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Beyond rogue scenarios and hype, the AI boom is accelerating a deeper structural shift: the migration of the global economy to the cloud. So far, the EU has mostly tried to rein in Big Tech through regulation, but this reactive approach has fallen short. The recent push for tech sovereignty can only succeed if it starts with democratic choice and a shared vision for social and technological progress.

Alessio Giussani: Your book The Rulers is primarily about three companies: Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. What sets them apart from other big corporations?

Cecilia Rikap: In the current debate, there’s a lot of noise about what’s going on with AI. Everybody, of course, has the right to talk about AI, particularly because decisions are made behind closed doors, and we lack a space to democratically discuss the ways forward. But instead of talking about the roots of corporate power and how it dictates technological change and profits from it, the conversation is often about two types of agents – and I’m playing with the word “agent” here.

One is the AI agent. People marvel at the things that AI can do, and instead of trying to understand who is developing this technology and for what purposes, they get caught up in this rhetoric that AI is either wonderful or horrible, but is extremely powerful either way. Others, who are more concerned with economic inequalities – as I also am – focus on another type of agent: the CEOs and the founders of these companies, particularly the ones who side with the far right, like Elon Musk or Alex Karp. I’m not saying that this approach is not relevant. But if we truly want to understand the roots of corporate power today, and therefore act upon it, dismantle it, and create alternatives, we cannot miss the forest for the tree.

These far-right characters shout very loudly and sometimes distract us from what’s really going on; this is what happens often with someone like Elon Musk. I’m not saying his companies don’t matter or that we shouldn’t study them, but in my research I don’t want to single out companies arbitrarily. Instead, I try to offer a more comprehensive view of corporate power. Therefore, I start by analysing the largest companies by market capitalisation, and then try to understand what explains their power.

I identify two groups: one is the group of big oil companies, and more broadly, companies that get their advantage by systematically extracting and monetising nature in different forms. The other group, which is the largest one and has been growing fast and overtaking some of the old giants, is made up of companies whose advantage comes from systematically capturing intangibles.

Corporate power has always been built, to some degree at least, on capturing and making sense of intangibles like information and knowledge, organising them, and putting them at the service of production processes. Think, for example, of the R&D laboratory of IBM, or the marketing department of Coca-Cola. These companies have been intellectual monopolies for decades, capturing intangibles like science and knowledge (in the case of IBM) or narratives and brand-building (Coca-Cola).

As intellectual monopolies, they mobilise their intangible assets to exercise economic power. Start-ups, for example, control intangibles, but usually they are not used for capturing economic value. An intellectual monopoly puts different forms of knowledge, narratives, and data at the service of expanding its control of the economy. This control can take the form of a chokepoint if it occurs on a specific market, or of a panopticon if it gives the ability to monitor all information created and exchanged within a network, enabling the leading corporation to plan, organise, and control beyond ownership.

Based on your analysis, a company like NVIDIA – which designs the most advanced AI chips and is the largest in the world by market capitalisation – does not qualify as a “ruler”. Why?

Nvidia has a clear chokepoint because it controls a specific market and is certainly an intellectual monopoly. But beyond that, it doesn’t have the capacity to control a broad part of the global economy. Its power is focused on semiconductor design, whereas other companies have a panopticon view, often because they sell directly across multiple markets. When you are at the supermarket, you think there are so many brands, but then you start turning the packaging, and you see Unilever everywhere. This gives a company like Unilever a panopticon: broad oversight across different parts of the economy. So all these companies mobilise intangibles to control portions of our lives, but these end up being contained, limited. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the only ones that combine multiple chokepoints and the largest panopticon of Western capitalism.

Many powerful actors are involved in producing an AI model. NVIDIA’s semiconductors are manufactured in Taiwan at TSMC, which I also classify as an intellectual monopoly with a chokepoint. So I’m not saying a company like Nvidia or TSMC isn’t powerful. But even the semiconductors from Nvidia end up entering the cloud of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Everywhere we look, we see these three companies controlling the many pieces and actors that then, seen together, become the digital stack.

Take academic research on AI, for example. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google co-produce around 90 per cent of their research with thousands of organisations. This isn’t exclusive to them: Meta, Nvidia, and companies from other sectors do it too. But when it comes to AI, Google and Microsoft are those with the largest capacity to control universities and public research organisations developing frontier research on AI. Moreover, they control the largest number of other companies, including start-ups, with their venture capital money and through the cloud.

Nvidia is expanding its profits so much that it has leverage to expand beyond its chokepoint. It is now trying to get its own cloud by investing a lot of money – also in partnership with other leading companies – to basically offer its semiconductors as a service on independent data centres that are not those of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Of course, this makes total sense because Nvidia doesn’t want to depend on selling to other big players. To some extent, what NVIDIA is trying to do is build its own cloud, and for me, this shows how important the cloud is.

What exactly is the cloud? And why does it bring so much power to the companies that control it?

