19, 2025 during the Hands Off protests; on October 18, 2025, when many No Kings protests adopted opposition to ICE and Trump’s mass deportation agenda as a central claim; and on March 28, 2026, when the third No Kings protests again made immigration a primary claim. Our tallies have also documented 170 repeater events (protests that are scheduled to take place daily, weekly or monthly) that specifically mention immigrant rights or opposition to ICE in their stated claims.

In Illinois and Minnesota, protests started local and went national

Trump’s immigration policies have produced particularly intense local mobilizations in areas that saw escalated ICE deployments, which then diffused to solidarity protests nationwide. For example, from early September to mid-November 2025, ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz targeting immigrants in Chicago. During that period, the CCC documented 3,491 protest events in opposition to Trump’s immigration policies, starting in Chicago and spreading across the country during the No Kings mobilization on Oct. 18, 2025, which named immigration as a central issue.

Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, also provoked powerful opposition locally and beyond, with over 4,400 protests taking place between Dec. 2, 2025 and Jan. 31, 2026. Significant numbers of protests responded to specific, publicized government abuses, such as aggressive law enforcement actions against immigrants, the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and the detention of a 5-year-old child of a Colombian immigrant. Three waves of action stood out: the ICE Out For Good weekend of action on Jan. 10-11; the Day of Truth & Freedom on Jan. 23, which was concentrated in Minnesota; and the National Shutdown and ICE Out of Everywhere actions, which mainly spanned Jan. 30-31, with some events lasting into Feb. 1. 

Figure 3 shows the number of counties that saw pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, after Operation Midway began in Chicago and Operation Metro Surge began in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Overall, these two states saw higher-than-average numbers of counties featuring protests, including among counties far afield from the major cities in which ICE focused its deployments. 

Figure 3. Pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota during and after ICE operations in Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul

Nationwide, the total volume of protest produced during early 2026 is extraordinary. 

January 2026 alone featured the fourth-most protest events recorded in all 10 years of CCC data, owing to the massive number of protests in Minnesota and around the country in opposition to Operation Metro Surge and its impacts, and to Trump’s immigration agenda in general. 

And the events in Minnesota seem to have been a flashpoint. Anti-ICE protests continued in February and March 2026, and anti-ICE claims were central to the nationwide No Kings mobilization on March 28. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history (see Table 2).

Table 2: Top 10 months by total protest events, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Protests opposing Trump’s immigration policies were reported in 933 counties during Operation Metro Surge, between Dec. 2, 2025 and Feb. 1, 2026 — about 30 percent of all counties in the U.S. These counties were densely populated: Together, they contain more than 80 percent of the U.S. population (see Figure 4). From March 2026 through May 2026, the CCC continued to record thousands of events protesting ICE, with hundreds of distinct civic organizations and hundreds of thousands of people participating. 

Figure 4: U.S. immigration protests following ICE deployments to Minneapolis

Nor are protests against ICE operations an exclusively liberal phenomenon. Instead, there has been a stark increase over time in the number of pro-immigrant protests in counties that Trump won in 2024 by at least a 5-point margin (see Figure 5). Among the pro-immigrant protests that occurred in March 2026, about 40 percent of them occurred in such counties. 

Figure 5: Pro-immigrant protests in counties Trump won by >5 Points in the 2024 Presidential Election, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026

Across the country, a broad range of constituencies using a variety of means have expressed opposition to Trump’s immigration policy. Demonstrations have just been one method. Those activating on behalf of and in support of immigrants include people forming human chains to protect immigrant workers; neighborhoods organizing support networks for affected immigrant families; students engaging in walkouts from schools and protests at college career fairs; people engaging in hunger strikes in support of international and undocumented students; knitters engaging in “craftivism”; people holding encampments outside of ICE facilities or noise demonstrations outside of hotels in which ICE agents were housed; consumers engaging in boycotts and sell-backs at Target and Home Depot; clergy engaging in civil disobedience; communities holding vigils for slain immigrants or those killed while advocating for them; community members building raised beds across thoroughfares to prevent ICE vehicles from accessing facilities, and more. Institutions and employers have raised their voices: Local businesses and business associations have called for the end of ICE operations in their towns, ranchers and farmers have decried treatment of their immigrant employees, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has condemned mistreatment of immigrants as well.

