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In 2015 the Chinese government announced an ambitious plan to build the world’s largest national park system. China started with Sanjiangyuan, a massive park 13,000 square miles larger than Germany and 14 times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, located in what the government called the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. State media recently described the region as containing “vast, unspoiled alpine ecosystems” and “pristine rivers and mountains.”

To many environmentalists, this was big news. Over the next few years, groups like Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, WWF, and others eagerly signed up to play a role in helping China build this system. Reports and articles from then focused on how this would protect wildlife like snow leopards, giant pandas, yaks, Tibetan antelopes, and provide opportunities for China to learn from America’s long experience with conservation and national parks management.

But for Tibetans like Kyinzom Dhongdue, there was a big problem. Of the 10 initially planned parks, four — including Sanjiangyuan — were in areas that had been part of the then-independent nation of Tibet prior to the 1950 invasion by China’s People’s Liberation Army.

By Quigley – Own work, CC0, Link

“In Tibet, you have an authoritarian colonial power presenting to be some kind of a green hero,” says Dhongdue, former member of the Tibetan Parliament in exile who is now an Australia-based human rights activist. “The environmental movement is in danger of normalizing what China is doing and without really looking at the darker side of these programs.”

She and others fear that history is repeating in Tibet and other regions under Chinese control, such as Xinjiang, homeland of Turkic Uyghurs and Kazakhs, and Inner Mongolia.

In each of these locations, the designation of new national park and land protections systems and increased efforts to promote ecotourism have resulted in the ongoing displacement of locals from the land they’ve lived on for generations. In their place, Chinese park officials or tourism interests have taken control.

“These parks are displacing the very same people who have lived on and looked after those lands for generations,” Dhongdue says. “A colonial, foreign government is coming in and protecting a landscape by removing the traditional custodians. And that is a huge problem.”

Nonprofit conservation groups, meanwhile, have mostly remained silent, their messaging focusing more on snow leopards, argali, and other endemic and endangered species over the communities who have lived alongside them for generations.

Environmental Colonialism

According to the East West Center at the University of Hawai‘i, The Nature Conservancy introduced the idea of national parks to the Chinese government as early as 1997 and has played an active role in knowledge sharing and exchanges between the U.S. and China. Conservation International claims to have helped conserve 4.9 million acres of land in China, and one of their first projects was in Southeastern Tibet. To them China’s 2015 national parks announcement was a major achievement.

While the imagery of parks like Sanjiangyuan evokes an empty landscape untouched by humans, the reality is quite different. According to an article in National Geographic, there were an estimated 652,600 people living inside the boundaries of China’s initial 10 parks.

While comprehensive data is lacking, so far these national parks have resulted in the displacement of tens of thousands Tibetan nomads and villagers from their land — and likely many Uyghurs and Mongols, too — often to newly constructed urban villages in less desirable locations.

It’s a similar story to what happened with America’s Yosemite National Park, often glorified as the origin of the global conservation movement. There the park’s formation led to the expulsion of the Miwok and Ahwahneechee peoples and eventually their erasure from the landscape, which was promoted to wealthy tourists as an unspoiled wilderness, not a longtime home of thriving cultures.

The same happened to at least 26 Indigenous groups at other well-known national parks or monuments in the United States — including Glacier, Yellowstone, and Shenandoah. For decades this history was erased and nearly forgotten.

Today it’s recognized that in the push to protect landscapes and forests in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, environmentalists turned a blind eye to the sometimes-violent displacement of native peoples. In recent years groups like the Sierra Club, the National Parks Conservation Organization, and even — at least prior to January 2025 — the National Park Service have begun to reckon with their role in erasing native peoples from landscapes.

The Nature Conservancy also acknowledges the harms of colonialism and the need to involve including local communities and Indigenous peoples in land conservation, as do Conservation International and WWF.

In the United States, it was mostly white settlers who displaced Natives from their land — and it was mostly white rangers and officials who managed national parks. Positions of power, and often voting rights, were withheld from native peoples. At the time millions of Native Americans and other oppressed groups lacked voting rights or representation.

For many nonprofits, understanding this harmful past didn’t stop them from actively working with China, despite its ranking as one of the world’s most repressive countries. China’s authoritarian single-party government has criminalized most protests, especially for so-called ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uyghurs, who face collective punishment and far more surveillance and censorship than the Han Chinese majority.

“Protest has become a very sparse and dangerous thing in Tibet and Xinjiang,” says Dawa Lokyitsang, a Tibetan anthropologist currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in the Netherlands.

The Environmental Cost of Displacement

Removing communities from landscapes isn’t just bad for people. It can be bad for the landscapes themselves.

In the same ways that European colonialism and America’s westward expansion were disastrous for iconic species like bison and passenger pigeons, many point to the invasion of Tibet as when deforestation, mining, and river damming began to transform landscapes.

“Extraction has been happening for a long time, [starting] right after Tibet’s invasion,” says Lokyitsang. “Deforestation and mining, since the 1950s, it’s been classic industrial, colonial, resource development, and extraction.”

Today science is finally starting to recognize the many ways that Native Americans molded the ecological landscape of much of North America. Other published science has found that in seemingly wild places like the Amazon rainforest, humans are often part of the ecosystem and removing them can have adverse impacts.

In Tibet, too, the role of traditional nomads and other communities should be valued, not displaced, by national parks, says Dhongdue.

“It’s also very important to understand that Tibetans are environmental actors,” Dhongdue says. “We have lived on and conserved this land for generations, and that traditional knowledge is not being taken into account by China.”

A report published last year by the Institute for Security & Development Policy presented evidence that removing Tibetans from these seemingly harsh landscapes has led to increased erosion, biodiversity loss, and land degradation.

Silence, Again

Not too long ago, global conversation groups were happy to speak about their work in China, which was highlighted in annual reports. Journalists were welcomed on tours of parks like Sanjiangyuan or Giant Panda National Park, where, sometimes, they saw showcase projects where some Tibetans had been provided housing or low-level jobs at parks.

But critics say these organizations failed to see past propaganda or ask difficult questions about what was really happening.

“The danger is if you’re not addressing both the environmental aspect and people’s rights, these organizations risk legitimizing a colonial system that is in place,” Dhongdue says.

WWF China, The Nature Conservancy, and Conservation International all declined to be interviewed for this story, while Snow Leopard Trust, the Paulson Institute (a sustainability think tank), and Chinese nonprofits like Shan Shui didn’t respond to interview requests. This echoes Dhongdue’s experience when she was working on a report about Tibetan nomads and land displacement in 2019.

“I’m not surprised, but, yes, quite saddened by that,” she says. “I had the same response: people not willing to engage on issues relating to Tibet.”

Gabriel Lafitte, an independent researcher focused on Tibet, fears that these organizations have self-censored due to policies that limit their space to operate in China.