Let me start with an example everyone knows: Netflix. It looks like a simple streaming app where we can watch whatever we want. Behind Netflix, there are thousands of digital services, which means that you have millions of lines of code that do a lot of different things. Not even a company as large as Netflix writes every line of code that makes the platform exist for all of us. Why? Because there are a lot of services, a lot of ready-made pieces of software for solving specific and repetitive issues that can be purchased. Where do you buy that? In the past, organisations used to go to a software provider and ask for software for their needs. It was more tailor-made, but it was also more expensive. Now, they rent it in the cloud.

The cloud is like a supermarket for digital technologies. It’s not just infrastructure offered as a service – that is, the data centres where data is stored and processed. You can get whatever you want in the cloud: software, a model, data, a platform, infrastructure, and more. From each of these clouds – which are run by Amazon, Microsoft and Google – you have thousands of options that you can purchase as a service.

That also means you never truly get access to the code. You don’t download the service to your computer, but you can use it while you are connected to the cloud. And this is where the cloud starts being something different. It’s not just the supermarket of technologies. It is also the production sphere, the factory, the place where data is arranged and organised, the software is produced, the architecture of the platforms is designed. Everything happens inside the cloud, and when we consume the services, we’re also inside the cloud. It’s as if I were also cooking and eating my meal inside the supermarket where I bought the ingredients. The production, the exchange, the consumption: it all happens there.

This differs from the power these companies already had over individuals through social media. Organisations of every size and every type, from small firms to large companies like Netflix, Nestlé, or Coca-Cola, and even governments, migrate to the cloud. In fact, the entire global economy is migrating to the cloud, which means that companies that control it get the capacity to oversee, predict, and anticipate where the economy is going; a level of foresight that no single institution, government, or organisation had in the past.

The cloud and intellectual monopolies predate the explosion of AI hype with the public release of ChatGPT in 2022. What does AI fundamentally change in the cloud’s role and the power relations it generates?

The AI companies that we now associate with the AI boom or hype, like OpenAI and Anthropic – but also DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 – are tightly connected to the cloud giants in multiple ways, including venture capital money. Since the release of ChatGPT, these AI companies have required a growing amount of processing power, which has also driven the data centre boom. At the same time, we have organisations around the world that feel that they must adopt AI, that they cannot be left out. I call this AI FOMO. And what is the safest, and also the most seamless, way to adopt AI? Well, the cloud.

AI is like a Trojan horse, a marketing strategy for the cloud. It accelerates migration to the cloud. Through Amazon, Microsoft, or Google Cloud, you automatically integrate the AI models into all the rest of the digital services you use. And you might not trust Anthropic, but Microsoft? Microsoft has been there for many years, so these companies have built a reputation as trustworthy partners, especially for other leading firms. Some companies have contracts directly with OpenAI or with Anthropic, but more and more we see that organisations prefer to go to the supermarket, where today they might use Claude, tomorrow ChatGPT, and the day after tomorrow they may use China’s DeepSeek, because even DeepSeek is available as a service on the cloud of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Meanwhile, regulators and competition authorities focus on AI and whether the AI market will be competitive, or what to do to make it competitive. But AI exists within an ecosystem, and the ones that control the ecosystem beyond ownership are the cloud giants.

Controlling beyond ownership is also linked to planning and delivering innovation. How do you understand that concept?

We tend to think that innovation is a precondition for economic growth, and that growth, if we have the right policies, will lead to prosperity and a better life for everyone. Private companies are seen as the innovators, so governments are expected to cut red tape so we can achieve prosperity. Yet societies are not becoming more prosperous.

The classical understanding of innovation would define it as a new process or product put on the market. An invention might be the discovery of a new drug or treatment, but until it’s approved and sold on the market, it’s not an innovation. But this definition neglects that every innovation is produced collectively by many, and then monetised by the company that captures that co-created knowledge. Between 2012 and 2021, for example, Microsoft produced over 15,000 scientific publications. Almost all of them had at least one co-author who worked for another organisation, not Microsoft. During the same period, Microsoft was granted 35,000 patents. It shared ownership of just 1 per cent of those patents.

This goes to show that these corporations are not the only innovators. When companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and others work with public universities and research institutes or invest in startups, they do so to get access to the knowledge that is being produced, to steer the trajectory of that knowledge, and then recombine all the pieces of that huge puzzle and monetise all the new recombinations. In a way, they are the big appropriators. So we shouldn’t cope with them under the promise that their innovations will contribute to a better life. In fact, they don’t, and these are not just “their” innovations, but the product of collective creative processes involving many others. These companies are indeed producing a lot of frontier research on AI, but never alone.

Besides, innovation today should be understood as knowledge in all its forms. This includes narratives and data, and how all this gets combined in the melting pot of creativity that the intellectual monopolies control beyond ownership. Corporations craft narratives about what we think AI is and how it should be regulated, and push us to use AI as a method of inventing, sidelining other means of producing and creating. I call this process epistemic totalitarianism.

