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What does going on a date have to do with fossil fuels? Everything, according to the petroleum industry. 

One advertisement from the pipeline company Energy Transfer follows two people getting ready for a date, the man primping with hair gel, the woman applying lipstick, before meeting at a bar. “That connection was brought to you by petroleum products,” the narrator says. “But what if we lived in a world without oil and natural gas?” 

The story rewinds to the beginning, except this time, the woman looks bewildered as her phone with the dating app evaporates in her hands. She gets lipstick all over her cheek when the car she’s riding in hits the pavement without its tires. As his hair gel disappears, the man looks into the mirror, baffled. When they sit down across from each other, makeup, hair dye, and glasses fade away. In the game playing on a TV in the bar, a football disintegrates a second before the kicker swings his leg at empty air.

The commercial, which has racked up 7.4 million views since it appeared four years ago, taps into the fact that fossil fuels have become embedded in American life (what’s more American than football?). Oil and gas not only influence how people get around town, but also where they live, how they dress, and how they cook food in their kitchens. This all feels so ordinary that most people don’t notice how pervasive petroleum is, powering our lives while hiding in plain sight. Though it might seem inevitable that we live this way, a Grist investigation found that this idea of what’s “normal” was shaped by decades of advertising, public relations propaganda, and broader efforts to sway American culture, from radio programs to Hollywood films.

“Our dependence on oil didn’t just happen,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University.

More in this series Fossil fuels are hiding all over your house. We built a model home to show how. Kate Yoder

This campaign started about a century ago, when companies began strategizing how to create long-term demand for fossil fuels and the products that ran on them. Billboards showcased happy families on the road in their cars, films showed stylish women cooking over the flame of a gas stove, and magazines featured men pushing their gas-powered mowers across soon-to-be perfectly manicured lawns. The message was often left unsaid: The American way of life runs on fossil fuels. 

There’s a well-documented history showing that Exxon and other oil giants understood the dangers of global warming by the 1970s based on their own research and still spent decades publicly downplaying, or outright denying, the science. But the story of how oil and gas companies coaxed Americans into accepting — even desiring — a life built on fossil fuels has largely escaped attention, buried in the pages of obscure trade journals. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, the oil industry spent millions of dollars a year on campaigns to “educate” the public about the wonders of petroleum and how it advanced the “American way.” The natural gas industry promoted all-gas “dream kitchens” and paraded them in front of the editors of Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. They sold a vision of the American Dream that required their products — a cultural legacy that has been devastating for efforts to rein in climate change and shift to a cleaner future.

This history offers an explanation for why Americans have had such a strong reaction to the idea of banning polluting gas ranges (“they can pry it from my cold dead hands”) or requiring more sales of electric vehicles over gas-powered cars. Is this debate really just about technology, or about what the burning of fossil fuels represents — freedom and a sense of identity? President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda is deeply nostalgic for what oil once promised: economic might, a higher standard of living, the chance to rise above your station and maybe make a fortune. In his inauguration speech last year, Trump promised a return to these ideals. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it,” he said.

As the world enters an “age of electricity” powered increasingly by solar, wind, and other low-carbon energy sources, the United States often appears to be stuck in the past. The Trump administration has prolonged the life of coal plants and opened up new areas to oil drilling, while paying companies billions of dollars to stop offshore wind projects. The explanation, when it’s offered, often returns to the same theme. Earlier this year, when the Trump administration scrapped Biden-era rules to cut emissions from cars, along with the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate climate change, it touted the effort as “restoring the American Dream.” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers summed up the sentiment this summer: “President Trump was given a mandate to roll back the radical climate policies that are burning a hole through taxpayers’ wallets and jeopardizing the American Dream for future generations.”

The words echo what the oil industry has been telling Americans for a century: Without fossil fuels, there is no “good life,” only sacrifice.

How oil became the ‘American way’

Before highways, parking lots, and suburban sprawl took over the United States, people moved about very differently. Americans traveled between cities by railroad; towns bustled with horses, buses, bicycles, and trolleys. Then the automobile rolled in, and forests, meadows, and swampland became pavement, changing the scenery forever. 

It wasn’t a sure bet that automobiles would run on gasoline. At the turn of the 20th century, electric vehicles were quieter and easier to drive, and they quickly became a popular choice, making up a third of vehicles on the road. But Henry Ford’s cheaper, mass-produced Model T, unveiled in 1908, was the vehicle that took off, powered by gasoline.

Up to that point, gasoline was basically a useless byproduct of kerosene, but the new automobile industry gave it a market. Automakers promoted their vehicles as superior to public transit, offering a step up in social status. In an advertisement that appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1917, the Willys-Overland Company, an Ohio automaker, sold its automobiles as “chock full of healthy activity, wholesome fun, and lots of fresh air” — which would make for “a bigger life.” That was supposedly in contrast to the “wrong way,” where families were subjected to suffering through “long rides in hot trolley cars and listless conversation.”

An ad from the Willys-Overland Company portraying cars as superior to crowded trolleys appeared in The Ladies’ Home Journal in 1917. Internet Archive

It was a preview of a major shift in marketing leading up to the 1930s. Previously, advertisements for cars had touted their features: the “favorable” ratio of their light weight to their horsepower, their seats upholstered with “fine, long-grain French leather.” But companies began marketing the benefits of using their products instead, painting situations in which a car could improve your life and status. Selling the American Dream meant selling leisure, enjoyment, beauty, good taste, and popularity along with the “mundane product,” as Roland Marchand, a cultural historian, once wrote.

Most advertisers were aiming to reach Americans with means, and the everyday luxuries they depicted clashed with reality as the Great Depression set in. The photographer Margaret Bourke-White captured that sort of contrast after the Ohio River flood in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937. A billboard ad from the National Association of Manufacturers shows a white family smiling as they drive through the countryside, while Black people waited for Red Cross relief under a sign proclaiming “There’s no way like the American way.”

A 1937 photograph in Life magazine shows Black refugees from the Ohio River flood waiting for Red Cross relief. An advertisement behind them broadcasts the “world’s highest standard of living,” exemplified by car ownership. Margaret Bourke-White / Life

As the Great Depression began to recede, automakers saw an opportunity to pitch Americans on a brighter future — one that relied, of course, on cars. At the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York City, where the theme was “The World of Tomorrow,” General Motors had the most popular exhibit, seen by millions of people: the seven-acre “Highways and Horizons.” Its centerpiece, “Futurama,” was a sprawling diorama of a futuristic city in far-off 1960, covering 35,000 square feet, complete with skyscrapers and 14-lane highways. People looked down on the display from moving chairs on a conveyor-belt ride, as if they were viewing it from an airplane. It was the visual representation of a new American mindset — a Futurama booklet promised that highways would “set the pace for advancing civilization” and improve “welfare and happiness.” Afterward, visitors were handed pins saying, “I Have Seen the Future.” 

Visitors tour General Motors’ Futurama exhibit in 1939. Futurama was the largest scale model ever built at the time, including more than 500,000 buildings and 50,000 motor vehicles, many of them in motion. Bettmann / Getty Images The Futurama display at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York depicts a futuristic American city in 1960. The model was designed by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors. Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images

From automobiles to oil, industry leaders grasped that appealing to a sense of national identity could legitimize their business. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, the oil industry boomed, producing fuel for planes and explosives. The wider public had been deeply suspicious of big corporations ever since the Depression, but the oil industry had a new way to defend itself, painting itself as patriotic and essential to the success of the broader American project.  

“The petroleum industry deserves a better public opinion,” James H. Tanham, an executive at the Texas Company (now known as Texaco), wrote to a member of the Petroleum Industry War Council in 1943. “If properly handled, there probably never was a better time to undertake this work. There is nothing inimical about the prosecution of this war and this job. Both have to do with protection of a way of life, wholly American, against enemies without and within the country.”

That same year, the Union Oil Company of California (later part of Chevron) launched an initiative specifically to “sell [the] public on [the] American way of life,” according to the trade journal National Petroleum News. Within five years, it was spending 30 percent of its advertising budget on the effort, promoting how a “free enterprise” economic system contributed to a higher standard of living. A Union Oil advertisement in Central Oregon’s Bend Bulletin in 1944 celebrated how American factory workers could afford more cigarettes and bread with an hour’s wages than those in Germany, Great Britain, or Russia. This success, the ad claimed, came down to “two fundamental principles: PROFIT and COMPETITION.” Provided that Americans didn’t tamper with these principles, it promised, a man might someday be “working only half as long to earn a radio, a house, a hat, a vacation, or anything else he needs.” 

After the war ended, the “American way” increasingly required a car. Suburbanization started taking off in earnest after 1946, when the Levitt family began acquiring 4,000 acres of potato farms outside Long Island, 25 miles east of New York City. They leveled the land, had trucks drop building materials every 60 feet, and eventually built more than 17,000 cookie-cutter homes. Other “Levittowns” soon followed suit, built across the country as developers converted apple orchards, garbage dumps, and barren desert into neat subdivisions. They proved to be model neighborhoods for the entire country. From the end of World War II to 1954, some 9 million people settled into suburbs. As Americans moved far away from where they worked and ran errands, they became locked into a car-dependent lifestyle that consumed vast amounts of petroleum. 

“Oil is basically the fuel that allows this dispersal of the population,” said Matthew Huber, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University.

Yet oil companies worried that the public still didn’t properly appreciate how the fuel had transformed their lives. In response to a survey finding an “opinion vacuum” on the oil business, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s biggest lobbying group, formed the Oil Industry Information Committee in 1948, intending to fill the void. “There is a great vacuum represented by men’s minds,” George H. Freyermuth, who led the public relations department for Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon), said at the time. “We can’t let others fill the vacuum. We have got to create the knowledge to fill people’s minds.” 

It was much more than an advertising campaign: The group built the infrastructure for promoting petroleum through schools, community parades, and exhibits, carried out by local industry ambassadors who could give the effort a friendly face. The committee produced pamphlets, sponsored films, radio programming, and educational materials for classrooms, but its signature initiative was Oil Progress Week: a national ad blitz that encouraged local events celebrating how oil fueled innovation and everything people loved about modern life.