Counter-protest was minimal

Trump’s immigration policies have supporters in the country, particularly among Republicans. But few people have rallied or marched in defense of them. Right-leaning protests made up fewer than two percent of all immigration-related protests during the first 14 months of the first Trump administration, and less than 0.7 percent of immigration-related protests during the same stretch of his second administration. 

The frequency of pro-immigrant protests during Trump’s second term has eclipsed that of anti-immigration protests by 145 to 1. The vast majority of anti-immigration protests have been counter-protests occurring at demonstrations in support of immigrants and their rights. 

However, right-leaning protests have been increasingly characterized by anti-immigrant claims over the past three presidencies. Whereas anti-immigrant protests constituted 1.68 percent of all right-learning protests during Trump’s first term, that proportion has increased sevenfold so far during his second, to 12.43 percent. 

Table 3: Anti-immigration protest events as a share of all right/conservative protests

A powerful and growing pro-immigrant constituency

Today’s mass protests in support of immigrants’ rights build on a durable pattern of pro-immigrant and anti-ICE protest in the U.S. To wit, the CCC has documented a prayer protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that has been held every Friday for the past 20 years. 

But the recent increase in pro-immigrant protests and their intensity is notable. The breadth and volume of pro-immigrant protests show that committed activists and organizations have succeeded in rallying huge numbers in favor of justice and dignity for immigrants, indicating a durable underlying infrastructure. In this essay, we focused on street protest as one indicator in the overall picture. But community mobilization on behalf of immigrants has meant far more than demonstrations. Mutual aid and neighborly support, observing and documenting ICE operations, litigation, support to immigrants in detention, and direct appeals to public officials have all been central to America’s response to Trump’s immigration policies. The growth of pro-immigrant protests reflects a (potentially growing) constituency willing to take risks to defend a multicultural vision of America, potentially widening its appeal. 

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In short, we see capable organizers and the mass public pushing hard for humane treatment of immigrants for the foreseeable future. Neither political party has figured out how to address immigration in a way that resolves the need for safe and secure borders and the need to treat everyone on U.S. soil with dignity, decency and due process. But the impacts of Trump’s policies on immigrants, their families and their broader communities provide a galvanizing issue for Americans who otherwise agree on little else. For example, some conservative faith communities and various progressive groups increasingly find themselves on the same side when it comes to immigration. 

Policymakers often resist turning to activists, civil society organizations and community groups for policy solutions. But the persistence of multi-sectoral immigration activism, as seen through protest alone, also reflects a powerful and growing constituency in favor of just and humane approaches to immigration. Protests reflect and shape the existing moral consensus but also can reorient constituencies in favor of a new consensus. We hope the members of the next Congress pay attention.

This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Effective Aid Ukraine, an Irish charity helping the Ukrainian community, is combining farming, cooking, and residential care reform to give young people of Lviv, Ukraine practical skills, confidence, and choice.

The project is based at Rozdil Friends Home, a residential center for boys and young men with disabilities. Residents displaced from eastern Ukraine after Russia’s invasion grow vegetables in a greenhouse, harvest fresh produce throughout the year, and learn how to cook and preserve food for future meals.

“It’s not just about teaching children how to grow food,” Tom McEnaney, Founder of Effective Aid Ukraine, tells Food Tank. “It’s choosing what you’re going to eat and being able to make it yourself,” he says. “That’s what leads to people having more fulfilled lives.”

Growing food also helps stretch the limited budgets of the nonprofit. Vegetables produced on-site reduce food purchases, leaving more money for clothing, repairs, and other daily needs.

Effective Aid Ukraine is now working to rebuild the center’s kitchen. When it is finished, residents will help prepare meals while kitchen staff become teachers instead of cooks. They will learn food safety, meal planning, and cooking skills they can use later in life as a career and to live independently.

The organization hopes their work will serve as a pilot to support a broader shift taking place across Ukraine. McEnaney sees the country moving toward community-based care. Working with the Lviv Regional Authority and its governor, Maksym Kozitzkyy, Effective Aid Ukraine is helping test how food production in residential care facilities can be scaled up and out.

