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David Camfield: If you’re serious about socialist politics, you recognize that socialists need to work together. For a socialist not to be a member, or at least a supporter, of any socialist political organization is a sign that either they’re living somewhere where there’s no group that’s worth joining—which is sadly true in too many places today—or that they’re not serious about being politically active.

But does the need for socialists to be organized to be as effective as possible mean that socialist groups today should consider themselves to be parties or the beginnings of parties? How can we best work towards socialist political organizations that genuinely deserve to be called parties? These are the questions that this episode’s guest Charlie Post and I are going to discuss.

So Charlie, would you introduce yourself and tell listeners about your political background, particularly with respect to these issues?

Charlie Post: Okay. I’ve been living in New York for about 40 years now. I’m originally from New York, and being that I’m a bit older than you, I’m actually part of the tail end of what was sometimes called the “Generation of 1968.”

I radicalized as a young teenager around Vietnam and the Black struggle in the U.S. and became a Marxist in the wake of the postal wildcat strike of 1970, where, for the first time, I saw the capacity of industrial workers to exercise much more social power than students and others. And I saw the effects of collective struggle on working-class consciousness.

That was around the time I was 16, and I started looking for a Marxist group to join. Shortly after I turned 17, I ended up in the youth group of what was then the largest Trotskyist organization in the United States, the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, which had very different politics than the British Socialist Workers Party, which most people are familiar with.

I was involved in a series of debates and was expelled in 1974. Afterwards, I was involved in various attempts to create groups and ended up coming around, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of comrades who were both coming out of my political tradition—which was the European-based Fourth International and the U.S. International Socialists—called Workers’ Power.

Then from there, Workers’ Power became involved in a regroupment of three small socialist groups in 1986 that formed Solidarity, of which I was a member until 2015. There was a period of time when I didn’t feel I could actually join a group and be a committed member, but I became one of the founding members of the Tempest Collective, of which we’re both members.

The attempts by various Trotskyist groups that were committed in one way or another to the politics of revolutionary socialism from below to transform small groups of former students into either the core of a revolutionary party or a revolutionary party with real influence among working people were failures.

But every other current on the Left was also unable to make that transition, including the much larger and more influential currents influenced by Maoism and Marxism-Leninism. Part of the foundation of Solidarity was a recognition that this model of building socialist groups was a dead end.

And over time, through discussions within Solidarity and our experimentations and practice, another comrade and I wrote a pamphlet for the organization called “Socialist Organization Today.”. In the pamphlet, we try to explain why the various attempts of small groups to transform themselves into the core of or an actual revolutionary party failed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and why a different model of revolutionary socialist organization was necessary.

While I left Solidarity for very specific political reasons that had more to do with its political perspective than it did with its organizational perspective, I felt comfortable being part of the group of comrades who formed Tempest. Many of them came out of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the United States, and they, too, recognized the limits and failure of what they labeled the microsect model

So, my thinking on this question of socialist parties has been shaped by a little over five decades of political activity and an attempt to understand why—despite the best efforts of very committed, very honest revolutionaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the effort of socialist formations to actually become significant organizations that were able to influence the course of working-class struggles failed so miserably. This is why we must ask what revolutionary socialists need to do today to prepare for that eventuality, without pretending to be it in miniature.

DC: Thanks for that. We’ll pick up on some of these things you’ve talked about as we go. I should mention that, for my part, the first socialist group I was in was the International Socialists, which I joined in 1988 and left early in 1996, along with a minority of other IS members who, with some other socialists, then formed the New Socialist Group, which formally dissolved in 2017.

In the early 1990s, the IS had become more aggressively self-promoting, declaring that it was beginning to build a revolutionary party. And this was a shift that was happening across the international network headed by the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, a network called the IS Tendency. The Canadian IS was its affiliate.

That shift led to changes in the group that a couple of years later led to the split that I was part of. The New Socialist Group, which I was in, rejected the idea that tiny socialist groups should try to organize “as if” they were socialist parties, but only smaller— the micro-party or micro-sect model. Some people also call that vanguardism.

So, to start, there’s some debate among socialists about whether socialist parties are even needed for the transformation of society. There’s more debate, though, about what kind of party would be needed. Then, there’s even more debate about how to work towards the creation of such parties.

Before we talk about those things, though, we need to clarify what exactly we mean by a revolutionary socialist party, since I think there are a lot of misunderstandings about that. What’s your take on that?

CP: A revolutionary socialist party is an organization that actually organizes a substantial portion of the most militant and radical working-class people in a given society and an organization that has the ability to influence the course of social and class struggles. I believe such a party is necessary. I believe organization is necessary because I believe that working-class consciousness always develops episodically and unevenly. And this comes from the basic tenet of socialism from below: It’s through the self activity of working people coming together—striking in a workplace, confronting a landlord, opposing an imperialist war, confronting the state and capital—that these people develop radical consciousness, a notion that their interests are fundamentally different and opposed to those of capital and the state, and that there is a need for a fundamentally different type of society now.

Working people in their vast majority cannot be always engaged in struggle, particularly strike activity, because as Marx tells us, we’re separated from the means of production and we need to sell our labor power and go to work for capitalists and be exploited in order to survive. This means that working people enter struggle episodically and that consciousness develops unevenly.

Without organizing those who’ve come to similar conclusions, these lessons and ideas dissipate. So, I believe that a revolutionary socialist party is necessary, but it has to be a party that actually has real roots in a large layer of the working class that is actually radicalized. And it’s because that layer doesn’t exist, for very specific historical reasons, that I believe that many of the previous attempts to turn small groups into revolutionary parties have failed.

DC: So let’s dig into the history of socialist party-building and go back to its beginning in the late 1800s. Do you want to start taking us through some of that history?

CP: You begin to see the emergence of independent working-class and socialist groupings as early as the 1860s and 1870s. Many of these get grouped together in what was called the International Workingman’s Association, or the Socialist and Labor or First International. Many of these parties and organizations were relatively small, a few thousand members, but they had real roots among the more militant, the more radical layers of workers.

Most of them did not survive the economic downturn of the late 1870s-early 1880s. Now, in the period of the 1880s and 1890s, there was a long period of relative capitalist stagnation—low profits, continuous recessions, etc. In this period there was also wave after wave of working class struggles.

Most of them were defensive in relation to wages, working conditions, and the like. These struggles happened in a number of countries, particularly in capitalist Europe, with Germany being the most important. But we also see them, to some extent, in France, Italy, and the United States, where we see the emergence of small mass parties, with 20,000 to 50,000 members, and some ability to actually contest elections and elect working-class representatives to various legislative or parliamentary bodies.

A revolutionary socialist party is an organization that actually organizes a substantial portion of the most militant and radical working-class people in a given society and an organization that has the ability to influence the course of social and class struggles.