Europe seems to have only awakened to the dangers of this system since Trump’s return to the White House in 2024 and his unholy alliance with tech bros. But who’s really in charge? Who’s driving whom?

During the Cold War, the Department of Defence set the trajectory and orientation of technological change. The Pentagon did this by investing strategically as well as coordinating and planning the big technological innovations of the Cold War period. After the Cold War, there was a sense of, “Why should we continue doing this the same way? We won.” Of course, it doesn’t mean that the Pentagon stopped investing in technology in the 1990s and 2000s, but it was no longer steering and planning technological development in the same way. Now, big tech companies have increasingly become the big planners of science and technology, particularly of AI. The AI that we have is the AI that they want. It’s an AI that can be resold again and again to countless actors, making it cheaper to produce and expanding their control over our societies.

Europe has been missing this story for decades. It thought that the world was operating as a common market, and that we should promote competition because everyone was on the same page. Of course, Europe knew that China wasn’t on that page and that China was planning. But what was harder to see was that leading corporations, in particular those from the US, were also planning and controlling beyond ownership.

The US government, once it realised around a decade ago that this was going on, decided to take action, and the already solid relationship between big tech and the Department of Defence has grown stronger and stronger since then. The most important change in this dynamic is that big tech – unlike previous military subcontractors – does not depend on government money. A key difference between a company like Palantir and a company like Microsoft is that Microsoft doesn’t depend on funding from the US government and its allies to be profitable, whereas Palantir does. This doesn’t mean Palantir will always obey the White House rule and bend the knee, but it is in its best interest to keep the government happy. For big tech companies, it’s not about getting money from the government; it’s about getting political help. They need the US government to stop places like Europe from regulating them.

What do they want exactly? They seem to be asking to pull the brake on AI development, while promising that AI could bring immense benefits to humanity and pushing on the accelerator.

There are two prevalent discourses in Silicon Valley, which correspond to two different ways of trying to control the state. One is that democracy, innovation, and freedom cannot go together. It posits that innovation and freedom should be prioritised over democracy. For those pushing this view, the state has failed and needs to be destroyed; technology by itself will bring a better world and deliver progress in every respect – to those who can pay for it, of course. These are the views of people like Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel. But we also have the discourse of Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai, the CEOs of Microsoft and Google, who say almost every day that their technologies will deliver promised economic growth while helping governments manage public administration, schools, hospitals, and borders.

This second discourse is more subtle. I describe it as corporate diplomacy because it’s a more strategic way to convince governments – even progressive ones. And when it comes to regulations, of course, these companies will respond differently: they will pretend to be much more open to oversight, but the question is which type of regulation and who designs it. They say that the technology moves so fast that it’s impossible for government regulation to be updated as it should be, and so they push for self-regulation, or regulation done by a third-party actor that goes inside the company and works together with its employees, with the information that the company wants to share. And they agree on regulations that blame tech users but never (themselves as) producers.

So, even though it might seem like they’re saying something different, in the end, they are all pushing for a certain type of regulation that blinds governments and society more and creates a shield from external oversight.

Regulation has been the approach driving policymaking in Brussels for a long time. Now there has been a shift towards competitiveness and a new buzzword: tech sovereignty. You’ve been working with this concept well before it became so popular. What does it mean?

Tech sovereignty can mean three different things. It can mean techno-nationalism, which consists in giving all the contracts to European firms. However, European companies like Siemens or SAP are also intellectual monopolies. And they are private companies, so their interest is to make money, not to grant options, choices, and openness to our societies in terms of how technology is produced or for what purposes.

Another interpretation, prevalent today at the EU level, sees tech sovereignty as making things happen in Europe, and it is as problematic as the first, if not more. The European Commission’s Tech sovereignty package should be renamed the tech competitiveness package. It aims to achieve competitiveness and economic growth through or with the excuse of sovereignty. It’s good marketing to call it sovereignty, but it’s essentially about attracting more capital to Europe, growing GDP, and reducing the feeling that we are lagging behind vis-à-vis the US. As it is designed, the package allows a company like Microsoft to fulfil all the criteria [of Europeanness] if it stores data in European data centres, and if its subsidiaries selling its services are based in Europe. So, from a legal point of view, these companies will be European entities, even if they are part of the Microsoft multinational corporation.

Clearly, these two ways of thinking about sovereignty are very short-sighted. Sovereignty, when it comes to tech, should be connected to governance, democracy, and choice. It is about being able to decide which technologies we want, which ones we don’t want, and for what purposes. Who is going to develop them? To what extent are we going to develop them, given their ecological footprint? What data are we going to use? How will we recognise the collective work that goes into developing technology? How are we going to make sure the effects don’t harm workers?

Ultimately, sovereignty is about who decides. It’s about democratising the political power of who is deciding about the present and future of humanity, because these technologies are powerful and ubiquitous, and the technologies that we are getting today are decided behind closed doors by a few actors.