“They have to operate within Beijing’s constraints,” says Lafitte. “Beijing has learned how to co-opt, control, and manage international nonprofit engagement across the entire spectrum of environmental issues.”

An NGO law passed in 2016 requires anyone operating in China to have their yearly plans approved by a branch of Chinese government, limiting direct criticism. Even actions taken by overseas offices staff are risky, as statements that anger or upset China could lead to Chinese staff being threatened or even arrested or detained. It’s one reason that human rights and labor nonprofits like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Transparency International have no presence in China.

Worryingly, some of this is now repeating in the United States, where Donald Trump has also backtracked on quite recent efforts to recognize the erasure of the Miwok, Ahwahneechee, and others from national parks, returning the government, after a brief window, back to silence about the treatment of Native Americans.

The good news? So far U.S. conservationists are mostly fighting back against these changes and refusing to forget the dark history. But Lafitte doubts they’ll be willing to speak about the same injustices happening today in China.

“At this particular moment, it’s hard to imagine who might speak up for Tibetans or Uyghurs.”

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

Tear Down the Walls: The Racist Roots of ‘Fortress Conservation’

The post China’s National Parks: Green Goals Through Authoritarian Measures? appeared first on The Revelator.

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The share of renewables in Europe’s energy production is growing slowly but surely. Yet as Europe races to build its green energy economy, the workers doing the building are too often facing weaker unions, unsafe conditions, and employers who resist collective bargaining. Without them on board, the transition can’t achieve the social consent it depends on for its success. What would it take to make green jobs good jobs?

Europe is, slowly, moving along the transition to green energy. In 2025, just over 9 per cent of the EU’s electricity came from coal and in the first three months of 2026, close to half came from renewable sources.

For a continent that has repeatedly come face to face with the economic, security, and environmental risks of relying on fossil fuels, this transition is both urgent and crucial. However, the question of whether it is a “just transition” is still open, particularly when it comes to the rights of the workers who are being affected as Europe’s economy shifts towards renewables.

Determining who falls into that group is not straightforward, as the green transition cuts across numerous sectors. “If you look at the standard statistical classification of activities, you don’t have brown or black sectors and green sectors separately,” says Bela Galgóczi, senior researcher at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI). Brown and black sectors commonly refer to carbon-intensive, polluting industries. While some workplaces – such as an oil refinery – might sit squarely in that category, chemical production and vehicle manufacturing are too complex to be put in a particular category, he notes.

However, the work done so far – often using imperfect data – tends to show that brown and black sectors have slightly higher wages and union density, greater coverage from collective bargaining agreements, and lower use of agency workers than green sectors. This is in part because these sectors have existed and workers have been organising for a century. “I would never suggest that for the wind sector we will need 100 years, or even 10 or 20. But there is a little bit of a build-up time for structures and representation and settlements,” Galgóczi says.

The work done so far tends to show that brown and black sectors have slightly higher wages and union density, greater coverage from collective bargaining agreements, and lower use of agency workers.

Unscrupulous employers

The multinational companies active in Europe’s green transition have tended to respond differently in each jurisdiction to protest action by their workers. For instance, in 2023, workers in Germany concluded a 123-day strike, the last of a series of industrial actions, against their employer, the Danish renewables giant Vestas. The strike was in protest against the company’s refusal to enter into a collective bargaining agreement with the workers’ union – something that was and is standard practice in Denmark itself. The workers ultimately succeeded and established a collective bargaining agreement. Meanwhile, workers at electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla’s Swedish subsidiary conceded defeat in August of this year following a three-year strike aimed at establishing a collective bargaining agreement.

Another pattern that has emerged in the behaviour of major players in the green industry, according to Galgóczi, are attempts to erode the pay, terms, and conditions of workers as part of company restructuring. In 2022, the state-owned French energy company EDF was forced to abandon a restructure named “Projet Hercule” that would have moved their renewables business into a new company, which was opposed by unions on the grounds that it would privatise a public service, and criticised by the European Commission over EU competition rules.

In the UK, North Sea oil still provides a significant number of well-paid and unionised jobs. But since production peaked in 1999, many have believed the future to lie in offshore wind. However, the workers’ ability to participate in that future is not guaranteed. “Nobody ever speaks to renewable workers, and I think there’s a massive missing piece of the jigsaw,” says Connor Watt, worker organiser at Platform, an NGO working on the just transition. Watt and his colleagues have been talking to workers across oil, gas, and renewables, particularly those who have moved over from fossil fuels – usually in search of long-term job stability – about their experiences.

Many of these workers find that renewables projects are often more poorly managed and workplace accidents are more frequent, in part because safety practices have not been transferred from the oil and gas sector nor developed specifically for renewables. Watt points out that safety processes and union engagement were transformed in the North Sea oil and gas industry following the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, where 167 workers died following a catastrophic explosion on an oil rig.

Watt feels the situation in renewables means a disaster is only a matter of time, particularly once workers are in international waters – a mere 12 miles from the British shore. “If you’re just on a vessel at sea and it’s not under a UK flag and you might just be waiting for weather or for a shout from somebody, there isn’t any legislation which protects the vessel that you’re on, and that’s a common thing,” he notes. In international waters, companies can exploit casualised migrant labour and pay less than minimum wage. “We’ve developed this massive [offshore wind] industry, second in the world. However, there are just these oversights in the regulations and legislation, so that’s worrying,” Watt adds.

The missing link with workers

The problem has its roots in the tendency in European countries, including the UK, to prioritise greener industries even at the cost of workers’ rights, terms, and conditions – a bargain that could undermine the transition itself.

“A lot of people who want renewable energy to be built, want it to be built quickly because of the urgency of the climate crisis, and so relatively few questions are asked about how it’s built and the conditions under which that happens,” says William Westgard-Cruice, a human geographer at the Clark University Graduate School of Geography.

He points to the construction of solar farms in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, where in a number of cases workers’ rights have been violated and where migrants have been hired to work under harsh circumstances. “There’s a lot of focus on local communities and their concerns, and relatively little focus on the workers who are actually building and operating these power plants,” Westgard-Cruice adds.

One of the reasons why there is localised opposition to renewables projects, he believes, is that communities where they are built are not offered clear and defined benefits in the form of good and decent jobs. Moreover, he says that political parties from across the spectrum are failing to engage with these issues sufficiently, if at all.

There’s a lot of focus on local communities and their concerns, and relatively little focus on the workers who are actually building and operating these power plants.

Westgard-Cruice believes that politicians can make an effective intervention by incorporating stronger labour protections into the auctions for offshore wind projects. At present, he explains, European countries are including measures around environmental sustainability and skills into these contracts, but they could go much further and mandate collective bargaining. There were, he adds, unsuccessful efforts on a European level by some MEPs to add protections into the Net-Zero Industry Act, but worker protection didn’t appear to be a “dealbreaker” for either the Greens or the Social Democrats – and certainly not for the European Commission.