In 1950, an advertisement in Life magazine as part of Oil Progress Week attributed the marvels of daily life to the advent of oil drilling. Internet Archive

It was part of a trend toward what’s called institutional advertising — promoting industries and brands themselves, rather than products. Fortune magazine surveyed this growing field in 1950 and found that the oil industry was pouring $10 million a year into these programs — roughly $142 million in today’s dollars. Executives insisted that such messaging was just telling the facts to the American public. But Fortune pushed back. Not since wartime ads, the magazine wrote, “have we been insulted with such noxious interpretations of the American Dream.”

As much as Americans were already driving, they could be driving more. Automakers and oil companies had been working together to promote highway construction for decades. In the 1950s, advertisements urged families to see the U.S. by car, framing the road trip as a matter of national pride. In the iconic jingle “See the USA in a Chevrolet,” the TV star Dinah Shore urges viewers to get on the road to take in everything America has to offer, from the “fields of golden wheat” to the “Rockies way out West.” Anyone who isn’t doing so is missing out, the lyrics imply: “Life is complete-r in a Chevy,” Shore sings.

The singer Dinah Shore closed her weekly TV variety show, sponsored by Chevrolet, with the jingle “See the USA in a Chevrolet.” Chevrolet Philippines

After the success of freeways in Los Angeles and a “miracle turnpike” in New Jersey that became the busiest toll road in the country, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, calling for a 41,000-mile superhighway system across the country. Futurama was becoming reality, roughly on schedule. 

The Oil Industry Information Committee, meanwhile, had been busy making sponsored films glorifying oil’s contributions to American prosperity. The films were shown all over the country, from small-town Michigan to the heart of Texas oil country, at Rotary Club luncheons, at meetings of religious organizations, in high school classrooms, and eventually on TV. The committee claimed that its films had been screened 92,500 times and seen by more than 12 million people in 1955 alone — about 7 percent of the U.S. population.  

Its 1956 film, Destination Earth, follows a cartoon Martian who visits the United States and is amazed by how powerful and efficient cars are. After doing research in the local library, he concludes that “the big secret is, of course, oil!” and that this miracle substance has provided “a whole galaxy of things to make a better life on Earth.” The result, the film’s narrator declares: “a higher standard of living in the USA than in any other country on the whole planet.”

Destination Earth, a film sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, tells the story of an alien who visits Earth, learns how oil powers cars, and brings that knowledge back to Mars. shaggylocks

During the postwar boom, profits from 14 big petroleum companies tracked by the Federal Reserve more than tripled during the postwar boom, rising from $269 million in 1946 to $917 million in 1956. All that money brought scrutiny. Critics in Congress and the media wondered if the Oil Industry Information Committee’s so-called “education” efforts, especially the pamphlets distributed to schoolchildren, should be considered propaganda, or even indoctrination. Henry Stewart McKenzie Burns, president of Shell Oil Company, admitted there was “a little ulterior motive” to the committee’s work when a congressman grilled him about it in 1956.

“I have had a good deal of experience in public relations,” Burns said during questioning, “and you never can stop telling people that you are good. They might forget.”

But oil companies had done more than simply tell people they were good. They had helped define what kind of life was good, steeping the American Dream in oil.

‘A Word to the Wives’: Fossil fuels invade the home

An unusual performance took place on Atlantic City’s Steel Pier in 1923, during an American Gas Association convention in New Jersey. The wives and sisters of the assembled industry delegates settled in to watch “Progress,” a play that pitted an old-fashioned kitchen against a modern one, starring “Miss Polly Old Time” and “Miss Mary Modern Way.” As charming as the old ways were, there was no doubt whose vision would win.

Miss Mary was played by Ada Bessie Swann, home services director for the Public Service Electric & Gas Company of New Jersey. She led the industry’s push to introduce women to appliances powered by manufactured gas, the predecessor to natural gas. In the early 20th century, most women weren’t familiar with all the expensive stoves, refrigerators, and washing machines that had come onto the market. They were used to cooking on wood or coal stoves and doing laundry by hand. So gas and electric utilities performed a “service,” as they called it: extensive efforts, led by women, to show homemakers how these appliances worked and convince them of their benefits. For years, Swann had been running the New Jersey utility’s experiment to foster “‘better, happier homes’ with the help of gas,” according to an industry publication. (It openly called the effort propaganda.) She was soon heralded as “an apostle of home service,” spreading the mission of gas appliances far and wide.

By 1925, these kinds of industry-sponsored lectures, demonstrations, and classes were reaching thousands of women every day. In Connecticut, New Haven Gas Light Company’s domestic experts visited nearly 13,400 homes that year to instruct residents on the “proper use” of gas ranges. A daily radio show from the Laclede Gas Light Company in St. Louis aided the “home manager” with recipes and cooking advice; the company also held free cooking classes every day to show off its model gas-powered kitchen. 

It was a clever strategy to speed up adoption and lock in future demand for gas — a parallel track to how selling cars as a cornerstone of American life led to increasing gasoline consumption. “Teaching [women] the art of home management as it has become today, is a duty of the gas company,” Swann wrote in a trade journal, pondering the industry’s future in 1925, “because by so doing it must reap for itself the profit of such service — Profits in goodwill. Profits in increased gas consumption. Profits in increased sales of gas heating equipment.” The industry also had to convince people to install the lines to deliver gas. In California, workers would track local building permits and talk homeowners and contractors into connecting gas lines to new construction.

It wasn’t inevitable that so many Americans would switch to gas appliances. Electric competitors were selling their “flameless fuel” as superior, and gas companies saw this competition as an existential threat. By 1930, gas executives were aggressively promoting their stoves, the core of their business. “The public mind has been inculcated with the gas cooking idea, but just as no business is secure, no idea is secure nowadays,” Rodger K. Tenney of Chicago’s North Shore Gas Company wrote in American Gas Journal that year. “Constant pressure brought to bear on the public mind will make that mind thoroughly gas cooking conscious,” he concluded.

To do so, gas companies embarked on a decades-long campaign to influence the influential. In 1934, Swann’s utility in New Jersey recruited newspaper staff and heads of home economics departments of colleges to advertise the modern gas kitchen. The industry also worked to get favorable coverage in The Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, The American Home, and other women’s magazines; Swann soon got a job working for Woman’s Home Companion.

Gas executives also sought to bring gas propaganda to the radio and Hollywood films. When the phrase “now you’re cooking with gas” started taking off on radio routines in 1939, the industry quickly capitalized on the free advertising, recruiting radio stars such as Jack Benny and Fred Allen to use the phrase. C. E. “Deke” Houlgate, a representative of the American Gas Association, also launched an effort to establish gas appliances as standard props in Hollywood films. By 1941, motion pictures had featured 202 all-gas kitchens, along with 360 gas ranges and 238 gas-powered refrigerators, according to Houlgate. “Today, Hollywood uses gas appliances 100 percent in its outstanding pictures,” he told the audience at a gas appliance and equipment convention in Los Angeles.

A 1939 advertisement from the American Gas Association in the Ladies’ Home Journal promises to make cooking easier: “‘Why, they do the cooking almost by themselves!’ women exclaim when they see the remarkable things an Automatic Gas Range can do.”
Ladies’ Home Journal

As World War II came to a close, the gas industry latched onto the patriotic mood and promised to take the “‘irk’ out of work” with its “New Freedom Gas Kitchen” campaign. Freedom, that is, from the drudgery of cooking. The actual model kitchens varied, but they had streamlined, step-saving layouts built around gas-powered ranges, fridges, and automatic water heaters that could “speed up clean-up” by providing endless hot water. 

It was the perfect time to market new gadgets, because mass consumption had rapidly taken hold of American culture. Economic growth after the Great Depression and World War II relied on an expanding middle class buying more, more, and more: A Bride’s Magazine handbook from the postwar era urged newlyweds to keep an eye out for brand names when buying “dozens of things you never bought or even thought of before,” for the purpose of “greater security” for the country’s industries. “[W]hat you buy and how you buy it is very vital for your new life — and to our whole American way of living,” it read. 

A Word to the Wives, a short film sponsored by the American Gas Association in 1955, showcased a modern home equipped with gas appliances, such as refrigerators and dryers. When a busy homemaker, Jane, visits her friend Alice’s home filled with this technology, she has to decline Alice’s offer of a shopping trip because she’s too busy with chores at home. “Remember, I haven’t got your dream kitchen to make things easier. Mine’s strictly the nightmare type,” Jane says, sighing. Alice sells her on how gas appliances can provide “freedom from unnecessary drudgery,” and they plot to leave Jane’s husband to suffer through chores without her for the weekend, so that he’ll want to buy a “dream kitchen,” too.

The American Gas Association’s 1955 film A Word to the Wives follows a woman’s scheme to convince her husband they need modern gas appliances. Internet Archive

The battle over what would power American homes — gas or electricity — would continue to play out over decades. But petroleum had quietly found a way into households, too. In 1957, the Shell Oil Company celebrated women’s work as part of an ad campaign, “From A to Z: An Alphabet of Good Things about Petroleum.” M was for Mother: “Housewife, cook, chauffeur, hostess, teacher, glamor girl — she does dozens of jobs well … who’s responsible for so many of these new time-saving products? Mother’s little helper — Oil,” the advertisement says. 

A 1957 advertisement from Shell promises that oil will make life easier for women. Lifeblood

Soon, it seemed like almost everything in the American dream house was made from petrochemicals, which some oil executives had predicted would be “the most dramatic future field of development.” As chemists experimented with petroleum derivatives, plastics began taking off, and Tupperware containers, polyester clothes, and synthetic carpets arrived in households. Shell’s alphabetical ad campaign pointed out that “oil research helps with quick-drying paints, no-polish floor tiles, durable plastic table tops, weather-defying asphalt-shingled roofs.”

“In many ways,” the ad says, “your home is a house that oil built.”

‘The American lifestyle is not up for negotiation’

As the years passed, people forgot where this version of the fossil-fueled American Dream had come from. Like most successful propaganda, it simply became taken for granted. The country’s growing reliance on petroleum was seen as a sign of progress for much of the 20th century, an article of faith in the American project.

In the 1960s, however, the pollution from fossil fuels and all the products companies were pumping out was increasingly visible. Smog blanketed Los Angeles on more days than not; an oil spill off the California coast washed sludge onto beaches; the polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire, again. The decade saw the federal government’s first serious effort to crack down on pollution, starting with the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1963, followed by the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Act in 1965. The environmental movement was born on Earth Day in April 1970, when an estimated 10 percent of the country’s population joined in demonstrations demanding that political leaders do more to clean up the environment. 