If you were a progressive politician, government, or policymaker who wants to work towards this more expansive notion of tech sovereignty, what kind of coalitions and constituencies would you try to involve in the process?

The “we” needs to include everyone who identifies that this is a problem and wants to build a vision of digital sovereignty that is about collectively co-creating and sharing knowledge.

I think we need to start by decoupling the public sector from these companies. We need to make sure the US government and the companies can’t switch off the states participating in building an alternative. We can start small, for example with education, which is a critical sector, because kids at school are receiving a Google Suite package and studying with generative AI. We’ve seen the effect it has even on adults: it reduces people’s capacity to think critically. We, as adults, have learned to maintain some balance, but kids often don’t have that capacity. Other critical sectors are healthcare and the public service media.

It’s hard, but it will not require all the money that the companies are investing because we are going to start smaller, from the capabilities that already exist. And Europe has a lot of those. A significant part of these companies’ advantage comes from research that was done and is still being done in Europe by European universities, European companies, and so on.

There’s a growing movement against data centres. Should they be part of the conversation? And can we really build a democratic and sovereign tech if we put a pause on them altogether?

Including the communities that are fighting against data centres is critical because if we are building a public alternative, we will need infrastructure. The question is, where are we going to build these data centres? To what extent do we need them?

There is the idea that hyperscale data centres are inevitable, but only because we’ve accepted the narrative from cloud giants and AI companies that what we need is the largest model with more parameters, even though that is less rigorous than the machine learning models developed to detect or do specific tasks. But of course, those models require more human effort and less energy. So, we also need to change the AI paradigm in this process.

Tech CEOs and politicians in the US mention China “catching up” day in and day out as the ultimate reason to push the accelerator and push back against meaningful regulation. Is that narrative justified by reality?

When you look at the level of investment in the digital infrastructure of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google compared to Alibaba, Tencent, or Huawei, you can clearly see that China is playing a different game. It is trying to expand the adoption of its models as much as possible, even if they are not at the frontier. If it had political interest in doing so, China could channel all its efforts into one big team producing the largest AI model you’ve ever seen, and it has the resources and people to do that. But that’s not the game that China is playing.

Nor is Beijing just playing the AI game. China has been focusing on so many industries; it’s trying to lead everywhere, while the US is focused on AI, and Europe is stuck in between because it’s not thinking about what Europeans’ problems are today. What’s the priority? What should we be focusing on?

I like to live in Europe. The quality of life here is way better than in the US, and we often forget this. We forget about all the things we still get in Europe that are much rarer in other parts of the world, and I think we need to embrace that much more. It’s the time to build digital commons. It’s the time to build global public goods. It’s time to solve critical problems instead of being blinded by the latest iteration of an AI model that clearly brings more problems than solutions. And again, I’m not saying we should solve all problems without technology, but we should first map the problems, who is being affected by them, and how, and then identify what type of solutions is needed. In some cases, it might be technology; in other cases, it might just be redistributing wealth and decision-making power. It’s ultimately about bold political choices, and I hope to see more of those coming from Europe.

The content of this interview has been edited and rearranged for length and clarity.

Walkable cities are places that do best what cities are meant to do: contain and display human life with all of its variety, tension, diversity, struggle and beauty.

Americans used the products for twenty years without trusting the companies. A data center is the first thing they could vote on.

In recent years, Agadir, Morocco, has become a focal point for discussions on climate resilience and adaptation. In a recent episode of The Stories on the Edge podcast, hosts Veronica and Nigel spoke with Zach Oulad, an urban data expert and local official, who discussed the urgent need for community adaptation and innovative policies.

UK developer and local council sign community benefit deals for two projects stuck in limbo after being "called" in by he LNP state government.

The post Wind developer signs community benefit deals worth up to $160m to end stalemate over called-in projects appeared first on Renew Economy.

'Imagination is resistance' Channel News brendan 15th October 2026 Teaser Media

The devastation goes on apace at the teeny toxic hands of the clowns and hacks in power (maybe not much longer?). Topping the abuses: An assault by Homeland Security (sic) thugs on the home of a duly elected (albeit female, brown, Muslim) member of Congress for imaginary crimes as a child. Also: racist rallies, fake rumors, defying of court orders, calamitous fails on all sides. Their witless leader: "If Republicans get in power, you're going to (have) a depression. These people are incompetent."

In 2022, Cory Doctorow helpfully wrote Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. At the time, it was an analysis of how the Internet went wrong, a sort of "Big Tech disassembly manual" aimed at curbing powerful people from making transactional, short-term, self-serving policy choices ultimately bad for everyone but themselves. Alas, since the return of Trump 2, many argue the same dismal process of enshittification has oozed and expanded outwards to become "the organizing principle of US statecraft" itself, rendering pretty much everything in the public sphere....shitty.