Westgard-Cruice believes that unions, social and climate movements, as well as green, social-democratic and left parties must push for better working conditions and standards to be a much greater political priority and to use the power of the state to raise them in the renewables sector. “This is the only way that there’s going to be social consent for the development of renewable energy in rural areas that feel like they’re being turned into sacrifice zones,” he emphasises. “These political debates could have a very different character if people all knew someone who’s working in offshore wind, and who’s saying, ‘Oh, the conditions are great in here. I’m so glad that I left my old job in the fossil fuel industry to be able to go to this.’”

The way forward

IndustriAll is a global trade union federation representing around 800 unions and 50 million workers worldwide. As a union focused on manufacturing, it sees a lot of potential for the green transition to generate new manufacturing jobs further down the supply chain.

Both IndustriAll and the ETUI are pushing for a just transition framework directive, says Corinna Zierold, head of just transition at IndustriAll Europe. This is because their experience of negotiating at the sector level has not been successful. For example, in 2022, IndustriAll started to negotiate a just transition agreement for gas workers at Eurogas, a European association representing the gas industry. However, after two years of talks aimed at reaching a voluntary agreement, Eurogas said it would not sign it.

That said, there are also positive examples, according to Zierold. For instance, Poland has established projects to retrain coal miners to work in wind power, which the country is aiming to expand to provide around a quarter of its energy. The UK and Scottish governments are also establishing projects to fund retraining of offshore oil and gas workers (however, this was before the announcement that the UK would grant permission for more gas production in the North Sea.).

IndustriAll’s member unions are also facing pressure from employers, backed by right-wing governments. In Hungary, battery manufacturing plants stepped up hiring of migrant labour, with the support and facilitation of the government of far-right former prime minister Viktor Orbán. At the same time, workers were facing increased health and safety risks from exposure to toxic substances. Unions have continued to push for change since a new government came into power earlier this year.

There are also structural issues at work in the new green energy economy. “The net zero sectors are basically small businesses, and maybe some of them do manufacturing… I would put that under the general bundle of the installation economy,” says Dr Nicholas Beuret, a lecturer in management and ecological sustainability at the University of Essex. According to Beuret, many green jobs are in assembling and installing rather than producing the components that go into key infrastructure like heat pumps or smart metres, so the full value of the green transition does not trickle down to workers.

“There’s often a fraught relationship with working conditions, and not only are they [small installation businesses] at risk of going under themselves, and there’s lots of competition, and then they’re fighting larger businesses, but there’s also quite a lot of underhanded economic behaviour that undermines the very conditions of green transition in itself,” he laments. This includes, for example, installation companies fitting faulty insulation and defrauding green energy schemes.

The economic geopolitics of green energies is another factor, with European renewables manufacturing contending with China, which supplies 95 per cent of the solar panels used in Europe and manufactures 39 per cent of wind turbines installed outside the country. In the long term, this could relegate Europe to largely being a continent where solar panels, wind turbines, and other green technologies are assembled, while economic giants in China capture the value created through manufacturing.

Beuret also highlights the heavier dependence on government grants and support, which is a “really politicised revenue scheme”.  As he sees it, the larger problem is how policymakers are approaching the transition. “They’re not interested in running public companies or public investment or public research,” he says. “They want to incentivise businesses to do it, and the problem is the businesses they’re trying to incentivise all have a lot of money to lose in fossil fuels.”

As the backlash to green policies gathers across Europe, supporters of the transition to a green economy need to understand better how to bring workers on board – both in old industries that are in the process of transition and the new ones that are meant to provide better, greener jobs.

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By her own admission, Marjorie Steele doesn’t get along with many people in the climate movement. She runs a Michigan-based activist group that advocates against large-scale industrial development. Though she considers herself a political independent, her opposition often puts her into conflict with both climate advocates and Trump-aligned conservatives. She spends most of her time these days focusing on data centers, but she founded the activist group Economic Development Responsibility Alliance to oppose a Chinese electric vehicle battery plant near the city of Big Rapids. She has also campaigned against solar farms, battery storage systems, and transmission lines, one of which is being built on the property adjacent to hers.

“When the progressives look at me and say, ‘You’re MAGA’ because of the green energy issue, it really hurts me,” Steele told Grist. As she has crossed the state opposing new development projects, she has encountered fierce pushback from climate-conscious progressives.

There has been one notable exception. Earlier this year, when she was in Lansing to lobby state lawmakers for a data center ban, she met William Lawrence, a Democrat who is running for U.S. Congress in Michigan’s 7th District. She knew that Lawrence was a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, one of the nation’s most prominent climate organizations, so she wasn’t sure how he would receive her. The two sat down to eat Jimmy John’s, and she spoke to him at length about what she sees as the negative consequences of clean energy development, including noise pollution and the destruction of prime farmland.

“I let him have it,” she said. “I just gave him the whole spiel rather forcefully. And he listened and he asked amazing questions. He’s clearly actual grassroots, otherwise he wouldn’t be at my table, because mainstream establishment politicians do not like talking to me.” A few weeks later, she saw Lawrence do an interview where he seemed to be repeating many of her points. The Economic Development Responsibility Alliance later endorsed him, something it seldom does for major-party candidates.

Like many parts of the country, the Lansing area has experienced a fierce uproar against the data center boom. Several hyperscale projects have appeared in communities across the state, including a $16 billion Oracle-OpenAI campus being built near Ann Arbor, and more than a dozen local governments have attempted to ban them. Local backlash tanked a smaller proposal in Lansing called Deep Green earlier this year, despite the developer’s promises to recycle waste heat and use minimal water. Activist fears about these data centers run the gamut from water and power usage to noise and light pollution, and the coalition appears to span partisan lines, from MAGA conservatives to progressives. It also includes many people, like Steele, who don’t want renewables built in their backyards, either.

The race in Lansing represents a test of whether major party candidates can channel these anti-development sentiments into electoral victory. Lawrence emerged from the mainstream climate movement and, like many Democrats, wants to see new restrictions on data center development. But running in Lansing has also required him to make common cause with skeptics of solar and clean energy. As Lawrence sees it, the stakes are extraordinarily high. The success of his coalition-building effort could determine not only control of the House of Representatives but also the success of the country’s efforts to ditch fossil fuels.

“I think it’s all up in the air right now,” he said. “It’s really hard to tell which way it will lean…It is genuinely cross-partisan. People do not believe that anybody at the top of business and government is looking out for them.”

The 7th District, which encompasses Lansing and a swath of its suburbs, is one of the few true swing districts in the country. Moderate Democrat Elissa Slotkin won it three times by slim margins, but Republican Tom Barrett won it back by a narrow margin when Slotkin vacated the seat to run for the U.S. Senate in 2024, and he’s running for reelection this year. 