These small mass parties, outside the U.S., were based on relatively small minority or non-majority unions, most of them organized along industrial lines, but generally whose members were radicalized skilled workers, machinists, etc. In other countries—France, Spain, Portugal, and other parts of the world—we also see the emergence of mass trade unions that present themselves as revolutionary. You see the growth of what’s sometimes called revolutionary syndicalism.

Capitalism entered a period of growth and high profitability between the mid 1890s and the First World War. In this period, we see the emergence of truly massive working-class parties and radical political organizations out of a wave of strikes, first in the 1890s, then around 1905-1907, the most visible manifestation being the Russian Revolution of 1905-1906. Then, there’s a wave of strikes between 1911 and 1914, which confronted issues of de-skilling.

Mass parties, the largest being the German Social Democratic Party, emerged from these strike waves. As hard as it will be for those who are familiar with German social democracy today to believe, the Party presented itself to the world as a revolutionary party, as a party intent upon the destruction of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. We see similarly sized parties to some extent in France and Italy, and smaller organizations in the underground in the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Canadian state.

These parties brought together two distinctive groups of workers. On the one hand, the activist core of these parties was a layer of militant workers– a real workers’ vanguard of shop floor and community leaders. These were the women and men who attempted to continue the struggle between mass upsurges and who actually could lead real working-class struggles. On the other hand, these social democratic parties also included a growing layer of full-time officials in the newly legalized trade unions and of elected officials, party functionaries, journalists, etc. whose livelihood depended on the growth and stability of the parties and unions.

Tensions emerged between a revolutionary left wing, based on the militant worker activists, and a more reformist right wing and center, based in the union and party officialdom. The first manifestation of this conflict emerged in German social democracy in the late 1890s, in the debates between the majority of the party and the revisionists around Eduard Bernstein. By 1910, 1911, we see a three-way differentiation between a right wing of trade union and party officials, who openly abandoned revolutionary politics; a center around Kautsky, which claimed to be Marxist and revolutionary; and a left wing that argued for a break with the formists and for preparing the working class today for revolutionary struggle through mass strikes.

On the revolutionary Left, you start to see people like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Poland, Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga in Italy, and what becomes known as the Bolshevik faction of Russian social democracy. We also see in this period the growth in many countries of revolutionary syndicalism, of attempts to build unions that are not only trying to organize workers around their immediate interests— their wages, hours, and most importantly working conditions—but also that are explicitly revolutionary and anti-capitalist. The best known to people in North America is the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies. Later in Canada, there was also the One Big Union.

The First World War creates a schism within the mass political and industrial organization. The question of whether or not to support your capitalist government in imperialist war leads to splits in these mass organizations. This rupture crystallized in the years after the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks were a unique formation in the pre-1914 period. Because Russia was an absolutist autocracy, there was no space to consolidate a layer of officials either in trade unions or parliament. Unions were illegal for the most part, and parliament was an empty shell in Russia. So, the Bolsheviks, I would argue, unintentionally built an organization of the most radical and revolutionary workers independent of the reformist officialdom.. By 1913, they recruited most of the leaders of the big strike waves in the big factories in Moscow, Petrograd, and other Russian industrial centers.

The Russian revolution forced socialists and radicals all over the world to make choices about their organizational affiliation. By 1921, the radical workers’ vanguard had formed independent parties in a number of countries. The largest was the Germany Communist Party, with some  400,000 members. I once did a calculation and found that that would be the equivalent of 1.2 million workers in the United States, and it was mostly made up of industrial workers and their family members, particularly in the metal working industries, longshore and mining. We see smaller mass parties in Italy and  France, and smaller Communist Parties in countries like Britain, the United States, and Canada.

Even these smaller parties gathered together thousands of experienced working-class militants, both from the left wing of the socialist parties that existed in these countries and from the ranks of revolutionary syndicalists. Through the 1920s, these parties struggled with varying degrees of success to displace social democracy, reformism as the main voice of the working class.

They had some degree of success depending on the pace of the class struggle, but they had through the 1920s, organized and consolidated a layer of radicalized, revolutionary minded workers. So, just to give you an example on the smaller end of things. By 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression in the United States, the Communist Party had gone through several very damaging splits, but it still had a membership of 10,000 to 15,000 workers, which today would be a hundred thousand. It was the largest organization of radicalized revolutionary workers in the United States.

Now, the big problem was that these Communist Parties, which had been grouped together in a new International, the Communist International, the Third International, that increasingly dominated by and eventually subservient to the emerging new ruling class in Russia. As the Russian revolution was isolated and council democracy and party democracy were strangled in the Soviet Union, a new ruling class emerged around the officialdom of the Party and the state. This officialdom justified itself as building socialism in one country. This ruling class transformed  the Communist Parties from instruments of world revolution, which needed to be rooted in their national realities to advance the class struggle, into what Trotsky called “border guards for the Soviet Union.” The role of revolutionaries outside the “socialist fatherland” was now preventing the capitalist powers from strangling the Stalinist ruling class’s attempt to build so-called socialism in one country. This led to tremendous distortions and errors in political orientation.

From 1928 to 1933, the Communist Parties proclaimed that capitalism in the West was entering its terminal crisis.And in this terminal crisis, the only thing that kept capitalist capitalism in power was social democracy. Communists around the world labeled the social democratic parties “social fascist” and argued that they were, in fact, the main enemy, not actually growing fascism in countries like Germany.This policy led to sharp divisions in the labor movement and the inability, particularly in Germany, to mount a united front in the streets—not in the ballot box, but in the streets—to stop the fascist gangs.

When Hitler took power,  the German Communist Party firmly believed that he  would last a few weeks and then they would come to power within a year. Hitler was able to demolish the oldest, largest, and best organized working-class movement in the world. The mass parties, both of social democracy and Communism and the largest trade union movement in the world were completely destroyed. By 1934, the Communist International  finally realized that it had a very potent threat practically on its borders in fascist Germany and fascist Italy, and began to search for an alternative strategy to protect itself.

After a couple of years of experimentation, they hit upon what is known as the Popular Front strategy. The Popular Front saw the Communist Parties adapting the Social Democrats’ strategy for fighting fascism and reaction. Rather than organizing working-class unity in the streets and on the picket lines.to confront fascist gangs and capital, they looked to electoral alliances, both with the reformist political parties like social democracy, and  with liberal capitalists.This strategy turned away from building rank and file movements in workplaces and  unions, while Communists aligned with progressive trade union officials. In Spain the Popular Front led to disaster– to  the derailing and defeat of an actual workers’ and peasants’ revolution. In France , there were mass strikes and factory occupations in 1936, which the Communist Party disorganized.