Trump and his cabal of low-lifes daily ensure we get ample evidence of that dark reality. Their latest target: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), the first Somali-American lawmaker, one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, the most visible refugee in American politics and Trump's worst nightmare who has long endured the most venomous of his abuses, which is going some. After four childhood years spent in a Kenya refugee camp, she came to the U.S. at 12, was reportedly 17 when her late father filed their immigration paperwork, was sworn into Congress at 36, and will now likely see easy re-election in the mid-terms.

For those crimes, she's been relentlessly bullied, threatened and assailed by a racist buffoon who has sneered she's "garbage," "totally crooked" and a "terrible person" who married her brother, came from "a non-country - all they have is crime and squalor," and should be sent back there, a notion his audience of bigots and cretins embraced this weekend at another Nazi rally where they mindlessly screamed, "Deport!" This, after Trump intoned "they are looking at her very carefully" after a judge signed a piece of paper allowing DHS goons to raid her home in the dubious name of unclear charges of vague unproven offenses.

The raid, which defies longtime DOJ policy banning major actions just before an election - "Another hard norm out the window" - was foreshadowed by racist story creator J.D. burbling it "seems like something's fishy there“ as he and Goebbels worked to decide, "How do you go after her (to) get some justice for the American people?” What a crock. A steely Omar responded to their clumsy "fascism in the extreme" by calling it "just the latest escalation" in ten years of Trump's "baseless lies and smear campaigns." “I will not be silenced,” she concluded, which reportedly "translates from Congressional-speak as 'Fuck You.'"

Trump, meanwhile, lumbers on, learning nothing. At a rally in Ohio that drew a paltry few thousand - with empty seats hidden by tarps and flags - he fittingly marked Columbus Day with more racist crap. He celebrated Haitians losing their legal status, insisted "I was right" about Springfield residents eating pets, called Somalis in Minnesota "low-IQ people," attacked Omar, from "the worst country," for claiming constitutional rights. (More "Deport!" chants. Jesus.) He also admired Jon Husted's ass - "I don't do this with men very often" - and urged on fans beating up a protester he called "fat," "paid," and "scum." (Pot/kettle.)

And he still keeps losing in court. Hungry to turn a public, affordable D.C. golf course where he dumped East Wing debris into a private fat cat resort, he tried to pull a fast one - filing a Friday 5 p.m. request, then razing 430 trees the next morning - on a judge who furiously blasted the “inexcusable," "preposterous" action, ripped him a new one - "In what universe did anyone in your office think this was acceptable?" - slapped him with a restraining order, and warned if they violated the order "by two seconds" they'd face contempt charges. "We did our best,” whined regime lawyers. "No," she snapped. "You did your absolute worst.”

So it goes. Another judge again blocked - past Election Day - the ludicrous, $20-million, taxpayer-funded, "educational and unapologetically patriotic" propaganda ads she banned once; in another end run, regime weasels moved them to YouTube. One ad portrays the desperate fragile snowflake as a lion who has to "show the jackals who he is." Another declares, "God made Trump...somebody with arms strong enough to wrestle the deep state and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild...who goes into the den of vipers, cares for the flock (and) won't ever forsake them," especially if they accept his $5,000 bribe.

Implausibly, his lackeys are just as lame and awful. Despite facing a scarcity of agents and funds, FBI head (sic) Kash Patel has been boasting of his supposed crackdown on violent crime, claiming the arrest of over 54,000 violent criminals, or 90% more than in the Biden era. Less than shockingly, his numbers turn out to be wildly inflated by including arrests by state and local police and other federal agencies where an FBI agent may have happened to be present. In fact, actual numbers show FBI arrests are down at least 15% from previous years, though at least they're busy harassing Trump's personal enemies.

There's more macho bullshit from aspiring warrior Pete Kegsbreath, fresh from his Arsenal of Freedom Tour (really). Speaking at an annual Army meeting on a panel of warmongers eager to expand the use of unmanned drones to make death-dealing even easier, Pete was repeatedly interrupted by protesters calling him a "coward" and "Nazi.” "The world fucking hates you. You're a fucking war criminal," yelled one. "We’ll see you at the goddamn Hague." Pete grew increasingly irritated; maybe he'd read reports that, despite their brave boat strikes, record supplies of cocaine still arrive here, "cheaper and purer than they've been in decades."

Other MAGA flops abound. When James Talarico took a week off the campaign with the flu, conspiracy crackpots decided it was a cover for a mental health crisis. Spencer Platt's crude take: “This isn’t a case of the ‘flu’, it's 'one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” The "silly season" claim fell apart so fast even right-wingers were embarrassed. "This is such shit work, bro," wrote one, wondering if Talarico would sue. There was also the cringey fall of Kimberley 'The best is yet to come!' Guilfoyle, and Trump's brazen distancing - "She, I guess, dated my son a long time ago” - despite the surfacing of damning partying video on Jan. 6.