Then, the cheap, plentiful fuel that had enabled the American “way of life” was suddenly no longer cheap and plentiful. In 1973, oil-producing Arab countries stopped exporting petroleum to the United States because of its support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and oil prices nearly quadrupled. President Richard Nixon instituted a rationing program, and gas stations started running out of fuel.

The oil crisis threatened the car-powered American way of life that people had come to rely on, and as if on cue, “freedom” became a hot talking point. “For many the ‘energy crisis’ was seen as a contrived threat to justify more government control of everyday life,” Matthew Huber writes in Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. One advertisement from the New Car and Truck Dealers of America in 1979 asked readers to “Help us protect your freedom to drive.” From whom? The people who cared about the environment. “There are people in government, and others, whose only answer to our environmental and energy problems is to restrict the use of the automobile.” Businesses that relied on fossil fuels were now on the defensive.

Another challenge for the oil and gas industry arrived when the American public grew concerned over global warming. During an unusually hot summer in 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at the time, warned Congress that the greenhouse effect had already been detected. Global warming became front-page news around the country, climate bills proliferated in Congress, and the United Nations created the building blocks for global climate policy. President George H.W. Bush went into office declaring himself “the environmental president” and promising to counter the “greenhouse effect” with the “White House effect,” but as soon as it became clear that doing something about climate change meant curbing the use of fossil fuels, his administration reversed course. By 1992, when countries met to sign a global climate treaty at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Bush refused to commit to targets for emissions reductions. U.S. delegates insisted over and over that “the American lifestyle is not up for negotiation.”

The idea that addressing climate change required a sacrifice of American values — and the lifestyles and products that supported them — came up whenever the country was seriously considering limits on fossil fuels. In 1997, President Bill Clinton stood prepared to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which required countries to cut carbon emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. But the oil company Mobil responded with alarm: “Committing to binding targets and timetables now will alter today’s lifestyles and tomorrow’s living standards,” it warned in an ad in The New York Times. “Flexibility will be constrained. Carpooling in; sport utility vehicles out. High fuel and electric bills. Factory closures. Job displacement.” 

A 1997 ad from the Global Climate Coalition, a group of 100-plus companies including Shell and General Motors that worked to block climate policies, shows smiling children beside the warning that signing the Kyoto Protocol “would force American families to restrict our use of the oil, gasoline, and electricity.” Climate Investigations Center

A pattern was established: Oil companies ramped up their PR campaigns whenever there was a push for climate action in Congress, helping to thwart efforts to limit emissions or negotiate binding treaties. They poured money into political campaigns and lobbying, played up doubts about the science of global warming, and commissioned studies showing that climate policies would hurt the economy. They also argued that cutting fossil fuels would threaten the American way of life — the one they had spent so many decades championing. 

But as fossil fuel emissions continued to rise, and hurricanes and wildfires grew more severe, Americans became increasingly worried about climate change. In the late 2010s, progressives channeled their energy into proposals for a Green New Deal, calling for bold investment in a clean economy that would tackle climate change and inequality at the same time. By tapping into nostalgia for the New Deal, one of the most ambitious political projects in U.S. history, they were articulating a competing vision of the “good life,” divorced from fossil fuels. 

The ascendant right wing of the Republican Party had a ready-made response: The Green New Deal was an attack on freedom. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office released a fact sheet that mentioned the difficulty of eliminating emissions from “farting cows and airplanes” in 2019, critics seized on it as evidence of climate activists trying to control their choices. At the Conservative Political Action Conference that year, Sebastian Gorka, a Trump administration official, said, “They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers.”

After years of failed climate proposals, politicians knew that mandates and regulations would be politically tricky. When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, promising to tackle climate change, the energy behind the Green New Deal was whittled down into a less ambitious, more politically palatable project. In 2022, Congress passed the only comprehensive climate law in American history, the Inflation Reduction Act, full of tax credits and incentives to switch to clean energy and green technologies. The Biden administration instituted many regulations that mandated more efficient technology, including for household appliances, and conservatives keyed in on the upfront costs. In 2023, The Alliance for Consumers, a conservative advocacy group, posted a visual of “Biden’s Dream House,” purporting to reveal how the Biden administration’s policies would force Americans to pay for costly remodeling jobs. 

“Welcome to Biden’s Dream House, where the American dream just got significantly more expensive …” Alliance for Consumers posted on X in 2023. The campaign focused on the cost of upgraded appliances and the idea that the government was trying to control household decisions. “If you like your living room and kitchen, you can keep your living room and kitchen … just with a few additional ‘upgrades’ to comply with Progressive Lifestyle Choices™.”

Welcome to Biden's Dream House, where the American dream just got significantly more expensive…

Join us on a tour and see the green "upgrades" that the Biden Administration wants to bring (by mandate) to a home near you, very soon. pic.twitter.com/7cg7yMRCXZ

— Alliance For Consumers (@for_consumers) October 26, 2023

The clear message was that “elitist climate liberals” wanted to force people “to have a worse life and sacrifice to solve this,” said Huber, the author of Lifeblood. 

As Republicans geared up for Trump’s presidential run in 2024, they leaned into this narrative. That September, Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the far-right policy playbook Project 2025, told the audience at a New York Times climate event: “I’ll go anywhere to talk about how the climate agenda is ending the American Dream.”

Another way of looking at it, though, is that climate change itself is threatening the American Dream. Global warming pushes up the cost of food and energy, causing spikes in home insurance rates that can price people out of owning a home, and destroys homes with floods and fires. Fossil fuels, long sold as the key to achieving comfort and prosperity, have now begun pushing those goals further out of reach.

Can a ‘petroculture’ dream up something new?

The idea that sinister, left-wing climate killjoys want to get rid of hamburgers, pickup trucks, and other iconic American standbys is often dismissed as culture war nonsense. But it begins to make sense if you see it as the result of a century-long campaign tying fossil fuels to the “good life.” 

From the cars we drive to the plastics that surround us, oil has become part of daily life. Brulle, the sociologist at Brown, says the MAGA movement that has captured the Republican Party taps into a “cultural belief in the rightness of petroleum” in the American imagination more broadly. 

The rise of MAGA Republicans has coincided with a sharp shift among members of the party toward embracing fossil fuels. In 2020, 65 percent of Republicans supported the U.S. prioritizing wind and solar development over oil, coal, and gas, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Today, that picture has completely flipped, with 71 percent preferring fossil fuels. Across party lines, the idea of moving on from oil and gas has lost some of its appeal. Less than half of Democrats polled by Pew in 2024 said the U.S. should completely phase fossil fuels out of the energy supply. Scholars call the United States a “petroculture” — an “oil society through and through.” 

It can be difficult to peer beyond the rumbling of an engine, even when stuck in stop-and-go traffic, to a different way of life. In the U.S., our lives are so saturated with oil, it’s hard to know where to begin untangling our connection with petroleum, said Stephanie LeMenager, an English professor at the University of Oregon who wrote a book about oil’s cultural resonance. “There’s a sense of despair, paralysis, and also just not really being able to clearly see a path forward, because of how embedded oil is in everything that we do,” LeMenager said. 

So how does a country begin to rid itself of a century’s worth of oil and gas propaganda? It might start with understanding that none of this was predestined, as much as it might feel like it. The early 20th century began with electric cars and electric stoves; things might have stayed that way, with a push or pull one way or the other, and the same sort of PR campaign that put petroleum at the center of American life. 

From the Green New Deal to the more recent focus on “abundance,” parts of the left have tried to move past the narrative that tackling global warming requires sacrifice. But it will take more than catchy slogans to convince people that a comfortable life is possible without fossil fuels. Oil helped deliver a higher standard of living — the stretch was that people needed to consume ever more of it to live their best lives. The fossil fuel industry spent decades reaching ordinary Americans with that message, broadcasting it over the airwaves and across movie screens, and carrying it into towns around the country through schools and public events. Now, there are cleaner, safer options to power the world.  

Petroleum runs so deep in American culture that building another, cleaner version of the good life will take time — and probably a lot of money. “Crafting the American Dream is the thing that advertisers have been doing for decades,” said Duncan Meisel, the former executive director of Clean Creatives, an initiative pressuring PR companies and advertisers to stop working with fossil fuel clients. 

The American Dream was invented, so maybe we can invent it again.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The hidden history of how Big Oil invented the American Dream on Oct 22, 2026.

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PRESS RELEASE

Agroecology and regenerative communities: a day of exchange between young people, farmers, schools, and institutions in Bracciano

On Saturday, October 24th, from 9:30 AM to 7:00 PM, at the Chiostro degli Agostiniani in Bracciano (RM), Navdanya International is promoting a meeting dedicated to the resilience of territories, biodiversity, and community participation. The event, titled “Agroecology and Regenerative Communities – Networks of resilience between young people, schools, farmers, and institutions,” will bring together agroecology experts, institutional representatives, associations, youth organizations, and agricultural realities to discuss the challenges of ecological transition, combining local experiences with international perspectives.

How can communities be built that are capable of facing environmental, climate, and social crises? What role can agroecology, biodiversity protection, ecological education, and citizen participation play in the regeneration of territories? And how can experiences of ecological and social regeneration be transformed into collective processes capable of influencing public policies and the choices that affect the future of territories? Answers to these questions already exist and have long since become good practices that are now waiting to be translated into concrete policies.

In an international context marked by the worsening climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the growing vulnerability of food systems, agroecology represents not only a set of sustainable agricultural practices, but also a perspective of ecological, cultural, and social transformation. It is an approach that recognizes biological and cultural diversity, community autonomy, and the sharing of knowledge as the fundamental conditions for building more resilient food systems and territories.

From local experiences to national and international policies

The meeting stems from the experiences developed by Navdanya International through the Terrae Vivae programme, the ecological education pathways and School-Work Training initiatives, the project “RiGenerAzione Ecologica – Cittadinanza e Partecipazione,” co-financed by the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security, and Officine Municipali, carried out in collaboration with the Municipality of Bracciano and co-financed by the European Union under the PR Lazio ESF 2021–2027. These are experiences that connect schools, new generations, agricultural producers, and institutions, experimenting with forms of learning, cooperation, and active participation in the life of local territories.

The initiative, which enjoys the patronage of the Bracciano-Martignano Regional Natural Park, aims to go beyond the presentation of individual projects, opening a space for exchange on the conditions needed to strengthen territorial networks and connect local experiences with national strategies and international processes for sustainability and food security, as confirmed by the director of Navdanya International, Ruchi Shroff: “The good practices that come from the territories are in fact laboratories from which proposals emerge for the democratization and sustainability of food systems, even at the international level.”