On paper, the 36-year-old Lawrence is not a good fit for such a purple seat. He is tall and lanky, with a cerebral speaking style, and projects the image of a graduate student much more than that of a farmer or an auto worker. He co-founded the Sunrise Movement in 2015 on the theory that solving climate change required disruptive activism and sweeping government intervention. In November 2018, he and his fellow founders organized a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s congressional office calling for a Green New Deal that would see massive public investment in clean energy. He was once a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, though he now says he no longer considers himself a socialist, and in since-deleted tweets from 2020 he called for “free and open migration” as well as police abolition.

Yet Lawrence secured 40 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary in August, beating two centrist candidates who appear to have split the moderate vote between them. Since then he has secured an endorsement from the Democratic Party’s congressional leaders, who tried to defeat him in the primary. He has also kept pace with Barrett on fundraising in what has become one of the most expensive House races, as Barrett has pulled in money from major Republican PACs as well as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. 

Construction proceeds on a $16 billion data center developed for Oracle and OpenAI in Saline Township, Michigan. Many residents of the community opposed the project, worried about the loss of farmland and the project’s impact on energy and water.
Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Lawrence has done this in part by campaigning like a community organizer. His campaign has knocked on more than 100,000 doors in the district, and Lawrence has held dozens of unscripted town halls where he takes direct questions from constituents. He has also inserted himself into local campaigns, in particular around data centers: Last month, he showed up to a city council meeting in the town of Mason to oppose a potential data center proposal, joining locals who appeared at the meeting wearing crimson-red baseball caps. 

But the anti-development opposition in areas like Lansing is not only about data centers. It also extends to solar farms, battery storage systems, and transmission lines that carry renewable energy to cities. These technologies are some of the cheapest and most effective solutions for replacing fossil fuels on the power grid, but they also take up a lot of land, which makes them more likely to produce pushback from locals. 

“We’ve definitely seen some bleed over from data center opposition to all types of infrastructure development,” said Ed Rivet, who runs the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, a right-leaning group that advocates for clean energy. He said this “infrastructure fatigue” is “unfortunate … because these other types of projects will have tangible benefits for customers in terms of cost, reliability, and cleaner energy.”

Solar has become a particular source of controversy in Michigan, which aims to transition its power grid fully to clean energy by 2040. After several local governments passed zoning laws that banned new solar farms, the state legislature in 2023 passed a law that preempted those statutes. Developers can now apply for direct approval from the state if they don’t succeed in securing a local permit. 

The first project permitted under this state law, Assembly Solar, just finished construction on the eastern edge of Lawrence’s district, outraging many locals. Lawrence told Grist that a homeowner in the area took him on a tour of the solar farm last month and showed him how it has disrupted the area’s agrarian lifestyle. More projects are already underway in his district under the state authority. Lawrence has criticized this policy in a number of public fora — he said in a radio appearance that wind and solar critics have “some good points” and that the state solar preemption has allowed utilities to “build mega projects without community buy-in.”

The Cereal City Solar project, a 100-megawatt solar farm in Marshall, Michigan, is seen above. The state legislature passed a law giving the state government more jurisdiction over solar siting.
Jim West / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Lawrence explains his skepticism of large-scale clean energy by arguing that the process of economic development in the United States is broken. Most communities have little say over whether a data center or a solar farm gets built near them, and they don’t have any reason to believe that these projects are good for them. While these projects sometimes produce construction jobs and tax revenue for local governments, they create very few long-term jobs, and most of their revenue goes elsewhere. Meanwhile, residents have to deal with construction noise and aesthetic disruptions.

“What’s clear is that people just don’t believe that investments that are directed from outside of the district, from somewhere else in the state or somewhere else in the country or the world, are going to benefit them,” he said, adding that he’s heard “a lot of concerns” about the state solar law in particular and that he thinks those concerns should be taken “very seriously.”

Lawrence acknowledged that it’s unclear what another model of development would look like: “It’s an open question,” he said, “and I’ll leave it at that.” He advocates for a public bank that could build infrastructure without seeking high profit margins, and he wants to use the “convening power” of the congressional office to bring developers and community members together for talks about “what we want to build, why, and how.” Perhaps developers could allay opposition by sharing revenue with the communities where they build data centers or solar projects, or by committing to more conservation and water protection when they build. In the meantime, he’s calling for a national pause on data center construction.

Lawrence concedes that his past efforts with Sunrise are in tension with this new focus on community control over economic development. The Sunrise Movement’s marquee proposal was the Green New Deal, which argued that the federal government should build massive amounts of new energy infrastructure while also taking control of sectors like housing and healthcare. The implication of such a program is that the government, not individual communities, would decide what to build and where. Lawrence left the organization in 2020 and spent years working as a tenant organizer in Michigan, where he grew up, and he said he now sees the climate issue differently.

“I think in that era, you know, we were thinking about the necessity of the outcome, and now I’m thinking more about what is necessary in the process,” he said. “And I’m reckoning with just how little trust we all have.”

Anti-development Michiganders like Steele say they aren’t opposed to solar per se, but to large-scale projects that erase farmland and generate profits for utilities. Steele’s group does support “community solar,” smaller solar farms that provide electricity to specific communities, as well as agrivoltaic projects that allow for continued farming of cropland under solar panels.

“I don’t want to make it seem like green energy is a big boogeyman,” said Steele. “We’re solutions-oriented.” Her group has envisioned an “agricultural renaissance community” that would feature small businesses, farmland, open park space, and light manufacturing, perhaps powered by community solar.

Will Lawrence speaks in opposition to data centers at a city council meeting in Mason, Michigan. Lawrence has staked his congressional campaign on opposition to data center projects.
Nic Antaya / Getty Images

The problem with these proposals is that they won’t produce power at a large enough scale to replace coal and natural gas plants, said Doug Bessette, a professor who studies energy development at Michigan State University and has worked with groups pushing community solar and agrivoltaics. Michigan has about 14,000 megawatts of natural gas capacity, and the typical community solar project has a capacity of between 1 and 5 megawatts. 

“In order to fully transition our economy to clean energy, you have to build huge solar and huge wind and huge batteries and you have to do it fast,” said Bessette. “The smaller-is-better approach honestly would be ineffective at actually mitigating emissions at the rate at which we need to do it” — and would also be more expensive. 

If Michigan and other states don’t find a way to appease critics of solar, each new project will only create more backlash, making it harder to build. Hundreds of counties across the Midwest have tried to limit solar and wind construction, and activist groups on the Eastern Seaboard have organized against offshore wind proposals. Lawrence is far more open to acknowledging this problem than many climate activists, who sometimes dismiss anti-renewable opposition as astroturfing by conservative groups. 