And the rise of new Press Barbie Katie Zacharia, former Pizzagate and QAnon fan, whose debut - so bad "a Zacharia may replace a Scaramucci as a time measurement" - was summed up by The Atlantic : "Hi, I'm Your New Press Secretary, and It's My First Time Reading Words Out Loud...I swear I have seen a sentence before, and I know where one stops and. Starts. And whether? To speak. With a rising inflection?" Now there are reports the self-described lawyer isn't one; a complaint has been filed with the California Bar for “the Unauthorized Practice of Law," and one account says she took the bar but failed it.

Fail fail fail: Thy name is MAGA. Perhaps we should be grateful; unimaginably, the current clusterfuck could be worse with competence. Take the Defending Main Street Super PAC, "the most effective independent expenditure organization for the GOP," which just spent tens of thousands of dollars to run a million 30-second ads arguing, “Maine can’t afford Troy Jackson and all his taxes" in the wrong Portland - Oregon, not Maine, over 3,000 miles off-base. One Maine operative: "At least now Portland, Oregon, can enjoy some of the crap we’ve been seeing every day.” MAGA's mantra: Make it shitty. Ours: Make it stop.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

TORONTO — The Pembina Institute is proud to announce that its executive director Chris Severson-Baker has been named to Canada’s Clean50 for his outstanding contributions to advancing clean energy and climate solutions in Canada – notably, the...

• Tesla has stopped referring to its “Full Self-Driving” feature as “self-driving” in response to European regulators who pointed out that a human is still required to be behind the wheel and alert (Bloomberg).
• Back in the States, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is looking into reports of Tesla robotaxis speeding through school zones (The Verge). That’s in addition to the NHTSA’s own investigation into Tesla’s self-driving mode, as well as the Cybercab’s lack of features like pedals, mirrors and a steering wheel, and Waymo traffic infractions.
• A lack of safe infrastructure is the main reason people cite for not biking more. (American Society of Civil Engineers)
• New York City’s congestion pricing policy reduced fine particulate air pollution in Lower Manhattan by 13 percent, according to a Columbia University study.
• A Twin Cities carshare is the latest victim of the Trump administration’s belief that everyone should own and drive their own personal vehicle. (MinnPost)
• The Seattle suburb of Everett is considering folding its bus system into Sound Transit. (KUOW)
• Phoenix is on track with its 2050 transit expansion and transportation safety plan. (KJZZ)
• The Texas DOT is adding lanes to I-10 between Houston and San Antonio. (Express-News; paywall)
• Los Angeles is exploring ways to create more shade to keep people comfortable in extreme heat. (Governing)
• Bay Area Rapid Transit ridership is up by double digits this year with a referendum looming on regional transit funding. (ABC 7)
• The St. Louis MetroLink completed its first rail expansion in 20 years. (Metro)
• Grand Rapids won a $6 million state grant to expand bus service during major downtown events. (MLive)
• Jacksonville is ending an expensive and ultimately unsuccessful autonomous shuttle program, and advocates want them to getback to basics to create a more useful transit system. (Streetsblog USA)
• St. Augustine partnered with a local bike rental company on a new bikeshare program. (Record)
• One of the few bike commuters in Honolulu has a plan to get more people pedaling. (Civil Beat)
• The Washington Post highlights six Amtrak routes where you can watch the leaves change color.

Fueling up America’s most popular car now costs an extra $85 every month compared to last year — and it costs even more in car-dependent states that require more driving, a new analysis finds.

Motorists who choose the ever-popular Ford F-150 in transit-poor states like Alabama, Kansas, and Kentucky can expect to pay $110 more at the pump per month than they did in 2025, according to a new report published by the Urban Institute.

Big pick-up drivers aren’t the only ones who are struggling — because motorists who picked smaller cars are, too.

The average American driver spends $65 more each month fueling up now than she did just one year ago, following the start of the Trump administration’s war with Iran which resulted in a dramatic increase in fuel prices. And because America is so car-dependent, the vast majority of people have no choice but to pony up.

“A bigger car is just going to end up consuming a lot more gas over time, and that means people are going to end up spending more money as a result,” said Yonah Freemark, who conducted the analysis.

Recommended Trump’s ‘Freedom Means Affordable Cars’ Rings Hollow As Gas Prices Surge Kea Wilson March 30, 2026

Of course, some transportation reform advocates might be tempted to shrug off the news that Ford F-150 drivers are struggling to pay their fuel bills — especially considering how few of them use pick-ups to actually haul anything bigger than a bag of groceries, and how deadly their vehicles are to pedestrians.

But advocates point out that “light trucks” — a category which includes pick-ups and SUVS — have surged in popularity on US roads not just because of consumer demand, but because of structural forces like the “SUV arms race” and regulatory loopholes that exaggerated their profit margins compared to smaller vehicles.

Production of light-duty trucks surpassed car production for the first time in 2018, and today, only four US automakers even produce a sedan. And as light truck purchases grow, more Americans are shouldering the financial burden.