Young people, biodiversity, and participation: the day’s programme

The morning, from 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM, will be dedicated to “Young People and Territories,” a space for exchange among youth organizations on the role of new generations in regeneration processes, within the framework of the National Strategy for Sustainable Development.

In the afternoon, from 2:30 PM to 6:00 PM, the programme will get underway with two public conversations dedicated to the resilience of territories and the collective construction of change.

Particular attention will be given to agricultural biodiversity and seed sovereignty, with a talk by Salvatore Ceccarelli, an internationally renowned agricultural geneticist, who will explore the relationship between genetic diversity, climate change adaptation, and farmer autonomy.

Among those taking part in the discussion will be Caterina Batello, president of the Italian Association of Agroecology, Mara Cossu and Tiziana Occhino of the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security, Silvia Canali of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food Sovereignty and Forestry, Silvia Francescon of the Italian Buddhist Union, the Mayor of Bracciano Marco Crocicchi, representatives of local farms (Fattoria biologica Le Bricchiette, Fattoria Faraoni, Azienda Agricola La Argentina), representatives from schools (Istituto Agrario Salvo D’Acquisto, the Art Lyceum of IIS Luca Paciolo), youth organizations (the Network of Youth Associations from the mapping of the project “RiGenerAzione Ecologica: Cittadinanza e Partecipazione“), and civil society (GASP – Gruppo di Assistenza e Solidarietà Popolare).

Also taking part will be Magdalena Ackermann, representing civil society at the UN Committee on World Food Security, and Ruchi Shroff of Navdanya International.

A dedicated session, “Territori in relazione: Bracciano–Tubas,” will be devoted to international cooperation in agroecology and the prospects for community resilience, connecting the territory of Bracciano with the Palestinian territory of Tubas.

A meeting open to the public

Throughout the day, the Chiostro degli Agostiniani will host exhibitions of educational projects created by schools, the art exhibition “Ars non dat Panem” by the Art Lyceum of IIS Luca Paciolo, the photo contest organized by Terrae Vivae Youth, local producers, seed exchange initiatives, agroecological games, and creative workshops for children and adults. In the convent’s cloister, stands will be set up by producers, associations, and the CRAS Wildlife Recovery Center of the Lago di Vico Reserve.

The initiative aims to promote knowledge and participation as concrete tools for transformation, fostering new alliances among those who cultivate the land, those who educate, those who study, those who govern, and those who work every day to protect the commons.

An opportunity to bring together practices, knowledge, and policies, in the conviction that the regeneration of territories cannot be entrusted solely to technical solutions, but requires democratic processes, cooperation, and communities capable of deciding their own future together.

Information and participation

Event: Agroecology and Regenerative Communities – Networks of resilience between young people, schools, farmers, and institutions

Date: Saturday, October 24, 2026
Time: 9:30 AM–7:00 PM
Location: Chiostro degli Agostiniani, Via Umberto I, 5 – Bracciano (RM)

Programme and registration form:
https://navdanyainternational.org/it/save-the-date-agroecologia-e-comunita-rigenerative/

Contact: info@navdanyainternational.org

Navdanya International
https://navdanyainternational.org/

 

Workers across the US are demanding divestment from firms that profit from weapons and surveillance. I’m one of them.

Food system change was a tool of colonization. If changing what people eat can change everything, then food system change can also be a tool of liberation.

We do not need to bear witness to and grieve the loss of our tree kin, or other losses we might suffer, by ourselves. Trees, who have shown extraordinary resilience in the face of extensive injury, are companions well suited to our journey through sorrow to healing.

After decades of losses, mangrove trees are gaining ground on coastlines around the world, often in places they have never grown before. Paradoxically, scientists say, warming temperatures and the destruction of inland forests are helping to power the revival.

Read more on E360 →

Racism is a powerful technique for sustaining injustice. We must respond to what it does, argues Gargi Bhattacharyya, if we are to dismantle it

The post Rethinking anti-racism appeared first on Red Pepper.

.stk-0359e53 {margin-top:var(--stk--preset--spacing--70, 3.38rem) !important;margin-bottom:var(--stk--preset--spacing--70, 3.38rem) !important;} .stk-2zo0h3w {margin-top:50px !important;margin-right:50px !important;margin-left:50px !important;}.stk-2zo0h3w .stk-block-heading__text{font-size:3rem !important;font-family:"Barlow Semi Condensed", Sans-serif !important;}@media screen and (max-width: 1023px){.stk-2zo0h3w .stk-block-heading__text{font-size:3rem !important;}}Citizens’ Atlas on False Climate and Circularity Solutions
In Focus: Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

.stk-fadc901 .stk-inner-blocks{gap:9px !important;}.stk-fadc901 {margin-left:50px !important;} .stk-hzfvrpd .stk--svg-wrapper .stk--inner-svg svg:last-child{height:20px !important;width:20px !important;}.stk-hzfvrpd .stk--svg-wrapper .stk--inner-svg svg:last-child, .stk-hzfvrpd .stk--svg-wrapper .stk--inner-svg svg:last-child :is(g, path, rect, polygon, ellipse){fill:#f5d18e !important;} .stk-vybxwqf {margin-left:0px !important;}.stk-vybxwqf .stk-block-heading__text{color:#2e5a9a !important;}GAIA Asia Pacific

This fact sheet assesses 14 false solutions projects by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank from January 2015 to August 2026.  It highlights total financing by false solution type, recipient countries, funding types and financial instruments, and environmental and social risk categories. Since 2015, the bank has supported USD 5.4 billion worth of projects with false solutions to circularity and climate action, worsening the debt burdens of countries.

Download your copy of the fact sheet here!

The post first appeared on GAIA.

Across Brittany, tractors can be seen trundling onto beaches to remove truckloads of foul-smelling algae ahead of the tourist rush. 

Situated below steep cliffs and ancient forests, these once pristine beaches have been devastated by algal blooms – the rapid growth of toxic seaweed which kills off fish and plant life. This sea lettuce algae can also release a toxic gas that can cause humans dizziness, chest pain, breathing problems, and even cardiac arrest.

The French peninsula is not alone. Fed by harmful pollution from agriculture, and fuelled by seas warmed by climate change, lurid green blooms are increasingly appearing on beaches and lakes across Europe – prompting hundreds of swimming bans across the continent this summer. 

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Scientists are clear on the cause: for decades, chemicals including nitrogen and phosphorus have leached into waterways from human sewage, as well as fertilisers and excess manure fuelled by the rapid growth of Europe’s factory farms. 

These ‘nutrients’ are vital for plant growth – but in large quantities they destroy the delicate balance of ecosystems, allowing certain plants, including algae, to multiply at the expense of animals and other species.

Green algae on Plage du Yar, Plestin-le-Grèves, in Brittany, France. Agricultural run-off carries the algae down the river Yar and into the sea. Credit: Selene Magnolia Gatti

DeSmog visited some of the worst impacted spots in Europe, speaking to fishers, swimmers, and business owners whose livelihoods and wellbeing depend on healthy waters.

This article was published in partnership with Euronews and Climatica

On the shores of lakes and beaches across France, Spain, Germany and Northern Ireland, we heard accounts of plummeting fish and insect numbers, swimming bans, and beach closures. 

The risks of algal growth have been known for decades, but higher temperatures and longer summers mean these dangerous blooms are growing larger and lasting longer in many of the continent’s most iconic waterways. 

“I remember our beautiful beach before the pollution,” says Brittany resident Jean Hascoet, who leads local campaign group Baie de Douarnenez Environnement. “Now, with thousands of pigs near our town, everything is different.”

Brittany resident and environmental campaigner Jean Hascoet, pictured here in Douarnenez Bay, France, says the surge in intensive farming in the region has devastated local beaches. Credit: Selene Magnolia Gatti

‘Spain’s Sacrificial Zone’

“You’ll never see me swimming in that water again,” Fina says. 

The 84-year-old from Murcia in southeastern Spain lives with her husband Francisco on the beachfront at Los Urrutias, on the west coast of the Mar Menor, Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon. Rotting seaweed piles up on the shore, giving off a foul stench. 

“This used to be paradise. The sea was teeming with seahorses,” Fina says. 

Brittany resident and environmental campaigner Jean Hascoet, pictured here in Douarnenez Bay, France, says the surge in intensive farming in the region has devastated local beaches. Credit: Selene Magnolia Gatti

The last decade has seen a sharp increase in algae growth in the Mar Menor – a hotspot for Spanish and international tourists. Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, is reliant on nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus to grow, and in this region, intensive farming has provided a ready supply. 

Spain is the EU’s largest producer of pork, accounting for a quarter of the bloc’s production. In the Mar Menor catchment area, according to latest government figures, 305 pig farms house nearly 700,000 animals – producing vast amounts of manure and slurry, a liquid mixture containing faeces and urine. When it rains, the nutrient-rich mixtures flow from fields into rivers feeding the lagoon.

Algae piled up on one of the Mar Menor’s 22 beaches, Los Urrutias, near Murcia, Spain, due to excess nitrogen from industrial agriculture and livestock farming. Credit: Santi Donaire

“The land can’t accommodate it all,” says Pedro Luengo, a biologist and spokesperson for the campaign group Ecologistas en Acción in Murcia. “We’re a sacrificial zone.”

Tourists now steer clear of the area closest to the farmland – the western region where Fina lives, which was once an idyllic family holiday spot. 

Instead, on other beaches, such as La Manga in the east, bathers enjoy an artificial paradise thanks to local authorities who, as in France, remove the algae daily over the summer months. In the first three months of 2026, they collected more than 4,000 tonnes from Mar Menor’s shores and nearby water– roughly the weight of 1,000 elephants.

Algae piles up in skips after being collected by municipal workers in Los Urrutias, Murcia, southeastern Spain. During peak season, cleaning crews remove the algae blooming in the saltwater lagoon on a daily basis. Credit: Santi Donaire

Authorities say these clean-ups help protect human health and allow essential sunlight to reach sea life, which would otherwise be blocked by the blooms. But it has not shielded those who rely on the lagoon for their livelihood.

“We used to catch far more gilthead seabream and prawns. Now the catch is much smaller,” says Rubén Albaladejo, a fisherman from Lo Pagán. “The Mar Menor is a drain into which everyone dumps their rubbish and waste.” 