The popular front strategy adopted in 1935-1936, shaped the political and sociological transformation  of the Communist Parties for the next.70 years. Particularly after the Second World War, when they grew to mass scale in countries like Italy and  France because of their role in the Nazi resistance, becoming essentially parties of left-wing reform, not revolution. They recruited and educated workers in the ideas that  “revolution is somewhere off way in the distance.And what we need to do today is build a progressive alliance in one form or another,” which included not only reform socialists, but also trade union officials and certain liberal capitalists—those who are willing to “defend democracy”  and enter diplomatic alliances with the Soviet Union.

This changes both the political coloration of the Communist Parties and also their sociological character. Before the mid thirties, the Communist Party recruited the most militant working-class people who were intent upon finding every possible way to advance the struggle against the boss, the landlord, the state, and who, particularly in the workplaces, saw themselves as independent of the full-time officialdom of the unions, which they saw, correctly in my opinion, as inherently conservative. After 1935, 1936, as the Communist Parties began to become integrated into that trade union officialdom–  in some countries leading the left wing of the officialdom in Britain and the US; and  in other countries becoming the officials of the largest trade union federations in France and Italy.

At that point, people who joined the Communist Parties were no longer the most uncompromising workplace militants who were willing to do anything possible to stop the boss, including confronting their union leaders. Instead, the Communist Party becomes a vehicle to be recruited into the labor officialdom. If you join the party, you can become a shop steward and get time off from work. If you follow the “line” you could  move up and become a full-time official of a local or an international. Thus, the Communist Parties by the late 1950s, early 1960s, were no longer mass organizations of revolutionary-minded workers, but organizations that primarily attracted  workers who were attracted by a left-reformist politics and many became left-leaning trade union officials.

Now this, in my opinion, poses a huge and unacknowledged problem for the layers of young people who radicalized from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s. These are people who radicalized in the wake of the Cuban and Algerian revolutions and the Chinese “cultural revolution,”  and in opposition to the US war in Vietnam, in anti-racist struggles. By the late 1960s, these young radicals were orienting toward the  growing wave of working-class militancy in the wake of the French May-June events and the strike waves that swept the global North.  Even in the U.S. and Canada, which have the more politically conservative labor movements,you see sharp increases in strike activity, much of it opposed by the official leaders of the unions. In this cauldron,thousands of young people, mostly college students and ex-college students but also some young workers who were increasingly alienated by the war, racism ,and by the incredibly alienated, degraded work they had to do in factories, began to move left.

And many of them correctly said, Okay, if we’re serious about revolutionary politics, we’ve got to form organizations, and we eventually have to build a party. Now, most of us at that point, and I will include myself as a somewhat naive late-teen, early-twenties person, believed that we were in a new epoch of world revolution equivalent to what swept across the world from 1917 to 1923. We were convinced that we were going to see, especially as the global economic crisis took hold through the early 1970s, growing class battles. The labor officials would be unable to deal with the capitalist offensive, and that this would create opportunities to build new mass revolutionary parties.

What we didn’t acknowledge was that there had been a break in the history of what we can actually call a workers’ vanguard, the layer of radical and revolutionary minded workers that had been created and recreated the class battles from the late 1870s-1880s through the 1930s. That layer had been disorganized, both politically and ideologically by Popular Front politics and sociologically by its increasing integration into the trade union officialdom.

So what you see again in the late 1960s and early 1970s is dozens of groups throughout the capitalist world, whether they are leaning towards some variant of socialism from below or some version of Marxist-Leninism, usually inspired by Maoism and the Chinese Revolution, throw themselves into working-class struggles and “centralize” themselves. Others were inspired by variants of socialism from below. All of them “Bolshevized” their organizations— become really tough, clamp down on internal discussion, and build  an “authoritative,” actually authoritarian, leadership. They believe that if they just pursue their” line and act as parties in miniature, as micro-sects, they would become mass parties. With very few exceptions, these end in disaster.

The two groups that were able to get through this period and have some cadre and some base among a much thinner layer of workers were the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire in France—which maintained 1000-2000 members, the equivalent of 5,000 to 10,000 in the U.S., before growing to over 3,000 in the wake of the 1995 mass strikes—and what becomes the British Socialist Workers Party, which also had several thousand members and some real influence in British society. Now, for a variety of reasons, these groups shrank radically in the early part of this century.m

For the most part,most of my generation, people who had gone into party building activity, whether of a Trotskyist variant or a Maoist variant, ended up by the 1980s either leaving politics completely or simply becoming reformist socialists. By 1985, almost everyone I knew who had been a Maoist back in the 1960s and 1970s was eagerly supporting Jesse Jackson’s run in the Democratic primaries.People who had believed that every trade union official above a shop steward was automatically a sellout were now pursuing careers in the  trade union officialdom, either as elected officers or as staffers.

The crisis of the revolutionary Left and the reformist Left’s embrace of neo-liberalism opened a period of experimentation from the 1990s onward, during which we see  the emergence of new “broad” parties that reject neo-liberalism and, in a few cases, capitalism.. The most successful of these was the Workers’ Party in Brazil, which emerged out of struggles in the 1970s and 1980s, in the workplaces, in the favelas, etc.. They looked in some ways, like pre-war social democracy. They brought  together radicalized layers of workers and intellectuals and some left-leaning trade union officials, parliamentary politicians, etc. We also saw the emergence of the Party of Communist Refoundation in Italy, and Die Linke in Germany. All of these groups were attempting to respond to both the failure of previous revolutionary party-building movements and the crisis of reformism. In the  early 1990s, both the social democratic parties and what’s left of the Communist Parties after the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” are no longer even capable of successfully fighting for reforms. For periods of time, these “broad Left” parties had some resonance, but all of them went through their own crises as tensions between the two wings—the radicalized, revolutionary minded base, and their officials—lead them into an impasse.

Now, I firmly believe that these sorts of broad parties will continue to emerge because the material conditions for the revolutionary Left to transform itself into a mass independent revolutionary party simply don’t exist; and the official parties of the labor movement and the Left have abandoned the struggle for reform.Today, we see the revival of Die Linke in Germany after they threw out some of their most extreme right-wing elements. In Britain, there’s Your Party, which seems to be intent on aborting itself before it’s ever born.

Just to sum up, and this is a sort of broad sweep: from the 1870s to the 1930s, we see, through continuous waves of working-class struggles, the emergence of a true mass working-class vanguard of radicalized workers who are active in their neighborhoods, their workplaces, etc., who formed the left-wing before the First World War of social democracy, and then became the mass base of Communism in the 1920s and 1930s. As the Communist Parties are bureaucratized, Stalinized, subordinated to the ruling elites—the ruling classes in the Soviet Union and then later China, etc.— they, even while going on zigs and zags through ultra-leftism, fundamentally begin to move in a reformist direction and become themselves very similar to the mass social democratic parties.