Four years after Russia’s invasion of the country, more than 10 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance in Ukraine and 3.8 million are internally displaced, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Effective Aid Ukraine sees rebuilding daily routines and pathways toward greater independence as an important part of the country’s broader recovery.

The UNHCR leverages food and cooking as catalysts for recovery across emergency settings and during times of conflict. The World Food Programme, along with UNHCR, call for decisive actions to ensure access to safe and sufficient nutritious food in times of crisis. Initiatives like the one in Rozdil build on those findings by connecting agriculture with everyday independence.

McEnaney believes the lesson of their work is simple: “It’s about giving people purpose, dignity, and fulfillment.”

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

Photo courtesy of Effective Aid Ukraine

The post How Food Is Helping Transform Residential Care in Ukraine appeared first on Food Tank.

Becoming certified organic is often a way for farmers to communicate their values to customers. It symbolizes a prioritization of environmental practices, especially within pockets of their market that they are unable to connect with face-to-face. With so many farmers already being worn thin with responsibilities, the often career-long decision to get certified can be daunting, especially without full clarity about what benefits await on the other side.

The post The Road to Organic Certification appeared first on RAFI.

At a time when accountability and transparency are especially important for Kentucky Power customers, the Kentucky Public Service Commission’s decision to deny intervention status to the Mountain Association, Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, and Kentuckians For The Commonwealth in its audit of Kentucky Power is disappointing because it limits how we can contribute to the process. 

For nearly a decade, the Mountain Association and our partners have formally intervened in utility cases affecting Eastern Kentucky. We’ve participated because the people we serve are directly affected by the outcomes. From small businesses and nonprofits to local governments, volunteer fire departments, and families struggling with high energy bills, we bring perspectives that might otherwise go unheard. 

Intervention in most PSC cases allows stakeholders to formally participate in a case by filing testimony, presenting evidence, conducting discovery, and helping build the official record. Those tools help ensure that decision-makers hear from the customers who live with the consequences of those decisions every day, versus just the utilities or groups like the Kentucky Industrial Utilities Customers who has been increasingly partnering with the Kentucky Attorney General to jointly intervene. 

In this case, we wanted to intervene to be able to review the Request For Proposals (RFP) and give our input in scope and selection of an auditor. The audit was called for by the Public Service Commission this July 2026 following their most recent rate increase case.

Kentucky Power serves more than 160,000 customers in far Eastern Kentucky. Their customers face some of the highest electric bills in the state, and many households in the region already struggle with significant energy burdens and low income. Kentucky Power has raised their rates four times in ten years. In that time, residential rates have risen 75% and small commercial rates have risen 35%. An audit of the company’s operations and management is an important opportunity to examine why these repeated, significant rate increases are needed and what the company can do differently to better protect its customers who aren’t able to just take their business elsewhere. 

“We appreciate that the PSC has directed the selected auditor to engage with stakeholder groups as part of determining the audit’s scope, but there is an important distinction between being interviewed and being a party to the proceeding,” said Robin Gabbard, President of Mountain Association. “The people who pay those bills should have a meaningful role in that conversation and our role as an intervenor would have centered those voices.” 

While we may not have been granted formal intervention, we will continue bringing those voices forward throughout this audit process and in the other cases our Energy Team continues to intervene in on behalf of Eastern Kentuckians.  

To learn more about our history of utility intervention, please visit our Policy webpage:  https://mtassociation.org/policy  

The post Why Formal Intervention Matters in the Kentucky Power Audit  appeared first on Mountain Association.

Adrian Ramsay, Green MP and former co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, has told the BBC, that the party is at a crossroads, on what kind of party it is to be. He cited the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion adopted at the party’s recent autumn conference, as a break with the traditional philosophy of environmental focus.

Ramsay said "One option is to sort of dig in more down this approach, not only in relation to this motion, but I think that there's a risk it brings with it - a quite divisive, a quite internally focused approach to politics."

Ramsay said this is "perhaps seen from small groups of people on the hard left of politics who go around different parties trying to influence how those parties are run."

As reported by The Guardian, Ramsay went on to say, “There is also a small number of people who have joined, perhaps from the very hard left of politics, who might be more at home in the SWP or with George Galloway or with Your Party. [They] not only want to adopt some very hardline positions on certain issues, but have a very different culture to how they go about it.” Those members were seeking to “seeking to change the direction of the party.”