Algal blooms endanger aquatic life by consuming vast amounts of oxygen, meaning fish, seahorses, and crustaceans can suffocate. They also produce toxins that attack the nervous and respiratory systems of sea life. 

Alongside nutrient pollution, water temperatures rose sharply this year amid record-breaking heatwaves across the continent. “We’ve reached 30 degrees – something we’ve never seen before.” Albaladejo says that in these conditions, species such as gilthead seabream struggle to reproduce.

Scientists warned in August that human-caused climate change was driving record temperatures in the continent’s seas, with a 2C temperature rise registered in the Mediterranean, and around 1.4C in ​Western European seas.

Rubén Albaladejo mends nets on his fishing boat, moored at the fishermen’s guild in San Pedro del Pinatar, Murcia, Spain. Credit: Santi Donaire ‘The Lough Is Dead’

Albaladejo shares his worries with fishers across Europe. Around 2,000 kilometres away in Northern Ireland, Declan Coney has also seen Lough Neagh – the UK’s largest lake – devastated by blue-green algae every summer since 2023. 

“Fishing is instilled in me – generation after generation,” Coney says. “This year has been the worst ever for fishing. The Lough is dead.”

Coney has been working on the lake since 1975. He used to go out with his father and sometimes caught £1,000 worth of fish in a day, he says. But now the cost of the diesel required to boat to his nets can be greater than the value of the catch. 

Trout and eel numbers have fallen in recent years, in part thanks to the oxygen-hogging blue-green algae, whose weight also forces Coney’s fishing nets shut, so fish can’t swim inside. 

Since the 2000s, the lough has also been besieged by the invasive zebra mussel species. These consume large amounts of phytoplankton, depriving other species of these microscopic plant-like organisms, a vital food source, as well as attaching to fishing nets and ripping them. 

“There’s no money [in it],” Coney says. “It’s not a livelihood anymore.”

Declan Coney has fished on Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland for decades, but plummeting catch numbers have made it impossible to make a living.
Credit: Joe Laverty

As in Spain, Lough Neagh’s algal blooms are the result of decades of nutrient pollution. Northern Ireland’s livestock sector has grown rapidly, supported by government expansion plans since 2013: poultry numbers have risen by a third, and pigs by 74 percent. 

Earlier this year, investigative outlet Watershed and The Guardian found evidence of cattle, pig and human faeces in samples of water from the lough, which spans nearly 400 square kilometres and provides 40 percent of Northern Ireland’s drinking water. 

Mary O’Hagan lives on the north-west of the lake. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she set up a wild swimming group, and found that the cold water had huge benefits – from improving mental health to relieving chronic pain.  

“In my 30s, I didn’t have much of a life, I wasn’t looking after myself. Swimming in Lough Neagh changed my life completely,” O’Hagan says. “We had a community.”

But after the second year of the blooms, she felt forced to shut the swimming group down. 

“I couldn’t in all good conscience organise swims where people would be exposed to bacteria, algae, or god knows what else.” 

“The first year… was awful. It was like Armageddon. To see the shores covered as far as the eye can see in pea green sludge, was horrendous,” she says.

Campaigner Mary O’Hagan was forced to shut her swimming group due to harmful pollution in Lough Neagh, Northern Ireland. Credit: Joe Laverty

O’Hagan’s concerns are shared by swimmers and local authorities elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, dozens of lakes are also routinely devastated by algal blooms, triggering a spate of temporary swimming bans this summer. 

“The water used to be clear, you could see your own feet,” says Oland Stephan, who has run a kiosk at Sander lake in northern Germany for 18 years. Once a popular bathing spot, the lake has been off-bounds for swimmers for the last few years because of the blue-green algae – which can cause vomiting, diarrhea, and skin irritation, among other issues. 

“I could make a living back then, but not anymore,” Stephan says. “I have bankruptcy papers at home.”

Peter Bünting, a lifeguard at the lake, says the cloudiness of the water from the algae makes search and rescue operations challenging. “You might have a casualty in front of you but you just can’t see.”

Sander lake in Lower Saxony, Germany. The lake is frequently closed to swimmers due to harmful blue-green algae pollution. Credit: Selene Magnolia Gatti ‘More Animals Than People’

Certain types of algae have been linked to fatalities. When sea lettuce and blue-green algaes break down, they can produce hydrogen sulfide, a lethal gas that smells like rotten eggs and causes  blocked airways and fluid to build up in the lungs if inhaled in large quantities. 

Since the 1980s, sea lettuce algae has been linked to as many as six deaths on Brittany’s beaches. 

Locals here are clear about the cause of the algae growth. Near the tourist town of Saint-Brieuc, “the pigs” has been scribbled across an official sign warning about the danger and symptoms of inhaling toxic gas from the algae. 

“We have many more animals than people,” environmental author Yves-Marie Le Lay told DeSmog. Although the peninsula covers just five percent of France’s surface, its 6.8 million pigs account for 58 percent of the country’s total population. “We have a manure problem, it all ends up in the rivers.”

Author and campaigner Yves Marie Le Lay demonstrates the use of a gas mask on the Plage du Fond de la Baie, in Locquirec, Brittany, France. He uses the device when algae blooms appear, to avoid inhaling any toxic gas. Credit: Selene Magnolia Gatti

For environmental activist Fabrice Hamon, who lives near the Penfoul beach in Western Brittany, bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella from manure run-off have also become a daily concern – washed by rain from farmland down to the sea. 

Since official tests in the summer of 2025 identified E. coli on Penfoul, the beach has been under a partial swimming ban, and is at risk of being closed permanently. 

Red signs warn swimmers and dogs against spending time on the algae-strewn Penfoul beach in Western Brittany. Credit: Selene Magnolia Gatti

Hamon says these bacteria are “super dangerous” if they are swallowed or come into contact with areas like the eyes and nose – and can cause infections, such as conjunctivitis, urinary tract infections, and gastro-intestinal infections that lead to diarrhea and vomiting.

Hamon is uneasy about the coming months. This summer’s droughts meant that fewer harmful excess nutrients were washed into the waterways from fields treated with manure, but instead are stored in the soil until it rains. Europe, the fastest-warming continent in the world, is seeing more intense and unpredictable bouts of extreme weather, including increased downpours and flooding.

“Right now there’s a build-up of bacteria in the fields,” Hamon says. “All it takes is a heavy downpour and bingo. It’s a slow-acting poison: little by little, ecosystems are being degraded by the build-up of pollution linked to intensive farming.”

Environmental activist Fabrice Hamon with the device he is using to test water in the River Foul in Brittany, France. He also regularly collects water samples to test for E. coli. Credit: Selene Magnolia Gatti Warming Seas

As climate change accelerates, warming temperatures are also exacerbating the algal blooms. Algae grows quicker and lasts longer in warm waters, as higher temperatures allow it to digest and reproduce at a faster rate. 

Jürgen Leicher, deputy chairman for the German environmental group BUND in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, has been sailing on the Baltic Sea for 40 years, and says this year’s algal blooms were the worst he’s ever seen. 

Temperatures in Germany broke records for three consecutive days in June, reaching almost 42C. Satellite images of the Baltic in August show vast algal blooms swirling towards the coast.“You feel really afraid when you sail for hundreds of miles through a yellow-brown dirty sea,” says Leicher. “All the way through this algae, the sea was dead. You see no birds, no mammals, no fish. It’s so empty.”

Agriculture is the biggest source of the problem: the intergovernmental body HELCOM estimates it accounts for up to 90 per cent of nitrogen and up to 80 per cent of phosphorus in diffuse nutrient run-off into the Baltic. 

Despite decades of intergovernmental efforts to reduce nutrient pollution, the Baltic is struggling to recover from the environmental damage combined with rising temperatures. Each year, when algae dies it sinks to the seabed, taking large amounts of phosphorus with it. That phosphorus is released back into the ocean in future years — a dangerous feedback loop that picks up speed as the sea warms.

Satellite image of algal blooms in the Baltic Sea, August 2026. Credit: Dávid D. Kovács, Jan Musial, Jędrzej Bojanowski, Dennis Clarijs, Jurry de la Mar, and András Zlinszk / Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem Seeking Solutions

In the face of these huge challenges, residents, campaigners and scientists are united in their determination to find solutions. 

Leicher thinks that better monitoring could help track the profound environmental disruption taking place in the Baltic Sea. His colleagues at BUND Schleswig-Holstein have launched a citizen science project, which will see volunteers collect water samples twice a month from local rivers. By analysing the samples in a laboratory, the organisation hopes to pinpoint sources of pollution and help efforts to cut nutrients.

In Brittany, Fabrice Hamon has designed an app – La Météo Bacterio – which helps monitor for bacteria in the 20 odd rivers that flow onto local beaches, meaning tourists and residents can check for warnings before they swim.

Others are focusing their efforts on political and legal action. In recent years, campaigners and residents have won a raft of legal victories – including persuading the Spanish government in 2022 to bestow ‘legal personhood’ on Mar Menor, providing the lagoon with rights to protection and restoration.

Residents and campaigners stage a protest at Playa de Los Espejos in Los Alcázares against the pollution of Spain’s Mar Menor, September 2026. Credit: Santi Donaire

Ultimately, though, scientists say that nutrient pollution must be slashed to limit the recurrent harmful algae growth – and that means transforming agricultural practices. 

“The science is clear on what needs to be done,” says Professor Friedhelm Taube from Kiel University (CAU), who spent 12 years advising Germany’s Ministry of Agriculture. Governments should support farmers to use less nitrates-heavy fertiliser, plant catch crops like grass clover that absorb some of the excess nutrients from soils before they run into rivers, lakes and sea, and reduce the number of animals farmed on limited land, he says.

“Farming animals can be fine,” Taube says, but to keep nutrient run-off within safe limits, numbers should be reduced to just one ‘livestock unit’ per hectare – a technical term that translates to just one dairy cow or around three pigs. That means far fewer animals in regions where they are intensively farmed, he adds. 

Campaigners in Spain also face a stark choice. “Either we wreck the Mar Menor,” says Pedro Luengo from Ecologistas en Accion, “or we transform the agricultural model”.

In Northern Ireland, Mary O’Hagan is determined to continue to fight for change. “I credit getting into Lough Neagh for the lovely active life I lead,” she says. “It’s one of the reasons I fight back in the way I do.” 