This not only politically disorients radical workers, it transforms them sociologically from workplace and community fighters into candidates to become full-time officials. This throws up a tremendous obstacle to the party-building efforts of the 1960s and 1970s. And since then, what’s left of the revolutionary Left has tried to figure out how to proceed in a situation that all of us find, in many ways, unexpected.

DC: That’s a very helpful overview of a lot of history, so thanks for that, Charlie. Let’s go back now and just pick up on the thread about the so-called party-building groups that started to emerge in the late 1960s. As you said, most of those groups had either collapsed or shrunk dramatically by the early 1980s, and these groups attracted lots of very committed young fighters of your generation.

Why do those groups do so poorly? Today many people who went through that experience and lots of people who didn’t but watched them would say it was because any kind of revolutionary politics is wrong. But I think that’s not a very helpful explanation.

CP: It’s not because revolution is impossible, and it’s certainly not because a revolutionary transformation of society is not necessary to the future survival of our species. The “microsect” strategy fails for a variety of reasons. The most fundamental was that the human material, the layer of radicalized workers, working people, that would be the base for a real revolutionary socialist party— rooted in that significant minority of workers who actually can play leading roles in struggles—had ceased to exist. Now, it didn’t help that most of the party-building groups made all sorts of subjective errors. In North America, the majority of these groups openly identified with one strand or another of socialism from above, some variant of Stalinism, mostly pro-Chinese Stalinism, some pro-Cuban, but they were basically Stalinists. They had, as a result, a limited repertoire of how to relate to actual struggles they might be involved in. These groups would swing wildly between ultra-left abstentionism and adaptation to whoever was leading the struggle.

For the Trotskyist groups, who had ostensibly better politics, they shared with the Maoist and Stalinist groups a notion that, in order for us to win leadership in this growing layer of radical workers, we had to be organizationally and politically homogeneous. Internal debate and discussion was not seen as a sign of the health of a group that was rooted in reality and was grappling with new challenges, but instead as deviations.But again, the fundamental problem was that the human material for these projects didn’t exist. And that only actually worsens their commitment to an ideological purity and an organizational despotism in order to make up for that fact.

Rather than acknowledging that what they were trying to do might not be possible in their particular historical moment,they began to beat up themselves and their members by saying, you’re not trying hard enough,you’re not disciplined enough, you’re deviating from the line.  Most of the people who went into these projects had incredibly unrealistic expectations, and I have to include myself here as well. I firmly believed until the  late 1970s that we were on the verge of the most important political recomposition of the working class since the Russian Revolution. I was convinced there would be mass splits in the social democratic and Communist parties in Europe, and that one or another variant of socialism from below would emerge as a mass current. A very small minority of comrades and I were able to adjust our expectations while maintaining a revolutionary politics, a politics that understood that, even in a period of working-class retreat, the difference between reformists and revolutionaries matters in terms of how you conduct even those defensive struggles.The vast majority of the people I radicalized with weren’t able to make that transition, and most of them left politics completely because they thought it was simply pointless. And the majority who remained political adapted to a social democratic or reformist realism.

DC: I think that really highlights the importance of having a historical and materialist understanding of the working class, not treating the working class as an abstraction that jumps from the pages of Marx’s Capital into social reality. There’s a very complex process the working class goes through in terms of how forms of organization develop, how relationships within the class and among different sections of workers are made and then remade, and so on. And so  we have to be much more concrete in how we think about the working class.

We’re trying to contribute to the self-organization and self-emancipation of that class, but again, the working class is not an abstraction and we have to recognize the ground on which we fight— not just in terms of how capital is organized and what’s happening to capitalism, but also where the working class is in relation to all of that.

CP: Right. Despite waving the selected works of Lenin, people in my day ignored his most important contribution, which is that the “living soul” of Marxism is the concrete analysis of the concrete conjuncture–the actual balance of class forces and state of working-class self-organization and self-activity.

DC: Unfortunately, most of what’s there on the far Left today has not learned useful lessons from the experience of the generation that you’ve just talked about. The most visible far-left groups either organize using the kind of micro-party model and proclaim themselves to be parties, like  the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) in the U.S. and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)  in the Canadian state, or they use the micro-party model, what they would call building a Leninist organization, while recognizing in some sense that they’re not yet what they see as a party. For example, Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and Left Voice voice in the U.S. and the International Socialists in Canada, I think would all fall into that category.

This party-building approach generates very strong pressures to act in sectarian ways that don’t actually help advance the struggles of working-class and oppressed people, but which may be good for that group in a narrow sense— boosting the group’s profile, recruiting more members, and so on.

And for those groups on the far left that do have at least some commitment to the idea that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, it leads to making the group the center of politics instead of thinking and acting in terms of what that group can do to contribute to the long, complex, messy, and non-linear process of the working class becoming a force that can change society.

And here I think we should also mention that, in a society that is shaped by sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression, all organizations are going to be  scarred by those forms of oppression. Of course, all those of us who are members of these kinds of groups are products of the same society like everybody else, no matter how much or how sincerely people oppose oppression.

Far-left groups that use the micro party model are, I think, especially prone to dealing badly with oppressive behavior, especially by their leaders. I and three other former members of the New Socialist Group wrote a public letter about this in 2019. We argued then that:

There is often a connection between the micro-party approach and inadequate responses by a socialist group to oppressive actions by members. This approach tends to inflate the importance of the group in the minds of its members. Preserving the group often becomes an end in itself. When people make the stability or preservation of the leadership and its “Leninist” authority their top concern, they may avoid suspending or expelling members, especially “leaders,” for oppressive behavior.

Organizing on micro-party lines with a “fetish of leadership” can fuel an abusive group culture. That kind of culture reproduces rather than challenges our societies’ oppressive forms of behavior. And socialist groups that treat their own expansion as what matters most are usually resistant to opening themselves up to struggles against oppression, learning from them, and changing.

CP: Yes, and you were writing in response to the crises of two of the largest revolutionary organizations in the English-speaking world: the Socialist Workers’ Party of Britain, which had lost a significant layer of its membership because it covered up the fact that a member of its Central Committee was involved in sexual violence and sexual abuse, and the International  Socialist Organization (ISO) in the U.S., which implodes precisely because its leadership had covered up a rape by someone who, at that the time they were involved in the sexual assault, was one of the leadership’s favorites.When this came out, it created a tremendous level of demoralization. While the British Socialist Workers Party survives in a shrunken form today, the International Socialist Organization had no choice but to dissolve itself,

DC: So, these are particular forms of the debacle of the micro-party model.