Not everyone is convinced that Lawrence’s vision of a cross-partisan coalition is possible. Barrett, the Republican incumbent, has also cast himself as a skeptic of data centers. It’s unclear that Lawrence’s strength on the issue will convince Republicans to cross partisan lines en masse, said Jean Hardy, a professor at Michigan State University who has studied local government decisions around data center development.

“Data center opposition is so bipartisan at this point that I don’t think it’s an issue that is going to activate people to switch sides or is going to organize independents in a particular way,” he said. 

But Lawrence believes that Democrats have to channel this opposition, and not just in order to win an election in Lansing. As he sees it, fixing the American model of economic development is a necessary step in order to transition to clean energy. Unless voters feel that energy infrastructure is benefiting them, and that they have a say in what their communities look like, any attempts to build clean power at scale will be bound to fail.

“The question is who can effectively connect the big ‘no’ that we’re all saying to data centers into an affirmative ‘yes’ about what we want to build,” he said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Michigan climate candidate courting opponents of Big Solar on Oct 26, 2026.

A single glacier sitting at the bottom of the world may be all that is holding back catastrophic amounts of sea level rise. As it melts away faster than ever, scientists are racing to get a better understanding of when it might fail. Unfortunately, they’ve recently found more bad news. 

The Antarctic bulwark known as Thwaites, or the “Doomsday Glacier,” is gargantuan — roughly the size of Florida — and holds enough ice to push the planet’s coastlines up 2 feet. But the edge of Thwaites also acts as a cork, holding up the rim of the West Antarctic ice sheet, much of which sits below sea level. As Thwaites deteriorates, more ice in this bowl becomes exposed to the ocean, creating a feedback loop that makes it melt faster. And if Thwaites were to succumb entirely, the whole interior of the sheet might follow suit, raising sea levels by as much as 10 feet. 

It’s easy to track Thwaites’ demise from space, but predicting its future has been much trickier. For years, computer models used to simulate Thwaites’ retreat weren’t able to pass the simple test of accurately re-creating the retreat that satellites have captured over the last few decades, marking them unreliable tools for looking ahead.

But now, scientists have plugged in a major missing piece. A new paper, published in Nature Communications earlier this month, appears to be the first to account for what’s happening underneath Thwaites to simulate how quickly it may lose ice. Using this model to simulate the future paints a grim picture: Thwaites could contribute twice as much to sea level rise by the end of the century as previously projected.

“There are many other unknowns, but this solves a specific and very important piece of the puzzle,” said Mattia Poinelli, a glaciologist at the University of California Los Angeles and the lead author of the paper. 

The problem area is where the icy underbelly of Thwaites rests on the seabed, known as the grounding zone. Only relatively recently did scientists realize this zone was not a fixed boundary, but one that oscillates with the tides. As it bobs up and down, warm water pushes underneath the glacier — creating cracks and miles-long channels that allow even more melting. 

Previous simulations of how Thwaites might melt didn’t account for this dynamic, Poinelli said. By doing so, his team’s model was able to match the changes to the glacier that satellites had observed. It also showed that Thwaites could become permanently unpinned from the seafloor as early as 2038, with a 60 percent chance that this could happen by the end of the century, an eventuality which would likely cause the melting to ratchet up even more.

If the climate remains as warm as it is now, the model shows that Thwaites would be on track to add 3 centimeters of sea level rise by the end of the century. That may not sound like much, but it doubles the projections made by previous models, according to the study. Thwaites contributes about 4 percent to sea level rise, which over the past three decades amounts to some 10 centimeters. That’s enough to have sent homes in North Carolina crashing into the sea, while forcing coastal communities in places like the Solomon Islands and Senegal to move to higher ground. 

Of course, global warming is not holding steady but rather continuing to ramp up, with each decade expected to be hotter than the one before. As a result, the world should brace for even more melt than the model predicts, Poinelli said. 

But what if humans get their act together and slow down climate change, or find a way to safely cool the oceans with geoengineering? A separate study, published in Geophysical Research Letters in July, used a model that tested this kind of hypothetical scenario with Thwaites and its comparably large neighbor, the Pine Island glacier, which is the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica.

Together, the two glaciers account for the bulk of sea level rise coming from Antarctica. Ocean melt is the primary culprit, so the researchers “switched it off completely” in their model as a way of understanding the condition of each glacier, said Rosie Williams, an ice sheet modeler at the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the paper.

For all their similarities, it turns out that Pine Island and Thwaites would respond very differently, according to the study. In cooler ocean temperatures, Pine Island would be able to recover ice within a decade, and eventually regrow to where it was 80 years ago — in part thanks to its relatively intact outer shelf. Thwaites, on the other hand, would keep losing ice and raising sea levels worldwide for at least 150 years. The researchers hypothesize that’s because Thwaites is in much worse shape, with the eastern half significantly diminished and the western half disintegrated into many icebergs. While the speed of ice loss would slow down, the glacier may be doomed even in this fictional best-case scenario.

But “that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do,” Williams said. Each fraction of a degree of warming makes a difference in how quickly Thwaites disintegrates, and lowering greenhouse gas emissions could protect other glaciers around Antarctica. “The more we can slow it down,” she said, “the longer we have to adapt to any change that’s coming.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Thwaites is a runaway climate disaster. New studies show how. on Oct 26, 2026.

Climate change gets a rare day in court today when 15 Canadian youth will accuse the federal government of violating their constitutional rights by failing to adequately address the country’s role in global warming. Although thousands of similar cases have been filed across the globe, legal experts said this long-awaited case is arguably the most consequential to reach trial.

The lawsuit is the latest in a yearslong campaign by young people who are using the courts to force elected officials to mitigate climate change. Like similar cases in the United States, including the landmark Held v. Montana, the plaintiffs in La Rose v. His Majesty the King argue that the government has violated their constitutional rights by allowing the crisis to continue.

Set in Vancouver, the proceedings are slated to last five weeks, with the 15 plaintiffs expected to testify alongside climate scientists and other experts. “It’s the chance for the young people to tell their story,” said Kelly Matheson, deputy director for global strategy at Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit behind this case and many similar efforts around the world. 

The outcome, while not precedent-setting outside of Canada, could prove persuasive in other climate litigation or spur new cases. “We found that some of the positive decisions from some countries have been inspirational in other countries,” said Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “This trial will be closely watched.” 

The case began in 2019, when the youth, six of whom identify as Indigenous, filed suit. They alleged, among other things, that by not doing enough to combat climate change, the government had violated Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees “the right to life, liberty, and security of the person.” They also argued that federal action breached their equality protections granted under Section 15 of the charter because, as young people, they will bear a disproportionate share of the impacts of the crisis.

The original lawsuit took aim at much of Canada’s approach to climate change. The plaintiffs argued that the government had allowed emissions to remain dangerously high, set targets that fell short of what scientists said was necessary to avoid the worst outcomes, repeatedly failed to meet those targets, and continued supporting the development and expansion of fossil fuels.