It’s a long fight, but Mary is hopeful. “I’d like to see improvements in my children’s lifetimes – to see it restored to how it was.”

Additional research by Joey Grostern and Louis Bontemps

Editing by Phoebe Cooke and Clare Carlile

The post In Pictures: ‘Armageddon’ at Europe’s Swim Spots Linked to Climate Change and Factory Farm Pollution appeared first on DeSmog.

'People vote their real lives' Channel Comment brendan 22nd October 2026 Teaser Media

Armenia is reconsidering its plans for a new nuclear power plant after a fresh proposal from Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom and a sharp revision of the country’s future electricity needs, potentially opening the door to decades of continued dependence on Russian nuclear technology.

The discussions come as Armenia works to extend the operating life of its aging Metsamor nuclear power plant, whose sole functioning reactor was commissioned in 1980 and is now expected to remain in service until at least 2036.

During a September 29 meeting in Yerevan, Rosatom Director General Alexey Likhachev presented Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan with proposals for new nuclear generating capacity, including a Russian-designed VVER-1000 reactor capable of producing approximately 1,000 megawatts of electricity.

The proposal is one of several under consideration by Armenia, which has also explored nuclear cooperation with the United States, France, South Korea and China.

Pashinyan emphasized that no decision had been made and that the government would evaluate competing proposals on economic and technical grounds, including their cost, safety, construction schedules and guarantees.

But according to Bellona nuclear expert Alexander Nikitin Armenia’s eventual decision will be shaped as much by geopolitics as by its electricity requirements.

A changing calculation

Until recently, Armenia had favored replacing Metsamor with one or more small modular reactors, whose relatively modest generating capacity appeared better suited to the country’s limited electricity market.

But on October 1, Pashinyan acknowledged that the government’s calculations had changed.

According to the prime minister, new investment projects, including facilities associated with artificial intelligence, have substantially increased Armenia’s anticipated electricity requirements.

Just over a year ago, he said, Armenia had an electricity surplus. Now, investment commitments have created the prospect of a deficit.

“I have said dozens of times before that we need nothing more than a modular nuclear power plant,” Pashinyan said. “But now, due to this change, we have to understand that, most likely, a modular plant will not be enough for us.”

He suggested that a reactor with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts might prove a more practical alternative, although experts are still examining the question.

The shift could improve Rosatom’s prospects. Unlike many proposed small modular reactor designs, Russia’s conventional VVER technology has an established operating history, something Moscow has emphasized in promoting its nuclear exports.

Yet a large reactor would also present challenges for Armenia’s relatively small electricity grid, requiring careful consideration of how the country would manage the sudden loss of such a substantial generating unit.

Nikitin, however, believes Armenia should continue exploring smaller reactors rather than concentrating its future nuclear generating capacity in one large facility.

“Given Armenia’s heightened seismic activity, I believe the country would be better served by establishing several power-generation centers using small modular reactors based on designs currently being offered by nuclear companies from the United States, South Korea, France or even China,” he said.

He also suggested that Armenia could establish an international consortium to develop small modular reactors, potentially including Rosatom, since cooperation with the Russian corporation will remain necessary as long as Metsamor continues operating.

Keeping Metsamor running

Meanwhile, Armenia remains dependent on its existing nuclear plant.

Metsamor’s second reactor, a Soviet-designed VVER-440 unit, began operating in 1980. Both of the plant’s reactors were shut down following the devastating 1988 Armenian earthquake, but the second was restarted in 1995 amid severe electricity shortages.

Today, it supplies a substantial share of Armenia’s electricity, estimated by Nikitin at approximately 30 to 40 percent.

Rosatom is participating in a modernization program intended to extend the reactor’s operation until 2036, when it will have been in service for 56 years, excluding its period of shutdown.

Likhachev has said he sees no technical obstacles to reaching that target. He also disclosed that Armenian officials are examining the possibility of a further extension until 2046.

Such an undertaking would require extensive additional investment in safety systems, equipment modernization and spent-fuel storage. Likhachev acknowledged that the necessary expenditures could substantially increase the cost of electricity generated by the plant.

Nikitin describes the extension as an interim measure driven by Armenia’s difficult energy circumstances rather than a desirable long-term solution.

“Extending the operating lives of nuclear power plants has become common practice in virtually every country. There is nothing unusual about it in itself, although aging equipment can certainly be expected to cause problems, particularly when subjected to external stresses such as earthquakes,” he said.

He warned that Armenia’s seismic conditions and the limitations of Metsamor’s original Soviet-era design make replacing the plant particularly important.

“The sooner Armenia develops a new nuclear power infrastructure, the less likely it will be to encounter problems with a plant built to an outdated design that did not incorporate many of today’s safety requirements,” Nikitin said.

A decision with lasting consequences

For Armenia, choosing a replacement reactor involves more than selecting generating capacity.

In recent years, Pashinyan’s government has moved toward closer relations with the European Union while effectively freezing its participation in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. Armenia has also discussed the possibility of withdrawing from the Eurasian Economic Union.

Nikitin argues that Moscow views these developments with concern and regards nuclear cooperation as one means of maintaining its influence over Armenia.

“Russia is doing everything it can to preserve the country’s dependence on Rosatom, pursuing various initiatives and offering proposals through the nuclear corporation that appear attractive at first glance,” he said.

In Nikitin’s assessment, the strategic purpose of these offers is to discourage Armenia from moving further away from Russian-led institutions and toward the European Union.

Russia already supplies Metsamor’s nuclear fuel and provides technical services. Awarding Rosatom the contract for a replacement plant could preserve that relationship for decades through fuel deliveries, maintenance, specialized equipment, personnel training and nuclear safety support.

“If Armenia agrees to build another Russian nuclear power plant, it will effectively become dependent on Rosatom — and therefore Russia — for nearly a century,” Nikitin warned.

He pointed out that the long-term relationship between a nuclear plant and its technology supplier extends well beyond construction, encompassing fuel supplies, spent-fuel management and the maintenance of specialized equipment.

Choosing a Western or Asian supplier could diversify Armenia’s nuclear partnerships, although alternative technologies would bring their own financing, licensing and construction challenges. Pashinyan has said Armenia expects to select its new reactor technology by the end of 2027, perhaps sooner.

With construction likely to take many years, the government faces a narrowing window in which to replace Metsamor before its planned retirement. For Nikitin, the choice goes to the heart of Armenia’s relationship with Russia.

“The decision to build a new nuclear power plant in Armenia will undoubtedly be driven more by politics than by energy considerations,” he said.

The post Armenia reconsiders nuclear future as Rosatom offers replacement for aging Soviet reactor appeared first on Bellona.org.

NEW LONDON, WISC. (October 21, 2026) — Bouressa Family Farm, owned and operated by fifth-generation farmer Rachel Bouressa, has earned the National Audubon Society’s Bird-Friendly Land...

This article by Nicolas Scibelli first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

[Haz clic aquí para leer en español]

A single stream nourishes the cattle of Ismael “Jim” Solis’ ranch on Panama’s Azuero Peninsula, which juts out into the Pacific Ocean.

Solis has raised cattle through countless droughts and dry spells over the years, weathering them with little concern.

But as El Niño builds strength ahead of Panama’s coming dry season, he worries that for the first time, his stream may run dry. 

"We hope it keeps flowing, but we need more rain so it will last when the dry season comes,” he said. 

Solis has spent his life raising cattle on the Azuero since his family arrived decades ago in the small town of Los Asientos on the southern part of the peninsula. His ranch is one of many that dominate the region, checkering the landscape in a matrix of rolling pasture dotted with trees, the last reminders of the expansive forest that once blanketed the surrounding hillsides. 

Extreme drought has caused the artificial reservoir on Cecibet Peralta's ranch to run dry. (Image credit: Nicolas Scibelli)

Across the Azuero Peninsula, extreme drought is stretching water resources thin. To counter it, some are switching to a more sustainable system of cattle ranching known as silvopasture, a method that incorporates trees into the landscape and helps preserve water. Those who have made the switch say the increased tree cover has proven vital in maintaining water supply and grass yield while neighboring farms feel the effects.

Still, with forecasts of a historically strong El Niño building in the coming months, a difficult dry season lies ahead for silvopasture and conventional ranchers alike.

Feeling the heat

The Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology of Panama declared an El Niño alert in May, warning of drier conditions on the Azuero Peninsula and a 10-20% reduction in rainfall during the region’s typically wet season. As the months drag on, ranchers are seeing the effects. 

“In the past, it wouldn't have been as hard as it is this year,” said Edwin Carrasco, a silvopastoral rancher in Herrera province. 

Edwin Carrasco, a silvopasture rancher in Herrera province, Panama. (Image credit: Nicolas Scibelli)

The stream on Carrasco’s property has run dry, requiring him to pump water from a well on site. The ranch remains in a precarious position as drought lingers. 

"I'm frightened, because we don't know what we're going to do with the animals if it doesn't keep raining,” Carrasco said. 

In the nearby Los Santos province, Cecibet Peralta is another rancher dealing with water shortages. Peralta uses a large artificial reservoir on her ranch to water her cattle, though it historically has not always lasted through the dry season. Peralta recently expanded the reservoir’s capacity hoping it would provide year-round water, but with this year’s El Niño-charged drought, even the expansion has not been enough. 

The dry reservoir has forced Peralta to move her cattle to a neighboring farm with more stable water resources. She’s now looking to expand the reservoir again in an attempt to stay ahead of the rapidly changing climate.

Living fences separate fields on a silvopasture ranch just outside of Los Asientos on the southern part of Panama's Azuero Peninsula. (Nicolas Scibelli)

“Every year the summers are stronger,” she said. “The intense heat causes the water to be used up more quickly.”

With a seasonal dry climate, the Azuero is projected to experience higher temperatures and increasingly irregular rainfall patterns in the coming decades. As climate change potentially drives stronger El Niño events, prolonged droughts are likely to occur again in the future. 

Nature’s original solution

For years now, some on the Azuero have been planting trees on their farms and using a less intensive, mixed-rotation system known as silvopasture. Those who have established these systems say they are seeing the results as drought rages on. 

“Nowadays, we have a greater abundance of water because of the way it has been managed,” said Manuel Cedeño, a silvopastoral rancher from the small community of Los Asientos. "Better water quality, better forage for the animals; more biodiversity.”

In contrast to conventional systems that clear the land entirely for pasture, silvopasture incorporates planted and naturally regenerated trees into pastures for grazing. It also uses mixed-rotation cycles that reduce overgrazing and preserve soil health. 