What’s the alternative to the micro-party model? That’s the key question that comes up in the U.S. today, as you know very well. There are a lot more politically active people who consider themselves socialists who are part of the Democratic Socialists of America than who belong to all the other socialist groups combined.But DSA is politically really pretty broad. Why not, in the U.S.,just join and build DSA and perhaps one of the many political caucuses within DSA that supports a more defined kind of socialist politics?

CP: DSA was a small and moribund social democratic organization prior to 2017. One of its younger members, who joined sometime around 2010, said it was a socialist version of the American Association of Retired People (AARP), which is a nonprofit that collects dues from its members, doesn’t expect them to do anything, and sends them a newsletter.

DSA explodes as a small mass organization reaching 90,000 members—not because of the 2016  Sanders campaign, as most DSA leaders claim, but in response to  Trump’s first election., And at that point, I was one of the people on the far left saying that the revolutionary socialist Left had to relate to this, possibly join it as a grouping with a coherent worldview and with some proposals on how to move DSA forward. The alternative, I believed,  would be DSA’s reversion into a staid, reformist, electorally-oriented grouping. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so there had to be revolutionaries posing the alternative of building DSA into an activist organization that was really committed to workplace, community, anti-war, anti-imperialist organizing.

Now, I believe that, from 2017 to early 2020, there were a lot of opportunities to work in DSA. And, in fact, when Tempest first formed and for a period of time thereafter,  I’d say a majority of our comrades were members of  DSA.We worked in various DSA branches trying to push for the idea that DSA should not be involved in the DemocraticParty and that members should be educating and agitating for an independent workers’ party. We agitated for DSA to  orient itself towards building effective rank and file organizations and unions, rather than looking to left-leaning officials who might be friendly to DSA politics.

Now, there was space for all of that for quite a while, and some currents did grow. The problem was that none of these currents had enough size, political coherence, and weight to really have much of an impact. A turning point came in 2021-2022 In 2018, a number of DSA members and DSA-endorsed candidates won Democratic primaries and actually got elected to the House of Representatives in the U.S.—the so-called Squad, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez being the best known. There was also Rashida Tlaib and an African American congressperson from the Bronx and part of the suburbs outside of New York named Jamal Bowman, who was also elected. Now all of these candidates, in order to get DSA endorsement publicly endorsed Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions  against Israel and pledged to promote those politics.Bowman, almost as soon as he’s elected, ends up voting to fund the Iron Shield missile system that essentially allows the Israeli state to rain terror on Palestinians and on its Arab neighbors without much worry about them sending missiles in and actually hitting Israeli targets.

This sparked a tremendous debate in DSA, and our comrades played a big role in initiating a movement in various branches calling for, at the minimum, Bowman to be censured, if not expelled, from DSA for basically disregarding the politics of the organization. In other words, this was an attempt on the part of the members of DSA to hold their electeds accountable. The DSA leadership, including those who claimed to be on the left of the DSA leadership, responded by saying, “Our main priority is to support Jamal Bowman.” And they ended up basically making a number of organizational moves against centers of opposition on this question. In particular, they shut down the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Working Group, which had been involved in the call to expel Bowman and basically removed its leadership and appointed a leadership that would not openly criticize Bowman.

In the wake of that, thousands, probably up to 20,000 members of DSA, left the organization, stopped paying dues, stopped going to meetings, etc., By 2022,  when several DSA members and Sanders supported Biden’s breaking of the railway strike, there was practically no opposition.

And what you started to see in many of the branches is that they became more and more bureaucratic and authoritarian. So, for example, our comrades were very active in the New York City Labor Branch of DSA, which had been a place where people involved in organizing rank and file caucuses in various public sector unions had been very active in talking about their work and trying to coordinate it. Increasingly, the leadership of that branch was appointed by the citywide leadership, which is very conservative, and branch discussions no longer included discussions of the fight in the teachers union or the fight in the big public employees unions but what candidates DSA was going to support for state assembly and city council. It became more and more narrowly electoralist.

Today in New York Tempest, we’re beginning to reassess this. There seems to be, in the wake of the election of Zoran Mamdani as New York City mayor as an open member of DSA, some ferment within New York City DSA. A few weeks back, the leadership of the branch held a meeting during which they instructed people not to share any information online. And if they did, they’d be expelled from DSA. Despite that, information from the meeting was shared, and DSA’s line was, “Our job, once Mamdani is elected, is not to hold him accountable, but to help him govern,” which means they will help cover for him as he retreats in the face of pressure from the Democratic Party and capital.

Now, there seems to be a considerable minority of members in New York CityDSA who are not going along with this. And that’s something. So, we’re beginning to reassess. For me, it’s a tactical question. DSA is, in its majority, a social democratic organization, which in the United States means that it doesn’t even advocate its own political electoral party.It tries to remake the capitalist Democratic Party. DSA, as an organization, has come to see electing people as taking power. All other forms of political organizing get subordinated to that.

But there have been times, particularly from 2017 to 2021, where it attracted a lot of radicalized people who wanted more than that, and there might be some opportunity today.The problem is  something we saw with many of these caucuses that formed in DSA. As the group shrank in the early 2020s and there was less opportunity to actually influence new people, these groups became sort of power groups concerned solely with winning positions on leadership bodies rather than organizing politically, which is always the problem with revolutionaries working in larger, predominantly reformist organizations. But again, it’s a tactical question. There may be openings in DSA in the coming year or so in New York. We’ll see. I am, in principle, not opposed to it. In fact, I actually thought that it was imperative that revolutionaries join DSA and promote our ideas within DSA when it was a growing radicalizing group.

DC: I should add that in  the Canadian state, we don’t have anything  like DSA, and there’s a certain amount of unfortunate DSA envy among people on the Left here (and in the UK too). What we have is the New Democratic Party, which is a weakened social democratic party that has really adapted to neoliberalism. The European term social liberal fits pretty well for it, although there certainly are people who are NDP members who are more left wing than that. There’s currently an election process for the new leader of the federal NDP where there is one or possibly two Left candidates running.But at the grassroots level, NDP constituency associations are not, with very few exceptions, activist organizations or places that attract people who are looking to do more than be involved in some way around elections. In Quebec,there’s also Québec Solidaire, which is a left-wing party that was originally formed as an alternative to the nationalist Parti Québécois and more right-wing parties. And Québec Solidaire originally talked about being a party of the ballot box and the streets, combining both elections and non-electoral work, although it, I think,fundamentally leaned in an electoral direction. It became more successful in electing more members of the National Assembly in Quebec but has also moved to the right through that process, with more influence of the MNAs and their staff and so on within the party apparatus.And so, although it certainly remains a not insignificant organization, there’s not very much of the “party of the street” – it has a fundamentally  electoral approach.. The Left has had a difficult time organizing itself in relation to Québec solidaire.