Although the government did not challenge the reality of climate change, its arguments included a claim that the accusations were overly broad and the lawsuit improperly asked the court to resolve a political matter. A federal judge agreed and dismissed the case without a trial in 2020. The plaintiffs appealed. In 2023, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the dismissal of the Section 15 claim but allowed the Section 7 arguments to proceed if the plaintiffs more specifically detailed the government conduct that violated their protected rights.  

The plaintiffs amended their complaint to focus on the Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act of 2021, which commits the country to achieving the law’s objectives by 2050, and the 2030 emissions reduction plan adopted under that law. They argue that the efforts don’t go far enough to avoid violating their charter rights in the context of climate change and that the government committed to the net-zero law. 

“Increasingly, people across Canada and the world are seeing the direct impacts of climate change,” said Andrew Gage, a staff lawyer for West Coast Environment Law who has worked on this case alongside Our Children’s Trust. “The plaintiffs will have their day in court.”

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The Canadian Department of Justice referred a request for comment to Environment and Climate Change Canada, which declined an interview request but provided a written statement to Grist. “Our commitment to net-zero by 2050 has not wavered, and we are implementing an ambitious climate agenda,” a spokesperson, Samantha Bayard, wrote in an email. “The Government of Canada respects the role of the courts, the right of Canadians to bring matters before the courts, and the important role that an independent judiciary plays in our democracy.” 

All 15 youths, who were between the ages of 10 and 19 when the suit was filed, are expected to testify. They will be joined by expert witnesses in climate science, renewable energy, children’s health, and economics. Closing arguments are scheduled for February with a decision expected sometime in 2027, although an appeal could delay a resolution. Still, it is unusual for such a case to even be heard.

“Seldom has climate been put on trial,” said James May, an environmental law professor at Washburn University who isn’t involved in this case but has supported some of Our Children’s Trust’s past work. He estimated that more than 3,000 climate cases have been filed worldwide over the past few decades, but most never reached a courtroom. The Hawai’i state Department of Transportation, for example, settled a lawsuit filed by 13 young people and agreed to develop a plan to zero out emissions from the transportation sector by 2045. The landmark case Juliana v. the United States was dismissed after years of litigation, and the Supreme Court declined to consider it.

Held v. Montana was a rare exception. After a seven-day trial in 2023, a judge ruled that the state’s energy permitting policies violated the plaintiffs’ right to “a clean and healthful environment,” which is enshrined in the state constitution. The state Supreme Court upheld that decision in 2024.

A similar outcome in Vancouver could have implications in other British commonwealth countries and beyond, said Matheson. “These courts are looking to each other,” she said. “There is momentum building.”

But even if the plaintiffs don’t win, May considers the trial a victory even before it starts. “It could serve as a blueprint for how to do this elsewhere,” he said. “It has already succeeded.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change rarely goes on trial. This one could be a landmark. on Oct 26, 2026.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on whether a lawsuit seeking damages for climate-change-related harm to Boulder County can proceed.

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Something ominous just hit California: rain. 

The life-giving water that normally hydrates people and crops is bringing an aura of dread this autumn, thanks to the strongest El Niño ever recorded. While the phenomenon causes severe drought and heat in many parts of the world, historically it’s brought extraordinary rainfall to the Golden State. The monstrous El Niño of 1997 and 1998, for instance, caused widespread flooding and debris flows (made not just of water and dirt, but big chunks of rock), destroying property and killing residents.

The state can’t stop rain from falling, so in the last few decades it has been renegotiating its relationship with precipitation. As climate change makes California whiplash from years of intense drought to years of intense rain, water agencies have been capturing as much H2O as they can to reduce reliance on using canals to bring it in from afar. That’s set the state up to avoid at least some flooding as this El Niño takes hold and bank the bounty for the dry spells to come.

“Heavy storms can affect regional infrastructure, construction schedules, and areas vulnerable to debris flow or power disruptions,” said a spokesperson with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in a statement provided to Grist. “However, these rain events also present a significant opportunity. Stormwater capture is a critical pillar of LADWP’s long-term plan to reduce reliance on purchased imported water.” 

The threat isn’t just more rain overall, but the way it arrives. If one storm hits, water can build up and flood, but some of it will soak into the ground, preventing further inundation. But if a succession of storms rolls through, the soils get saturated. “Even one can be very big and impactful,” said Steven Springhorn, supervising engineering geologist in the California Department of Water Resources’ sustainable groundwater management office. “But if they start to come in a series, that’s where you start to get into some situations where you have a lot of excess water.”

Water, like any material thing, moves through time and space but brings unique challenges in both realms. For one, it’s heavy, so channeling it requires using pumps or gravity, like when draining water out of a reservoir. And for humans, at least, the rain’s timing isn’t always ideal: A lot can fall at once, or it doesn’t fall for months on end. 

To address the timing problem, California operates nearly 1,500 reservoirs. But that creates a challenge with space, as the dams can only hold back so much water — during especially wet winters, the reservoirs occasionally release water to keep from overfilling or even breaking apart. That’s to say nothing of the plethora of environmental harms that come from damming rivers, like destroying migratory routes for fishes.

So in recent years, California has been turning its attention underground, to its sprawling aquifers. In 2014, the state passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires local water agencies to tackle the crisis of dwindling subterranean supplies. California has long been extracting an unsustainable amount of groundwater, due in part to droughts exacerbated by climate change. The issue is particularly acute in the agricultural Central Valley, where farmers have drawn so much groundwater that aquifers have been collapsing like empty plastic bottles, causing the land to sink by nearly 30 feet.

But that problem is also an opportunity. Whereas the state’s major reservoirs currently hold around 21 million acre-feet of water — that is, the amount it’d take to cover an acre in a foot of the stuff — its land could hold something like a billion acre-feet underground, according to Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “So the potential room for storage is immense,” Kiparsky said. “The enticing question is: Is there a way to grab those flood flows before they flow out to sea, and hold them underground, and therefore expand our capacity?”

That strategy is known as managed aquifer recharge, which tweaks how water moves through space and time. California water agencies, for instance, have been diverting excess rainfall into big dirt bowls on the landscape. This slows it down, allowing it to seep into the underlying aquifer. “If that fills up, then they go and talk to the growers in the area and see if there could be opportunities to put that water on agricultural land,” Springhorn said. 

Whether it’s in basins or on fields, the water moves underground where, as a bonus, it’s not lost to the evaporation that inevitably occurs in a reservoir. When summer rolls around, water managers and farmers can pump that groundwater back up. Indeed, in an average year, this subterranean stash provides about 40 percent of California’s supply. “But in a drought, it makes up even more,” Springhorn said. “So that’s why we want to use the wet years, and the excess water that might be there, to replenish the aquifers so that there’s more there year to year.”