A cow walking to pasture on a silvopasture ranch in Veraguas province, Panama. (Image credit: Nicolas Scibelli)

The conventional wisdom that trees are detrimental to cattle production is unfounded, according to Jake Slusser, a tropical forester working with Yale’s Environmental Training and Leadership Initiative. Slusser is not affiliated with Yale Climate Connections.

“Trees offer everything from shade, forage, fodder, fruit,” Slusser said. “Some trees fix nitrogen so that the pasture grass that they're eating has a lot higher nutritional content, especially in terms of protein.”

Silvopastoral systems are also crucial for preserving water levels and water quality. Most systems use pumps to transport water directly to cattle, reducing the need for cattle to travel directly to water sources while limiting pollution. Increased vegetation along riparian areas also improves shade cover, reducing evaporation.

“These are just in general much more resilient farms during El Niño years when you have these long-term droughts, because you're conserving and utilizing the water you have on [the] farm in a very efficient way,” Slusser said.

The Yale initiative has been working with ranchers on the Azuero since 2009, having helped many farmers make the change to silvopastoral systems. Thousands of hectares of land on the peninsula have been deforested or degraded since ranchers began clearing the region in the 1940s, the majority of which are still actively used for cattle grazing today. Slusser said silvopasture presents an opportunity to improve environmental outcomes in actively farmed areas.

“That's where the most degraded landscapes are,” he said. “It allows the biggest potential because you're not replacing people's traditional livelihoods; you're enhancing them by doing silvopasture.”

A solar-powered well on a silvopasture ranch outside of Los Asientos. The pump provides water for the ranch's cattle and protects water quality. (Image credit: Nicolas Scibelli)

The transition to silvopasture is not seamless, as significant upfront financial and technical investments are required. Silvopasture also does not entirely reduce the negative environmental impacts of cattle ranching, with substantial climate-warming methane emissions still caused by the practice.

Still, the positive effects are clear to ranchers in water-stressed areas like the Azuero. For those like Solis who have not yet made the transition to silvopasture, this year’s drought is making a compelling case to do so. 

"If you don't reforest, the water disappears more quickly,” he said.

Looking ahead to a drier future

This year’s extreme drought has been a reason for many to begin examining the future of their farms more closely. The dry season still looms on the horizon, and water resources on many ranches have already been stretched thin. With extreme weather events becoming increasingly common throughout Latin America, some believe silvopasture offers a potential solution moving forward. 

“This is one of the ways we can mitigate climate change and help the planet benefit," Cedeño said. 

Cows grazing in a mixed-rotation pasture outside of Los Asientos. (Image credit: Nicolas Scibelli)

For Cedeño, the change to silvopasture has been a worthy investment. Although the drought is providing new challenges on his ranch, he nonetheless feels secure that his cattle will have water throughout the coming year. Cedeño has already helped several other ranchers in Los Asientos make the change to silvopastoral systems and is looking to expand his own operation even further. 

He hopes that in the future, farms like his will be the norm.

"The culture of the farmers in this Azuero area had always been to cut down the trees, plant pasture, and raise cattle,” he said. “If we could change that mindset, I think we could accomplish much more.”

//

The Environment Agency has refused to extend its public consultation on plans for gas drilling and fracking at Burniston in North Yorkshire.

Proposed Burniston drilling and fracking site.
Source: Europa Oil & Gas permit application

DrillOrDrop reported yesterday that villagers had called for an extension to the final consultation on an environmental permit.

This followed local concerns about revisions to two key documents after the EA admitted what it called “a small number of minor typographical errors and inconsistencies”.

An EA spokesperson told us this evening:

“We value the contribution of the community and have carefully considered requests for additional time.

“However, we are satisfied that there has been a reasonable opportunity for all interested parties to respond and have closed the consultation.

“We will provide the outcome in due course.”

The EA said the Burniston consultation period had already been extended to give people time to consider the updated documents.

The EA also said all the amendments had been “clearly identified and summarised”. It said the changes did not affect its draft decision to approve the permit.

The regulator also said it had used “a range of channels to raise awareness of the consultation, including notifying the local MP, councillors and parish councils, and issuing online information and community letters.

Deadlines and updates

The EA originally set a deadline for comments of 26 September 2026.

On 24 September 2026, the Burniston permit consultation webpage changed the closing date for comments to today, 21 October 2026. There was no explanation.

On 29 September 2026, an update on the webpage acknowledged errors in the draft decision document.

On 7 October 2026, a second update said the errors had been corrected and revised documents were now available on the webpage.

Some local people said the EA community letter about the revised documents had not reached them until 14 October 2026. Others said they had not received one.

Local reaction

The campaign group, Frack Free Coastal Communities (FFCC), said this evening:

“We are disappointed – not so much that they have not extended the consultation but more that they have refused to engage with the fact that their revised decision document perpetuates the confused terminology of the first version.”

The group said yesterday the deadline had not “give sufficient time” and went “against the spirit of the EA’s published code of practice for consultations”.

FFCC said it needed more time to carry out a “comprehensive analysis of shortcomings that affect the EA’s technical analysis and appraisal of the permit application”.

Burniston Parish Council had asked the EA for an extension to the consultation of at least two months.

The council chair, Cllr Richard Parsons, said yesterday:

“Burniston Parish Council and members of our community have become extremely concerned about the changes that have been made to the Environmental Agency report into the Burniston Gas drill licence.

“There have, very recently, been a large number of changes many of which do not just cover minor errors.”

June Rubis is a Macquarie University Research Fellow working on Indigenous rights and biodiversity governance and a steering committee member for the Cali Fund. She writes here in her personal capacity.

At COP16 in Cali, governments made a significant commitment: at least half of the funding from the new Cali Fund should support the self-identified needs of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, including women and youth. It was a watershed moment for multilateral benefit-sharing.

The challenge now is to translate that commitment into access arrangements that recognise the different institutions, priorities and decision-making processes of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

For generations, biodiversity and traditional Indigenous knowledge have provided significant value to companies who depend on nature’s genetic diversity to discover new drugs that fight diseases, create products that improve health, and grow crops resilient to extreme heat and flooding events. While some compounds are sampled directly from the source country, increasingly the digital blueprints are held in online public databases which are freely accessible to use for innovation and research.

Countries urged to ramp up “insufficient” nature policies at COP17

The Cali Fund was established at COP16 to encourage commercial users of Digital Sequence Information, or DSI, to share benefits arising from its use. Estimates suggest it could generate over $3.5 billion a year – a stark contrast to the modest $10,656 currently committed to the fund from just five SMEs, underlining how much progress must be made at COP17 over the next two weeks.

The COP16 decision that set up the fund offers two routes for money to reach Indigenous Peoples and local communities: through government authorities, and through direct payments to institutions identified by Indigenous Peoples and local communities themselves. 

Varied ways of organising

Indigenous Peoples and local communities organise through a wide range of institutions. Some have national or regional organisations experienced in managing international grants. Others work through territorial organisations, customary institutions, community associations, cooperatives or networks. Some have professional finance teams and audited accounts; others have extensive experience governing territories, collective resources or conservation work without having been organised around international funding requirements.

For direct access, some questions are already apparent. Which institutions should be able to receive funds? How should they be identified? What fiduciary standards should apply? How should safeguards and accountability work where institutional capacities differ? What support may be needed where institutions have strong community mandates but less experience with international finance?

Comment: Protecting nature is a public duty, not a Wall Street profit opportunity

If access is designed mainly around institutions that already meet the expectations of large international finance mechanisms, early funding will tend to favour those already familiar to funders. They will gain further experience and become better positioned for future funding, while institutions with less administrative capacity may remain outside the system despite strong community mandates and long histories of stewardship.

These first decisions matter most, because they set the terms for everyone who follows.

The role of intermediaries requires care. Some Indigenous organisations may want a fiscal host to hold and manage funds on their behalf. Communities may choose to work through an NGO they trust. Government-facilitated arrangements may work well in particular national contexts.

What matters is the function an intermediary performs and the authority that comes with it. Providing administrative support is different from deciding which Indigenous organisations qualify, which priorities can receive support, or how success will be assessed. Direct access means communities keep that decision-making authority.

Decision-making power

The COP16 decision refers to institutions that Indigenous Peoples and local communities identify. But authority among Indigenous Peoples does not sit in one kind of body. It may sit with territorial organisations, customary institutions, community associations or combinations of these. Legal recognition and customary authority do not always align neatly.

Global deforestation slowed in 2025 but Brazil’s election could undo “fragile” gains

An important feature of the Cali Fund’s governance is that Indigenous Peoples and local communities participate as full members of the Steering Committee, rather than as observers. Seven Indigenous Peoples and local community representatives, one from each of the seven socio-cultural regions, participate in consensus-based decision-making alongside representatives of governments and UN entities. Six additional representatives from civil society, scientific institutions and the private sector participate as observers.

That representation carries responsibility. Institutional legitimacy, access and representation take different forms across the seven socio-cultural regions. Indigenous Peoples and local communities members therefore have an important role in bringing those differences into the Fund’s governance and in ensuring that arrangements developed for one context do not become the assumed model for everyone else. 

Safeguards and clear responsibilities

COP17 can establish the core principles and direction, while allowing operational pathways to develop in ways that respond to different regional contexts. The decisions countries take in Yerevan will shape how that flexibility is realised in practice. 

The choices made around access will influence which institutions are able to participate, which routes become established and which forms of authority are recognised within the funding architecture. The aim should be an architecture with enough structure to maintain confidence while allowing for different forms of Indigenous and community governance.

A credible direct-access pathway will need safeguards, financial oversight and clear responsibilities. This would give the 50% commitment a stronger institutional foundation.

The Cali Fund’s importance will ultimately depend not only on how much funding reaches Indigenous Peoples and local communities, but on whether they are able to determine how the money is accessed, governed and used. This requires access pathways that recognise their institutions, priorities and decision-making processes, rather than requiring them to conform to a single predetermined model.

The post COP17 must settle who decides how Cali Fund money is disbursed appeared first on Climate Home News.

Judge Chutkan Reopens National Monuments Litigation

 

On October 13, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan issued an order granting a request by SUWA and other conservation groups (filed in September) to reopen the 2017 litigation challenging President Trumps’ illegal reductions of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments. Those cases had been stayed after President Biden restored the two monuments in 2021. Now, unfortunately, they’re relevant again.