If people who’ve been listening to this discussion have been listening carefully, you recognize that Charlie and I understand that it’s a mistake to think that the only options people have when it comes to socialist organization are, on the one hand, broad organizations like the DSA with members that range all the way from moderate reformists to revolutionaries, and on the other hand, micro-parties and other far-left groups organized along those lines.

There have been, and there still are revolutionary socialist groups that reject the micro-party model.  Affirming the commitment to the revolutionary transformation of society, these groups try to organize in ways that make sense where they are. In the spirit of what British socialist Duncan Hallas once wrote, which is that “organizations do not exist in a vacuum, they’re composed of actual people in specific situations attempting to solve real problems with a limited range of options open to them.” And one of those groups that tried to carve out a different path was the one that you were in, Charlie, Solidarity. And Solidarity was certainly an influence on the New Socialist Group in Canada.

Can you share some thoughts about the strengths and weaknesses of Solidarity in the years that you were a member, between 1986 and 2015?

CP: Throughout the history of Solidarity, there was an extremely strong and healthy commitment to training comrades to be activists and militants, particularly at the workplace.

Two of the groups that we had that came together to form Solidarity, Workers’ Power and the International Socialists, had a decade or more of experience doing workplace activism as revolutionary socialists. And there was a layer of comrades who were my age and a bit older who were very excited about training younger people to continue doing that work.

And in the early years, I’d say up until about 1993 there was also a continued strong commitment to training people in the broad politics of revolutionary socialism from below on the need for revolution, the need for class independence, the importance of anti-oppression struggles, etc.

Over time, and this became more and more evident in the later  1990s and then later, particularly in the 2000s, Solidarity was unable to maintain those two strengths, both a commitment to a training people in revolutionary politics combined with grappling with the world as it is today—attempting to understand the nature of the economic crisis, the nature of the restructuring of the working class and the oppressed, etc. We were doing both of these, I’d say,until the mid 1990s. I think we began to abandon the second, and that had an effect on how we trained people as activists. Our commitment to maintaining revolutionary politics and training people in these politics weakened over time, and this affected how we were training people to do day-to-day organizing.

The weakening of our commitment to training people in revolutionary politics had two sources. One source was the demoralization of a layer of older comrades of my age and older about the prospects of revolutionary politics.A number of them, including leading comrades, came to the conclusion that the idea of revolution was simply unrealistic and that the best we could hope for was to build left reformism

At the same time, we had projected ourselves as a regroupment organization—an organization that would bring together people from a variety of political traditions and try to cohere something new. Initially, in the mid 1980s, we thought we could include some of the people coming out of the Maoist milieu, who had drawn conclusions about micro-sects and about Stalinism. Those folks never showed. And by the early 1990s, regroupment came to mean integrating layers of people who had come out of primarily the crisis of the main Trotskyist organizations in the United States who had not drawn lessons about the micro-party.These are people who thought that their previous organization had gone wrong because of some ideological deviation and unclarity about what Trotskyism is, rather than thinking that the project was flawed because the layer of working people that would be the basis of a revolutionary party simply didn’t exist.

So, we had a layer of older comrades who were saying all this stuff about how the restructuring of the working class, the restructuring of the economy, etc. was not that important anymore. They were saying that we just had to do practice. But other folks were going, all we need to do is read Trotsky and memorize the Transitional Program and be able to spit it out and we’ll be fine.

The result was we would periodically recruit layers of young people who would either become good workplace militants but drift to the right, politically adapting to the trade union officialdom, or who would try to transform the group into a more coherent, revolutionary group that did real activism but would leave.

And by 2011, to be quite honest, I had been trying to keep the group on what I saw as a reasonable path. I’d been very active through the 1980s and 1990s in my branch in New York, which at points was fairly successful, had up to 40 or 50 people, which for us was large. And I served in national leadership from 2000 to about 2008.I came to the conclusion by 2011 that the group was going nowhere, and I was pulling back from my activity. For personal reasons. I  dropped to a sympathizer in 2013, but then in 2015, the group, which had shrunk tremendously from 350 to 400 members to at most 100 members on paper and 30 active— voted to  participate in the Sanders challenge in the Democratic primary, at which point I left and decided that this group had reached its limits and wasn’t going anywhere. Now, Solidarity still exists. They still have some very good comrades who I have tremendous personal and political respect for,but they don’t seem to be a vibrant organization that’s recruiting new people, that’s capable of having an impact on the Left, not on the world, but at least on the Left. So, for me, the big failure of Solidarity was its inability to define what broadly it means to be a revolutionary socialist group and also the boundaries of being a revolutionary socialist group, and then the concomitant failure to train new members in the fundamentals of these politics while encouraging them to think about the world and think about their activity as revolutionary socialists.

And what we ended up with was that the group—politically, not organizationally— liquidated itself into a more amorphous left-reformist current.

DC: Thank you for that. It’s a sad story, but an instructive one. And it brings us to the question of the Tempest Collective, of which you’re a member. I’m also a member.

It’s a U.S. organization that also welcomes members in the Canadian state, and Tempest is trying to build a socialist group that rejects the micro-party model and tries to avoid repeating the problems of Solidarity and other really loose groups.

The Tempest website puts it this way:

We need new forms of revolutionary organization that can better meet this moment, that can bring fresh eyes to how we make revolutionary organization relevant to what’s happening and what needs to be done. We do not claim to have the answer to how a new revolutionary organizational form will come about. We want to contribute to the process of figuring out how to strengthen organized socialist forces in this era of worsening crises, a process that is underway in many different publications and organizations.

And, of course, there are groups in other countries with a similar approach to Tempest.

So, just to wrap up, what do you think is the most important thing for people in very small groups like this to bear in mind about how we approach building a socialist organization?

CP: I think the most fundamental thing is to be aware of and have a real grip and analysis of the pitfalls of ideological and political and organizational looseness. This is the notion that all we have to do is be active. We don’t really need to develop our thinking as revolutionary Marxists. We need to reject that, which, I think, was the problem with Solidarity. And at the same time, we need to reject the micro-sect model, which was the problem with the ISO. Tempest was formed  mostly by people who survived the breakup of the ISO and a small number of us who survived as revolutionaries from the disorganization of Solidarity.

We know these are the two directions. We don’t want to go on the broad path in the middle. We have at best a compass but not a roadmap. Tempest comrades joked at our founding conference that we’re building the plane while flying it. This is an experiment, and I have been very pleased by how Tempest has collectively attempted to find our way.

We were willing to be active in DSA as revolutionaries but not as sectarians who were going there to lecture people on the correct program. We are seen as good workplace activists, as good social movement activists, but also as people who have a clear politics. We related to Bernie, AOC, and now Mamdani not by being purist or sectarian. Rather than simply denouncing, we’ve tried to understand the support for these left-wing Democratic Party politicians as a sign of people searching for a left-wing, collectivist, solidaristic alternative to the crisis, to capitalist politics and to rightwing populism, while  the same time arguing honestly that the Democratic Party is a trap for revolutionaries and for radicals.