What is taking place here, is that this is part of an ongoing attempt by the establishment of the party to regain control after Zack Polanski was elected as leader of the party last year. Ramsay, along with Ellie Chowns, another Green MP, stood against Polanski for the leadership, and were endorsed by former leader and former Green MP, Caroline Lucas.

Polanski won with 84% of the vote, a crushing defeat for the party establishment who didn’t want him to become leader, and they were worried about losing their influence in the party. They bided their time and waited for an opportunity to strike back.

The party’s membership shot up from about 60,000 to 230,000 which made it difficult to complain about things not going well, so they needed a cause. Something that would appeal to more traditional type of member and would lead to the newer, suspect members to leave to leave the party.

The ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion passed at autumn conference became the trigger. I think the establishment thought there was a chance it would pass, and started preparing. When the motion did pass, they went into action. What made this an even better vehicle for the fight back was that the Holborn and St Pancras Parliamentary byelection would take place a few days later, where Polanski was the Green party candidate.

On mainstream media, even before the vote was declared, although Lucas probably knew that Labour would retain what is a very safe seat, launched into a speech about how the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion had cost the party winning the seat. There is no evidence for this, but once she said it, it became a news story in itself for mainstream media. So, the campaign had begun. Ramsay’s latest media intervention is just the campaign moving along.

Mainstream media reports that 18,000 people have left the Green party since Zionism motion was passed. I don’t know if this true, but I have seen a few members saying on social media they have left over the motion, but I’ve also seen some say they left over the pro-nuclear policy passed at the same conference. I’ve also seen some say they have joined the party because of the Zionism motion.

The whole thing has the uncomfortable feeling that this is another right-wing coup, similar to what happened in the Labour party when Jeremy Corbyn was leader. Spread smears about antisemitism, demand expulsions of members on spurious grounds for being antisemitic and creating an atmosphere where the newer members will leave the party.

I’m proud to be a Green Lefty or ecosocialist, as we say, and have been a member of the Green party for over twenty years. Our numbers were fairly small, but now many left-wing people see the Green party as the most viable party to deliver any kind of socialism and anti-neoliberalism.

This minority establishment should stop waging this divisive civil war and realise that the party has moved on. Ecological justice cannot be separated from social justice, because the effective cause of both of our ills is the same, capitalism. If we don’t want to challenge this system, the party will remain on the margins of politics and so be completely irrelevant.

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• Just transition
• Climate finance
• Adaptation and mitigation
• Global stocktake and NDCs
• Action agenda and other issues

Delegates will soon gather in the Turkish resort city of Antalya for UN climate negotiations, against a backdrop of war, energy crisis and climate extremes.

At COP31, nations will try to find agreement on various issues, including climate finance for developing countries and a global “just transition” towards a cleaner economy.

This summit is unusual due to its joint presidency, which means that Australia is leading the negotiations while Turkey hosts the conference.

Outside the formal negotiations, Turkey is also pushing its own priorities as part of a wider “action agenda”, including electrification, oceans and “green industrialisation”.

In order to track parties’ positions on key negotiating points and wider issues at COP31, Carbon Brief has analysed around 100 documents and captured them in the interactive table below.

The first column shows the countries and UN negotiating blocs, the second shows the topics up for debate and the third indicates specific issues within those topics.

The final column indicates the positions that the parties have expressed on each topic. These range from “priority” – meaning the party is likely to be pushing the issue – to “oppose”, meaning it is likely to push against it.

This is a “living document” that will be updated over the course of COP31. 

Please get in touch if you would like to offer additions by emailing policy@carbonbrief.org.

Brief explanations of the key issues and jargon-filled language that permeate the talks can be found below the interactive table.

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At COP30 in Brazil in 2025, nations agreed to establish a practical mechanism to help drive a “just transition” to a low-carbon economy.

Key aspects of this "Belém-Antalya mechanism" (BAM) – often referred to as the “just transition mechanism” (JTM) – were agreed during the June climate negotiations this year, but many details are missing and dividing lines remain between parties.

Parties have disagreed about the scope of the mechanism and whether it should be tied to the provision of finance.