During a status conference held a few days later, Judge Chutkan ordered the federal government to give those working to protect the monuments 48 hours advance notice of any surface disturbing activities on lands cut from the national monuments.

“President Trump’s attack on Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, two crown jewels of the nation’s public lands system, was illegal, plain and simple,” said SUWA Legal Director Steve Bloch. “And because of this unlawful act, irreplaceable cultural resources and the monuments’ unique geology and flora and fauna are now at risk from activities like mining. Today was an important step towards restoring protections for the monuments. We’re looking forward to presenting our arguments to the court and defending these remarkable landscapes.”

>> Read our full press release

Photo © Whit Richardson

Bears Ears Mining Claims Increase to 72 (So Far)

 

Since mining restrictions were lifted on lands Trump illegally cut from Bears Ears National Monument, 72 mining claims have been filed on some of those now unprotected landscapes. This is more than triple the number of claims filed after Trump’s first-term attack on the monument.

“The pace of new mining claims in Bears Ears National Monument is alarming and reinforces the need for vigilance while we work to undo Trump’s illegal actions and restore both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments,” said SUWA Staff Attorney Hanna Larsen. “These claims are located in some of the region’s most remarkable places, including the headwaters of the Dark Canyon Wilderness and just outside Natural Bridges National Monument.”

SUWA continues to monitor these claims and will act as necessary to protect both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments from irreversible harm.

>> Read our most recent press release

Photo © Jeff Foott

SUWA and Partners File Suit to Protect Nine Mile Canyon

 

On October 6, SUWA, alongside the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition and Center for Biological Diversity, sued the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for approving a hydrocarbon highway through Gate Canyon in eastern Utah. That project—if completed—would straighten 6 miles of what is currently a scenic, winding gravel road and involves the blasting and destruction of 100-foot-tall canyon walls, Utah historical sites, and habitat for threatened wildlife. It would also lead to dramatically increased truck traffic, sometimes mere feet away from archaeological sites in nearby Nine Mile Canyon, often described as the “world’s longest art gallery” due to its abundance of Native American rock imagery.

This would all be done to accommodate 70-foot oil tanker trucks traveling to the oil fields and transloading facilities in Carbon County, Utah. As many as 1,000 vehicles could pass through the area each day—the equivalent of a tanker truck every 7 minutes, according to news reports.

Our lawsuit challenges the BLM’s rushed and behind-closed-doors environmental review for failing to disclose or analyze the impacts of increased traffic and the destruction of Gate Canyon on scenery, wildlife, the area’s rock imagery, and historic axle grease inscriptions. The agency also ignored its own management plans that require protecting cultural and scenic values and violated the federal National Historic Preservation Act and the Endangered Species Act.

>> Read our full press release

Photo © Ray Bloxham/SUWA

BLM Proceeds with Plan to Auction Off Wild Landscapes for Fossil Fuel Development

 

Last month, SUWA and many of our supporters submitted comments on a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lease sale offering 43 parcels of public land in Utah for oil and gas development, including wild places in the Dirty Devil and Hatch Point regions. The agency has since released a final environmental assessment discounting that input and intends to move forward with the sale.

As you may recall, many of the parcels—including some near Bears Ears National Monument—are in designated critical habitat for the Mexican Spotted Owl, a species listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Yet the BLM failed to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about foreseeable impacts to the owl, as required by the ESA. Instead, the agency kicked the can down the road to the drilling stage when it claims that it may (but likely won’t) fulfill that requirement. This backwards approach is illegal and does nothing to ensure the owl is protected.

SUWA plans to file a formal protest of the leasing decision. Stay tuned for future updates.

Photo © Ray Bloxham/SUWA

Attention Wordsmiths: SUWA Is Hiring!

 

Can you imagine writing copy for future Redrock Reports and drafting (or editing) a wide array of other SUWA materials, both print and digital? Now is your chance! SUWA is seeking a Writer & Communications Specialist to join our growing Communications Team. If you have a deep love for protecting public lands, strong writing skills, and experience with social media, please apply. We offer great benefits and the opportunity to learn and grow with other communications professionals in support of a great cause.

The application deadline for this position is Monday, November 9. Learn more, including how to apply, at suwa.org/careers.

On the Horizon: November 2026 Elections

 

We’d be remiss if we didn’t note that the 2026 Midterm elections are less than two weeks away on Tuesday, November 3. During this election, at the federal level, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are on the ballot, and depending on where you live you may have a senator on the ballot as well. This is in addition to any races that may be happening at the state, county, or local level.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, SUWA does not endorse candidates, but we can encourage you to vote! In many states, early voting or vote-by-mail is already underway. You can visit vote.org to check your registration status and learn about how to vote, wherever you live. One final ask: once you’ve made a plan to vote, reach out to a family member, friend, or colleague and help them do the same!

The post October 2026 Redrock Report appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

By Quentin Scott, Federal Policy Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network

Not long ago, conversations about solar reflective methods (SRM) were dominated by one question: How do we stop it? At this year’s Climate Week NYC, we heard a different one: How do we make sure research into this emerging climate technology is done responsibly? 

Nearly 100 scientists, policymakers, advocates, students, skeptics, and supporters came together for Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN)’s SRM Research Hub Crawl to grapple with what responsible research into and governance of SRM could look like. The concerns haven’t disappeared, and they shouldn’t. But as climate impacts grow harder to ignore, people are increasingly willing to move beyond debating whether SRM should exist and start asking how we can responsibly explore its potential to help protect our planet.

That’s what happened on Wednesday, September 23, when CCAN hosted our SRM Research Hub Crawl: Building a Community for Responsible Research and Governance. People across sectors showed up to discuss responsible research into SRM techniques. Such an event would have been hard to imagine in years past, but it showed us how the public is hungry for oversight over responsible research into SRM as climate change becomes harder to ignore.

Why This Conversation Can’t Wait

Let me be clear about where CCAN stands: solar reflective methods are not a substitute for rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Full stop. We’re still fighting for clean energy alternatives, and against every rollback of climate progress.

Climate change is already forcing hard choices on communities, but policy isn’t keeping pace. Meanwhile, SRM research is growing—whether or not we’re comfortable with it. That doesn’t mean deployment is inevitable, and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s desirable. It means the public deserves a transparent, inclusive conversation about what research is happening, what we still don’t know, and what safeguards would be required if this technology ever were to be deployed.

If that conversation doesn’t happen, the public is left in the dark. With climate change making the road ahead even harder to see, the public needs to move back into the driver’s seat.

Not Your Typical Convening

Most SRM discussions happen in technical and academic settings, with the usual insiders. We wanted to open up the conversation, so we brought it to the bar with our first-ever “Hub Crawl.”

Participants moved between interactive hubs hosted by partner organizations. One hub dug into the science of SRM. Another explored emerging governance frameworks. Others tackled policy debates and what meaningful public engagement should look like. People with very different views on SRM—from supporters to skeptics—engaged directly with the research and the governance challenges around it.

Ben Kalina, director and producer of the Plan C For Civilization documentary, said the SRM field has always been “dangerously shrouded in mystery,” dominated by a small number of researchers and personalities. He called the event fun:“Standing on the roof, talking about the earth’s reflectivity, it was like a sci-fi mini-convention sharing what we’ve learned—and what we don’t know—with a curious and questioning Climate Week community,” he said.

I’ll take it. Serious doesn’t have to mean stuffy.

Different Perspectives, Shared Questions

This year’s Climate Week took place after a record-shattering summer, on the heels of the hottest month ever recorded and 12 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. Our co-host, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS),  pointed to urgency. Dr. Hannah Safford, FAS’s Associate Director of Climate and Environment, pointed to glacier collapse and flash flooding in the Himalayas and unbearable heat around the world. “We owe it to ourselves, our neighbors, and our kids,” she said, “to rigorously, responsibly explore tools like SRM that could help reduce climate risks, even as we continue to ramp up mitigation and adaptation.”

The organizations that joined us don’t all agree with one another, and that was the point: the Federation of American Scientists, University of Chicago, Reflective, Degrees Initiative, Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, Environmental Defense Fund, Plan C For Civilization Documentary, and SRM360. Thank you to every one of them who attended and shared their views. 

Research Is Not Deployment

I say this often, and I’ll keep saying it: CCAN does not support SRM deployment. We do support studying whether it could work, what the risks are, who would be affected, and who gets a say. Those are responsible questions, and we need answers before other nations or private companies make those decisions for us.

Decisions about whether, how, and under what conditions research proceeds should be shaped by rigorous science, strong safeguards, and public accountability. Most of all, they should be shaped by the people most affected by climate change, not by whoever has the most money or the loudest voices.

Earlier this year, we watched lawmakers in statehouses across the country push bills to ban even the study of these technologies, many built on conspiracy theories rather than evidence. Banning research doesn’t make the technologies disappear. It just ensures we won’t have the full picture if it ever comes time to make a decision.

Climate Week’s Hub Crawl showed an alternative path: a room full of people from all backgrounds, willing to ask hard questions in public, backed by scientific research.

What Comes Next

Responsible SRM research is no longer a fringe topic in the climate community. As the climate crisis intensifies and policy lags, SRM is moving onto the agenda. The real question is who will be in the room when decisions get made.

If scientists, advocates, and affected communities don’t show up, a small number of people who have their own agendas will fill that space.

CCAN will keep bringing people together and pushing for SRM research that is transparent, publicly accountable, and governed by strong safeguards. We’ll also keep fighting for the cuts in carbon pollution that nothing else can replace.

If you’re curious, skeptical, or both—good. Join us. We’d love to hear from you.

Sign up to volunteer with CCAN!

About the author: Quentin Scott (he/him) joined CCAN in January 2021 as part of the newly created CCAN Federal Team. He moved from Chicago specifically to build political will for groundbreaking national climate and climate justice policies. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he got a first-hand look at the two Americas and sought to bring the two Americas closer together through advocacy.

Before joining CCAN, Quentin was chief of staff for an Illinois State Representative and a legislative correspondent in the US House of Representatives, and has led numerous issue and candidate campaigns across the Midwest and East Coast. In his roles, he has stood with neighborhood groups to hold industrial polluters accountable in communities of color and looks forward to bringing that fight to the federal level.

The post The SRM Conversation Is Growing: Nearly 100 Scientists, Advocates, and Skeptics Showed Up to Claim Their Seat appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.