There is no guarantee that we will be successful. The pressures on small groups to adapt to either sectarianism, a comfortable micros-sect model, or to just adapt to the milieu you’re in are very strong. But I’ve been very happy so far and very pleased with the way in which our collective has responded to political pressures and continued to grow, integrate new people, etc. And to be honest, it is also one of the most internally healthy organizations I’ve been in since Solidarity in its early days. We have really good, honest, healthy debates about real questions facing revolutionaries.

As Solidarity became depoliticized, not only did the discussion level drop to the mundane:,What do we do next? Not in terms of,  What is to be done, but rather, What do we advocate tomorrow? And it became an incredibly personalized and toxic atmosphere, as bad as what comrades described in the micro-sects.

So, Tempest has succeeded so far, but, again, we know what our guardrails are— the micro-sect, on the one hand, and political adaptation, on the other. On that broad path, we at best have a compass. We don’t have a roadmap.

DC: And I think we can say that the fate of Tempest and all other attempts to build non-sectarian, revolutionary socialist organizations of one kind or another is really deeply wrapped up and shaped by the fate of the working-class and social struggles that are happening and will happen in the future. Those are the powerful forces that will ultimately blow an organization one way or another.

The best you can do is try to understand where those forces are blowing and where they’re moving, and how you can most effectively try to navigate through that. Our fate is not going to be something that we make in a vacuum but in the circumstances we find ourselves thrust into.

CP: You actually do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”

The post Party time?  appeared first on Tempest.

 As President proposes slashing 100% of NOAA’s research budget, speakers highlighted NOAA’s vital role protecting communities from extreme weather disasters

WASHINGTON, D.C.  – Amid proposed draconian budget cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and as Americans face escalating extreme weather risks, U.S. Representative Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) joined former NOAA assistant administrators and dozens of advocates to rally in defense of the agency on Monday, June 8, on the National Mall. The rally, hosted at Constitution Gardens’ East End Plaza, was held outside a pop-up Museum of Unnatural Disasters. 

Watch the live stream recording on Instagram HERE.

“NOAA saves lives and powers the economy, and we can’t let the Trump administration gut it,” said Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR). “What if the next storm hits while the National Weather Service is understaffed? What if farmers and fishermen can’t get the accurate data they need to make good decisions? I choose NOAA, science, and the American people because they deserve a government that cares about them, their livelihood, and their safety. And I’m not stopping this fight until we win.” 

President Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 would eliminate 100% of the funds for NOAA’s research department and cut the agency’s overall funding by 28%. Although the House of Representatives has proposed smaller reductions, any cuts risk undermining NOAA’s critical work at a time when NOAA’s life-saving services and critical research are needed more than ever.

“Cutting NOAA and our government weather forecasting budgets is both expensive and dangerous,” said Monica Medina, former Deputy Undersecretary of Commerce. “Accurate government forecasts are free and help farmers protect crops, utilities prepare for storms, airlines avoid disruptions, emergency managers evacuate communities, and businesses plan operations. With extreme weather events increasing, every dollar cut from forecasting translates into higher costs and real safety risks for every American.”  

“NOAA’s research department has brought innovation, advancement, and connection across the agency for over fifty years,” said Craig McLean, former NOAA Assistant Administrator for Research. “Breaking up and fractionating NOAA research destroys synergies that bring you enhanced fishery forecasts, coastal community resilience and prosperity, weather forecasts you can trust, and climate realities without politics.” 

Meteorologists are forecasting one of the largest El Niño warm water systems in human history to begin this summer. With it will come more deadly heat waves in the Midwest and West and more extreme storms in the South. At a moment of growing climate volatility, advocates emphasized the need to strengthen weather research agencies, especially those at NOAA, rather than weaken them.

“As communities across the country face more frequent and severe weather disasters, cutting NOAA’s research and resources would put lives at risk,” said Gabrielle Walton, Chesapeake Climate Action Network Coordinator. “NOAA’s science and forecasting capabilities are essential to protecting public safety, strengthening resilience, and preparing for the growing impacts of climate change. We should be investing in this critical agency, instead of dismantling it when Americans need it most.” 

Watch the live stream recording on Instagram HERE.

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Chesapeake Climate Action Network is the first grassroots organization dedicated exclusively to raising awareness about the impacts and solutions associated with global warming in the Chesapeake Bay region. Founded in 2002, CCAN has been at the center of the fight for clean energy and wise climate policy in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, DC and beyond.

The post U.S. Representative Bonamici Joins Rally to Tell Trump Administration to Protect NOAA appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

A new report from the Center for Western Priorities found that less than one percent of 35,700 comments submitted to the National Park Service in response to signage asking the public to report negative depictions of American history in parks actually used the comment form as intended. The comments were received via a QR code sign that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered to be posted at national park sites. The sign asked park visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”

The Center for Western Priorities analyzed 35,700 comments submitted across 475 national park units between June 2025 and January 2026, organizing the comments into categories based on content and sentiment. The vast majority of comments expressed opposition to the order, support for national parks, the importance of telling a complete history, criticism of the Trump administration generally, as well as a number of jokes and off-topic responses. However, a negligible number of comments actually flagged signage or supported removal, with only 47 comments, or 0.1 percent of the total comments submitted.

“These comments pass the vibe check with flying colors. Americans support our parks and the stories they tell, and they aren’t happy about the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite history,” said Lilly Bock-Brownstein, Center for Western Priorities Creative Content and Policy Manager. “Instead of helping Trump censor our national parks, visitors used the comment form to tell the Trump administration to respect our parks or get lost.”

A former Interior department official explains what’s wrong with mining on public land

On a new episode of The Landscape, Kate and Aaron are joined by Dr. Steve Feldgus, an independent consultant who served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the Interior department under President Biden. Dr. Feldgus talks about how to improve mine permitting in the U.S., a topic he worked on while at Interior.

Quick hits Effort to get national park visitors to snitch on signs backfires

Center for Western Priorities [report] | KOAA | Source NM | West Central Tribune | Salt Lake Tribune

New BLM grazing rules eliminate Tribal bison from public lands

Inside Climate News | Public Domain | Idaho Statesman [opinion]

BLM and Utah Lt. Governor sign co-management agreement for San Rafael Swell

ABC4 | Salt Lake Tribune | Deseret News

Elk herd habitat near Dinosaur National Monument to open for drilling

High Country News | International Business Times

Forest Service admits cabin project in Alaska was cancelled due to mining interests, after previously denying it

KTOO

Trump administration waives environmental laws to allow border wall in Big Bend National Park

National Parks Traveler | Common Dreams

Opinion: Federal policies put public lands elk habitat on the chopping block

Colorado Newsline

Once underwater, Colorado River canyon country reemerges as drought-stricken Lake Powell’s levels drop

Denver Post

Quote of the day

Folks need to understand the long-term impacts of a rush to lease so much public land. Once those leases are issued they are very hard to get rid of — they stay on the land for a long time, even if they aren’t developed.”