Since fuel costs and the availability of mobility alternatives vary by state, that financial burden does, too. Wyoming residents pay $4.51 per gallon, nearly identical to the national average. Yet because they have so little transit, they spend more overall than any other state, averaging $347 per month on gas alone.

Recommended The ‘Affordability Crisis’ Conversation Can’t Leave Out the Cost of Cars Kea Wilson January 7, 2026

In transit-rich states, by contrast, sticker-shock at the pump doesn’t always mean high household transportation budgets. Even California’s $6.37 per gallon only adds up to $266 each month, because more residents can substitute drives with walking, biking, and public transit.

That’s why Freemark argues that expanding alternatives to driving is necessary to lowering costs. And while electric vehicle owners are able to dodge gas prices, the other costs of car ownership still create significant expense for households, like financing, maintenance, and insurance.

“Driving is inevitably going to be super expensive,” Freemark said. “It’s not like there’s a great way out of it.”

Recommended Sustainable Transportation Can Ease the Affordability Crisis — And Help Climate Champions Win Streetsblog May 19, 2026

Making it easier to walk, bike, and take transit, on the other hand, could unlock major cost savings for families. Congress’s recent purge of federal transit funding could jeopardize progress, but Freemark says that all levels of government can step up by shifting transportation funds away from highway expansions and towards transit operations, sidewalks, and bike lanes.

However they do it, providing alternatives to cars — big or small — can provide families with relief from rising fuel costs.

“Transportation is such a high share of many people’s daily expenses,” Freemark said. “People have to have alternatives in order to save money.”

A record amount of large-scale renewable generation has reached financial close, the federal government says, but the pace needs to quicken further if emissions reduction goals are to be reached.

The post Grid-scale renewables hit record levels of investment sign-offs, but the pace still needs to quicken appeared first on Renew Economy.

China's Envision lines up its first wind and battery deal at a new energy park to be hosted in an Australian mineral sands mine, with other projects soon to be announced.

The post China’s Envision Energy lines up major wind and eight-hour battery deal at site of Australian mineral sands mine appeared first on Renew Economy.

Final all-clear for huge wind and battery project comes just in the nick of time, with a change of government threatening to deliver a default 2 km buffer zone between regional renewables projects and homes.

The post Labor waves through Australia’s biggest wind farm – a project “not possible” under state Coalition buffer policy appeared first on Renew Economy.

The Albanese government is making great strides on clean energy, while at the same time supporting the ongoing betrayal of future generations through fossil fuel approvals.

The post High Court coal mine ruling factors in exported emissions. Why isn’t federal Labor doing the same? appeared first on Renew Economy.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s abrupt and erratic trade policies have caused substantial disruptions around the world. But no countries have been more exposed to the twists and turns of his policies than Canada and Mexico: America’s neighbours and largest trading partners.

The three-country trade agreement, the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) that Trump himself negotiated and implemented in 2020 has not held back his unilateral and illegal actions.

For labour and equality advocates, Trump’s actions create a quandary: they oppose his policies (which have hurt workers in the U.S., as well as other countries), but without seeming to endorse the pre-Trump status quo as the ideal model. After all, the CUSMA (and the 1994 NAFTA, before it) imposed a very one-sided, corporate-friendly set of rules on the continental economy. The previous trade deals guaranteed freedom of movement and special protections for investors and multinational corporations, while curtailing the ability of national and sub-national governments to limit the economic, environmental, and social fallout of corporate decisions.

It is possible to both oppose Trump’s tariffs, but also oppose the corporate-oriented trade arrangements which he now ignores. And it is possible to envision a continental economy that supports development, living standards, and sustainability in all parts of North America, rejecting the false worker-versus-worker ideology which Trump has weaponized in his trade war.

To that end, Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford recently participated in a tri-national project to develop a proposal for North American trade and cooperation that prioritizes living standards, labour and human rights, environmental protection, and income equality. The project was hosted by an initiative called Game Changers, based at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst. The Game Changers network assembled progressive proposals in numerous policy areas in advance of the coming U.S. mid-term elections, with the goal of showing Americans (and others) that there are workable, hopeful alternatives to the increasing authoritarianism of Trump and his compliant MAGA base.

Stanford joined Thea Lee, Hector de la Cueva, Luis Ranger, and Jasper Andrée in developing a proposal titled ‘Democratizing North American Trade.’ The proposal is described more fully in:

A two-page policy brief which summarizes its main features.

A full 25-page paper including a critique of both Trump’s tariffs and the previous CUSMA deal, and a summary of six priority features of a more democratic approach to continental trade.

A two-minute shareable video dramatizing the major themes.

A one-hour webinar where the authors describe the paper and discuss how to advance these ideas in the current political and economic crisis.

Readers are invited to share any of these materials throughout your own networks. We are grateful to the Game Changers network for the opportunity to participate in this tri-national project, showing that a better North American economy is indeed possible.