As a bonus, managed aquifer recharge can boost biodiversity. California has lost 95 percent of its wetlands, which used to mitigate flooding and provide critical habitat, especially for migrating birds. To help restore them, a Nature Conservancy project called BirdReturns incentivizes farmers in the Central Valley to flood their acreage, replicating the erstwhile ecosystems. “The local landowners can make a profit off doing a service for this really valued part of ecology,” Kiparsky said, “and it functions also as a groundwater-recharge project.”

But what about the state’s cities? Like metropolises the world over, California’s were designed to move water into sewers and out of the built environment quickly. But as climate change intensifies rainfall — a warmer atmosphere by default holds more moisture — wastewater systems are struggling to keep up. “The gray infrastructure that we built in the 20th century was really built for a climate that is no longer here,” said Edith de Guzman, a water equity and adaptation policy cooperative extension specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We can’t just engineer our way out of the problems — we need to actually kind of reverse-engineer a little bit and think about the way that nature does things.”

Simply put: Gray infrastructure like concrete is a liability, whereas green and brown spaces are assets. So in 2018, Los Angeles County voters passed a tax of 2.5 cents per square foot of impermeable land, like driveways, raising nearly $300 million annually. That finances preserving local watersheds and developing stormwater-capture projects, helping the region pioneer a better way to manage urban water by getting “spongier.” As it develops roadside gardens and retrofits public parks, Los Angeles creates more spaces for the liquid to soak into the ground. It’s also built several spreading grounds, a series of bowls where water accumulates. 

All told, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said that in the 2025-2026 water year, it captured around 37 billion gallons of stormwater. (The average resident uses around 100 gallons a day.) “While intense downpours require active management, they allow us to maximize local groundwater replenishment and capture as much precious rainfall as possible when it arrives,” said the spokesperson for the LADWP.

By building out as much spongy infrastructure as possible, California cities like L.A. better prepare themselves not just for the aquatic ravages of El Niño, but for the hotter summers ahead. Green spaces significantly cool the neighborhoods lucky enough to have them, while urban farms go a step further in producing nutritious food for residents. “The psychological and societal benefits,” de Guzman said, “are really not something to be ignored in this era of ever-increasing needs for us to have more connection and more reasons to celebrate where we live, rather than reasons to stay on our phones indoors with our air-conditioning on.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California has a plan for El Niño’s torrential rain: Save it for later on Oct 26, 2026.

Network failures obstruct community solar Channel News brendan 26th October 2026 Teaser Media

What will it take for the federal government to get illegal, ultra-fast e-motos off the streets, and stop the wave of deadly crashes that have been falsely attributed to safe and legal e-bikes?

That’s the question on the lips of bike advocates across the country as a rising tide of state laws aimed at curbing e-bike use sweep the nation — despite evidence that low-speed pedal-assist vehicles aren’t actually to blame for many of the most headline-grabbing collisions.

Let’s break down where that confusion comes from — and how to end it once and for all.

What a legal e-bike is — and why we need them now more than ever

Clearly defined by the Consumer Product Safety Commission as “two- or three-wheeled bicycles with an electric motor of less than 750 watts, fully operational pedals, and a maximum speed of less than 20 mph when operated solely on electric power,” real e-bikes are widely regarded in advocacy circles as one of the most critical street safety tools around. 

That’s mostly because of their potential to reduce the constant driving that’s helped make American roads the deadliest of any high-income country. One study found that 46 percent of North American e-bike trips replaced a car trip, and those percentages may be even higher in European cities with more diverse mobility landscapes.

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Critically, many of those replaced car trips happen at conventional bicycle speeds, rather than the vehicles’ 20 mile per hour max; it just takes less effort (and sweat) for riders to pedal longer distances. And unlike many illegal e-motos, e-bike riders do have to pedal, or the bike won’t move.

Studies show that, on paths shared with pedestrians, e-bike riders average a super-safe 7.8 miles per hour, compared to 6.8 for conventional bikes; on all roadway segments, cyclists who use pedal-assist still tend to top out around 16 miles per hour, compared to 15.8 for those who don’t.

As e-bike use has grown, though, so has public frenzy over “e-bike crashes” — though many of the most-reported collisions ultimately didn’t involve what most cycling advocates or governments would even consider an “e-bike” at all.

Real crashes, wrong vehicle blamed

Of course, none of that is to say that the bloodshed isn’t real. A recent analysis of national data from 30 major US health systems recently reported a 760 percent increase across the last three year in emergency room visits for crashes involving some form of motorized, two-wheeled vehicle — and a 19.1-fold increase among children and adolescents.

Because the distinction between e-bikes and e-motos isn’t typically captured in emergency department records —and police officers who report on crashes don’t always know the difference, either — all of those crashes were recorded simply as “e-bike” injuries in the researchers’ press materials, which mentioned the term a staggering 70 times.

The role of drivers in those collisions, meanwhile, was not mentioned at all, even though the vast majority of all fatal bike crashes involve cars.

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To be clear: some of those crashes almost certainly did involve a CSPC-legal e-bike — and the rate of actual e-bike crashes is likely rising, as both e-bike popularity and driver-on-cyclist violence continue to explode.

But time and again, media outlets have been forced to retract disturbing reports that an “e-bike rider” had killed or injured a pedestrian while traveling more than 30 miles per hour, or was killed or injured themselves in a single-vehicle crash — only to admit later that the vehicle involved was actually an e-moto instead.

“It used to be once a week I would see a crash with a teenager reported as an e-bike crash – now it’s almost every day,” said Matt Moore, General and policy council for PeopleForBikes. “But then you see the picture of [the vehicle], or when it’s corrected later on, and suddenly it’s, ‘Oh; police say that was actually an electric motorcycle.'”

More granular local data, meanwhile, suggests that e-moto use is on the rise — and horrifying crashes involving minors are, too. In California, for instance, “kids between the age of 11 and 14 accounted for 61.7 percent of e-motorcycle crashes, even though children under the age of 16 are legally prohibited from riding e-motorcycles,” ABC7 recently reported.

Moore says that shady e-moto manufacturers know kids like buying their product — and they have no serious incentive to stop selling it to them.

“That’s the target market, and they have hit that market,” he said. “And unless something is done to stop the importation of these products and their online sales …those statistics are going to continue to get more grim.”

What an illegal e-moto is — and why we have so many of them

Moore says most e-motos on US roads tend to slip in through loopholes in federal regulations, which are supposed to police what can be legally sold as an electric bicycle instead of an electric motorcycle — and what gets turned away at the border because it doesn’t meet either modes’ safety standards.

Faster two-wheeled vehicles that don’t meet the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s narrow definition of an “e-bike” are theoretically classified as motorcycles, which means they must have VIN numbers and meet strict safety and import standards set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Their riders, meanwhile, need to register their vehicles, maintain motorcycle licenses, and buy insurance.