Nevertheless, following progress in June within the “just transition work programme” (JTWP), civil society groups highlighted that getting the mechanism up and running is a “key expected outcome” from COP31. 

Climate finance

Climate finance is always a highly contested issue at UN climate negotiations. 

Developing countries have successfully pushed for a “work programme” on climate finance to feature on the conference agenda.

These parties see this programme as a way to pressure developed countries into providing more funding from their public coffers, specifically under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement. Some are even proposing a “burden sharing” arrangement for climate-finance provision.

This comes against a backdrop of major donors cutting their aid budgets and the Trump administration in the US pressuring multilateral development banks (MDBs) to drop their climate objectives.

Developed countries, which have traditionally been responsible for providing finance, would prefer to keep a broader focus on issues such as improving access to existing finance and broadening the range of donors. Some developing countries, such as small-island states, also support these goals.

Nations have also been discussing Article 2.1c of the Paris Agreement under the “Veredas dialogue”. This focuses on making all global “financial flows” consistent with climate action.

Countries have different views about what this involves, with developing countries again hoping to keep the focus on developed countries’ responsibilities to financially support them. 

Adaptation and mitigation

At negotiations in June, parties were unable to agree on the details of a “global goal on adaptation” (GGA), which is intended to drive climate adaptation worldwide.

Having agreed at COP30 on a list of 59 “indicators” – ways to assess progress towards the GGA – nations now need to refine these before COP32 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This is a highly technical process that involves a taskforce working out how to use and track these indicators.

Broadly, developing countries stress the importance of finance to fund adaptation efforts, rather than simply to track progress. They also want reassurances about a pledge made last year to “triple adaptation finance”.

At the June climate negotiations, negotiators also failed to make any progress when discussing the mitigation work programme (MWP) – the only formal agenda item that concerns cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Among other things, parties disagreed on whether the MWP should continue running over the next few years, or simply be brought to a close.

Global stocktake and NDCs

Back in 2023, the first “global stocktake” (GST) of the Paris Agreement set out the state of climate action and what needed to be done to set the world on course.

On mitigation, nations agreed to a package of measures, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels”, tripling renewable energy and “halting and reversing deforestation” by 2030. 

Some of these outcomes remain contentious among certain parties, particularly large, developing countries and those with economies that rely on fossil-fuel exports.

Developing countries have persistently argued that they need more climate finance to implement the global stocktake outcomes.

Parties were meant to update their climate plans under the Paris Agreement, informed by the first global stocktake, by 2025. These plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), cover the period out to 2035.

So far, only 150 parties – responsible for three-quarters of global emissions – have submitted new NDCs. 

Iran, Vietnam, Egypt and Argentina are among those without new NDCs – and the US has withdrawn its climate plan under the Trump administration.

Some parties, such as the EU, have stressed the need for countries to submit their new NDCs ahead of COP31 – and to ensure they are aligned with the 1.5C temperature limit.

COP31 will also see the launch of the second global stocktake, which will conclude in 2028.

Action agenda and other issues

Turkey will be pushing its “action agenda” priorities at COP31, including global targets for electrification, reducing waste and reducing building-sector emissions.

(The Australian “presidency of negotiations” is intending to pursue a “cover text” decision at COP31 that may capture some of these wider targets, such as the electrification goal.)

The action agenda is meant to provide a complementary track to the formal negotiations, where governments and non-state actors can advance specific, real-world solutions.

A new COP31 presidency effort dubbed the “climate implementation bridge” is also meant to complement these ambitions by turning NDC goals into an “investable project portfolio”

Some parties have explicitly signalled their support for various elements beyond the formal negotiations, in the run-up to COP31. 

For example, a joint letter signed by 105 parties called for COP31 to “put the ocean at the heart of climate action” by embedding ocean-based climate action in the UNFCCC architecture.

Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP31 climate summit 05.11.2026 COP31 Antalya Experts: What China wants from the COP31 climate talks 29.10.2026 China policy Interview: COP31 president says electrification is ‘surest way to protect citizens’ 10.07.2026 COP31 Antalya Bonn climate talks: Key outcomes from the June 2026 UN climate conference 19.06.2026 Adaptation

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