The post A Tri-National Vision for a North American Economy that Works for Workers appeared first on Centre for Future Work.

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It’s early morning outside Perryville, Arkansas. A scissor-tailed flycatcher is perched on the fence, cattle are grazing in the bottoms, and Sam Noble begins her day in the chicken brooder at the Heifer Center for Regenerative Agriculture.

There is nothing unusual about a woman starting her day this way. Women have always farmed. They have raised livestock, managed farms, saved seed, sold food and cared for the land. What has changed is that we are finally getting better at seeing them.

That visibility matters.

Sam is Heifer USA’s Poultry Coordinator, and she is part of a growing number of women farmers and ranchers across the United States. Since 2002, the percentage of women producers has increased steadily. According to the USDA, women represent over 36 percent of all U.S. producers.

Some of that increase is about how we count. In 2012, the USDA changed the way it collected census information, allowing farms to identify more than one primary operator. That simple change made women’s contributions more visible in the official numbers.

But the numbers are catching up to something many of us working in agriculture have known for a long time: women are already doing the work… and have been doing so for a long time.

Being counted is one thing. Being recognized is another. Even today, Sam and the other women livestock managers at Heifer USA encounter the assumptions that come with being women farmers. Sam’s response isn’t to try to prove that she can farm like a man.

“To me, being a woman farmer doesn’t mean proving that I can farm like a man. It means I get to define what a good farmer looks like.”

Agriculture doesn’t need women to change who they are. The world needs to make room for different ways of knowing, different approaches to managing land and livestock, and different concepts of what a successful farm looks like.

The critical role rural women play in agriculture is evident across the Americas, and it is important to hear their voices. We recently spoke with women farmers in parts of Ecuador, Honduras, and Mexico.

Their stories are different because their circumstances are different. But the common threads and challenges are there. Access to land and markets, the effects of a changing climate, the importance of family and community. These women are making their way even if the systems around them don’t make it easy.

In the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, Mexico, land is never just land. Yumara Salas Ramírez is helping raise the visibility of women coffee producers. Chiapas produces 41 percent of Mexico’s coffee, but women hold only about a quarter of the land rights. Women also face challenges that range from sexism and violence to the effects of a changing climate.

At the Sierra Azul Cooperative, Yumara is the first woman to serve as the cooperative’s secretary and handles incoming green coffee. But she also works with women producers to market coffee under their own brand.

Yumara remains connected to the land and to the knowledge passed down through her family: “Every time we work with coffee, we reflect what we were taught and keep a family tradition alive.”

On the Galápagos Islands, part of Ecuador, over half of the food consumed is shipped in from the mainland. For an ecosystem as fragile as the Galápagos, that dependence creates its own problems, including the introduction of invasive plants and pests.

María Espinoza is using agroecological methods to raise livestock and grow crops for local markets on land cleared of invasive blackberry bushes. She and other farmers have increased the percentage of locally sourced food available at their market from 10 percent to 40 percent since 2019. It is an example of how local food production can play multiple roles: providing income and strengthening food sovereignty.

María doesn’t pretend the work is easy: “The most difficult part? There isn’t one. With dedication, you just have to overcome the difficult challenges.”

The challenges these women face vary, but one issue affects them all: a changing climate. Women farmers are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts. They often have fewer resources available during droughts, extreme weather or other disruptions.

Milexy Rodriguez, a farmer in El Nance, Honduras, lost 15 of her cattle during a drought in 2024. It was a call to action to build a more resilient livelihood. With support from a community savings group, she drilled a well and diversified her production, growing chili peppers and keeping bees.

Milexy’s experience is a reminder that resilience isn’t some abstract concept. It may be a well, or another crop, but sometimes resilience is challenging assumptions about who belongs in agriculture.

“Many people thought that a woman couldn’t manage a cattle farm. However, with consistent work, I’ve proven that it is possible.”

Working at the Heifer Center for Regenerative Agriculture, I get to see women like Sam doing this work every day. I see it in the way our entire livestock team cares for the animals, makes land-use decisions, and tries new things.

And I see something else, too.

The women I know in agriculture aren’t waiting for someone to tell them they belong. They are already doing the work. That is what struck me as I learned more about these women across the Americas. All of our farms and lives vary, but the underlying questions are familiar.

How do we care for the land and still make a living?

How do we pass knowledge on to the next generation?

How do we build communities and food systems that can withstand difficult times?

For too long, women have had to answer these questions while also proving that they belong at the table. The most important change is that we are noticing what has been happening all along. Women have been farming, ranching, building markets, raising families and caring for the land for generations.

The numbers are finally catching up with that reality. And that is a good thing. If we are serious about building resilient farms and food systems, we need the knowledge, experience and leadership of everyone.

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

Photo courtesy of Lys Arango / Heifer International

The post Op-Ed | Women Farmers Are Shaping the Future of Food and Agriculture Systems appeared first on Food Tank.

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