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In practice, though, the Chinese manufacturers who dominate the production of all two-wheeled vehicles have become astonishingly adept at evading NHTSA and CSPC scrutiny, by slapping an “e-bike” label on an electric motorcycle box and adding design features to blur the line between the two modes.

And since one in four Chinese residents already own an “e-bike” — most of which, experts warn, are actually classed as throttled e-motos in the US — the companies have a lot of product to move, and a lot of incentive to break into the wide-open North American market.

“These manufacturers are all overseas, and they have very little interest or expertise in what our requirements are here — but they are pretty good at evading enforcement,” added Ash Lovell, PeopleForBikes’ Vice President of Government Relations.

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Lovell and Moore say some e-moto manufacturers dodge US regulatory requirements by equipping their vehicles with fake, removable pedals that don’t even turn, since they’re actually powered by throttle alone. Others ship motorcycles with a 20-mile-per-hour setting, but offer another setting capable of reaching 80 miles per hour, and easy instructions on how to unlock it.

And when all else fails, manufacturers can just check a box that their vehicle is really an electric “dirt bike” intended “off road use only” — even if their marketing materials depict it being ridden on public roads, sometimes even by children.

“I think that the manufacturers and importers of e-motos, have tried to create a gray area,” Moore adds. “[Because] it costs money to make a motorcycle that’s certified and compliant … If you’re avoiding triggering the scrutiny of either [the CPSC or NHTSA], you might be able to get that product into the United States without any sort of regulatory framework.”

Because it’s “extremely difficult” for U.S. courts to get jurisdiction over Chinese companies, Moore says consumers typically have no recourse to sue when they buy an e-moto falsely advertised as an e-bike — even when someone gets hurt or killed. And in the rare case that a domestic e-moto company gets sued, accountability is still hard to come by.

“If I’m a brand called ABC E-Moto, and and I get a cease-and-desist letter or judgment or a lawsuit, I can say ‘well, ABC E-moto just went out of business’ — and it’s now DEF E-moto, and we’re selling the exact same product with a different label,” he adds.

State confusion leads to bad state laws

To complicate matters even more, all but eight states have added another layer of complexity to the conversation about what an e-bike is: the three class system, which divides the market into categories based on vehicles’ speed and the presence of a throttle.

While People For Bikes say it’s been essential to helping states dictate where different sub-types of e-bikes can legally be ridden, some advocates say the three class system has made it harder to define them in relationship to e-motos, since the Class I e-bike — 20 miles per hour max, no throttle — is the only one that neatly aligns with the federal definition of the term.

Class II models, meanwhile, can have a throttle, which isn’t explicitly mentioned by the CSPC — leading some consumers to assume that it’s actually a motorcycle, even though that “accelerator” is often only used to get a heavy cargo bike going from a full stop on a steep hill, and speeds are still capped at 20 miles per hour.

Class IIIs, meanwhile, flatly violate the CSPC definition because they can go 28 miles per hour to help cyclists keep pace when they’re riding in car traffic. But proponents argue they’re still safe, since state laws banish them from standard bike paths when they’re not operating at slower speeds — and because it’s intentionally challenging to actually get them to their top velocity, since they can’t have a throttle, and only speed up when the rider pedals as fast as she can.

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And then there’s New York.

By far the largest market for e-bikes and e-motos in the country thanks to its legion of 80,000 delivery workers and the fact that most people can easily live in New York City without a car, New York State adopted a different definition of a Class III e-bike than the rest of the country in 2020, dropping top speeds to 25 miles per hour — but allowing the use of a throttle, unlike class III’s everywhere else.

Moore says that simple shift transformed the class III e-bike into “essentially a moped,” and made it even harder for law enforcement to distinguish between e-bikes and e-motos. And as crashes involving faster, two-wheel vehicles on both sides of that blurry line mounted, neighboring New Jersey — where many deliveristas live — enacted a widely criticized law to require all e-bike riders to carry driver’s licenses, registration and insurance.

“What we’re seeing in New Jersey is that if you make it mandatory to do registration and insurance for electric bicycles, no electric bicycles will be sold,” added Lovell. “We have e-bike retailers that are going out of business in New Jersey because these requirements are on the books. But the overseas e-moto sellers that are still selling into New Jersey? Nothing has happened there.”

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And New Jersey may not be the last. Lovell says she and her group have tracked over 400 e-bike related bills this year, which is “up dramatically from when I started five years ago”; shortly before the publication of this article, Ohio introduced a new law eerily similar to New Jersey’s.

“State legislators are seeing that nothing is really being done federally, and they’re all coming up with ‘solutions’ for the quote-unquote ‘e-bike problem,'” Lovell added. “That’s a huge challenge for the bicycle industry — because if there’s 50 different states with 50 different solutions, it’s going to be nearly impossible for anyone to sell bikes.”

That’s not to say that all states have embraced bad e-bike policy. California made headlines in September for a nation-leading law that drew a clearer line between e-bikes and e-motos, and more consequences for falsely advertising the latter as the former to Californians. Usually, states mostly regulate the use of vehicles on their roads, not their import or sale, which is typically the federal government’s purview.

In most states, Moore says getting laws like California’s passed has been a battle.

“In every meeting that I have with legislators and staff, there’s usually about half an hour explaining what an electric bicycle is and is not,” he added “In Minnesota, I had a legislator say, ‘So, the one I just got for my kid isn’t legal?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not.'”

How to fix this mess

At the end of the day, Moore says that the federal government is the one responsible for regulating all vehicles on the road, and they must stamp out the e-moto crisis once and for all — rather than leaving it to often-confused state leaders to try to make up for their failures.

That starts with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stepping up and treating e-motos as what they are: dangerous illegal motorcycles dressed in sheep’s clothing. He particularly urges officials to search and intercept more import shipments of fake “e-bikes” — and publicize those seizures far and wide.

“It’s a shot across the bow for these sellers,” he adds. “It’s [saying:] ‘You’re not going to be able to get away with it.’ Do you really want to risk your entire container being seized, and never getting it back, and maybe getting fined as well? That would change the landscape.”

Both NHTSA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, meanwhile, need more resources to conduct that market surveillance — something Congress could and should provide.

That would better position the CSPC to enact the Safe SPEEDS Act, which, if passed, would direct the agency to draw a clearer line between e-bikes and e-motos and require them to publish periodic studies on crashes involving both.

The bill would also help federal officials teach local governments, law enforcement agencies, and emergency medical workers how to standardize crash reports so media outlets are less confused about what kind of riders are actually getting hurt. And in the meantime, PeopleForBikes stresses that education is critical to help the public and media outlets understand the difference on their own.

Without these sorts of structural fixes, keeping dangerous illegal e-motos off our roads and protecting the good name of the humble e-bike will both be an uphill climb — and not the easy kind with pedal-assist.