—Peter Hart, legal director of the Wilderness Workshop, High Country News

Picture This @u.s.forestservice

The rings on the shells of wood turtles reveal their age — giving them something in common with the trees in the forests they live in.

Forest Service scientists’ partner with land managers across the Midwest, finding ways to care for wood turtles threatened by habitat loss, stream pollution, disease, and poaching.

Data from long-term monitoring shows that protecting nests and constructing roadside barriers help turtles survive to adulthood and ensure the next generation of hatchlings.

(Forest Service photo by Donald Brown)

 

 

Featured photo: Lower Delicate Arch viewpoint, Arches National Park. NPS/Chris Wonderly

The post Trump effort to solicit negative feedback on national park signage backfires appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

The two countries set to lead this year’s COP31 have unveiled three headline goals for November’s UN climate summit – on electrification, waste and buildings – following six months of consultations with governments.

At mid-year climate talks in Bonn, Turkish COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum and the talks’ chief negotiator, Australia’s Chris Bowen, billed the targets as a blueprint for climate action, with electrification emerging as the top priority.

Bowen said he wanted this year’s COP negotiations in the Turkish city of Antalya to “take inspiration” from the targets, adding that he would push in particular for a “strong outcome” on switching from fossil fuels to electricity to run vehicles, industry and buildings.

“35 by 35” goal

The electrification target – dubbed the “35 by 35” goal and based on analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) – would strive to ramp up the share of final energy consumption provided by electricity to 35% by 2035 from about 20% today. 

That would be achieved by accelerating the switch to technologies such as heat pumps, electric vehicles (EVs) and electric cookers.

Murat Kurum (centre-right) and Chris Bowen (far-right) speak at a press conference in Bonn on June 9, 2026 (Photo: UN Climate Change/Lucia Vasquez)

Bowen said he wants to lead a push focused on “electrifying everything that can be electrified and making sure as much of that electricity as possible is renewable”. 

He said electrification is “the key to transitioning away from fossil fuels”, urging negotiators to keep in mind that 2035 is just nine years away.

Bonn Bulletin: Tackling climate crisis is “hardest” challenge ever, Stiell says

Kurum said the COP presidency would work to forge “a strong global coalition that is ready and determined to act”, promising to facilitate access to technical assistance, particularly to developing countries.

Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which will produce a special report to map out pathways to achieving the target, said the world was already electrifying because of the current global oil shock and the growth of electricity-using sectors such as air conditioning, EVs and AI data centres.

Previous COPs have seen similar goals on boosting renewables, energy efficiency, nuclear, biofuels, grids and other technologies. Some of these have been agreed by all governments as part of a negotiated COP decision, while others have remained as goals that only some countries have put their names to.

Bowen told reporters in Bonn there was strong interest around the world in electrification as he continues his talks with governments, saying the COP presidency wanted “to seize that for the negotiations”.

Climate campaigners generally welcomed the announcement. Duygu Kutluay, a campaigner at Beyond Fossil Fuels, said elevating electrification to a flagship priority was a “positive step”.

But she cautioned that “electrification can only deliver meaningful climate benefits if the power comes from renewables, not fossil fuels”.

Berkan Ozyer, director of Greenpeace Türkiye, said the electrification goal was “vital”, noting however that Türkiye has 37 active coal power plants and was “leaving the door open” for more.

Smoke rises from Yatagan thermal power plant near southwestern town of Yatagan in Mugla province, Turkey, February 24, 2021. REUTERS/Umit Bektas Last-minute change on buildings

At the same time, the COP presidency quietly overhauled its goal for reducing energy use in buildings.

An initial press statement on Monday set out a target “to achieve at least a 25% increase in energy efficiency in buildings by 2035”. But in “a small update” issued on Tuesday, that was replaced with a different goal to “reduce energy consumption intensity in the building sector by at least 25% by 2035”. 

No reason was given for the change and Kurum did not directly address a question from Climate Home News about the decision to remove the energy efficiency target, a step that experts said raised potential questions about ambition and implementation.

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“Energy efficiency improvement and energy intensity reduction are complementary metrics: efficiency targets drive the deep physical upgrades that lock in long-term performance and, crucially, higher resilience, while intensity targets keep operators accountable for real-world outcomes. What matters is that both remain in the frame,” Roxana Dela Fiamor, global policy lead at the U.S. Green Building Council, told Climate Home News.

“Only looking at energy intensity is really delaying the crucial role that buildings can play in the energy transition,” she added.

Focusing only on energy intensity risks delaying deeper structural changes, she warned, as it can be achieved through short-term measures like switching off lights or optimising usage, rather than investing in retrofits.

“Energy efficiency requires a lot of investments and structural measures, energy intensity is easier to achieve. But energy intensity is not sufficient,” she said. “It doesn’t tackle the systemic changes needed, it doesn’t look at all the different components that drive energy consumption in buildings.”

Missing details on waste target

The COP31 presidency has set a goal to halve the growth in global waste by 2035, but key details about the goal are still missing.

Announcing the target, Kurum said waste was “one of the areas where the fastest results can be achieved” in climate action, but he did not specify the baseline for the target, or what types of waste it covered. A COP31 spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for clarification.

Türkiye prioritises cleaning up garbage emissions in COP31 ‘action agenda’

Mariel Vilella, climate director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, said it was “encouraging” to see waste getting more attention, but warned that the target “remains difficult to assess without clarity on the baseline, scope and implementation pathway”.

She said success should be judged not by a headline figure alone, but by whether it drives real change – including waste prevention, methane cuts, lower plastic production and protections for waste workers.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that municipal waste could rise from 2.1 billion tonnes today to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050 without significant action.

Cutting waste generation would curb planet-heating emissions, protect ecosystems and improve human health, the UN says.

An Ideal Heating heat pump is seen in front of a cottage in Newbiggin-on-Lune, Britain, February 18, 2024. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett An Ideal Heating heat pump is seen in front of a cottage in Newbiggin-on-Lune, Britain, February 18, 2024. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett New initiative on climate finance?

The COP31 joint presidency has also floated a new climate finance initiative – the so-called Climate Implementation Bridge (CIB) – to help countries make progress on the three proposed targets.

Kurum said the initiative would not involve creating a new fund or financial mechanism, describing it as “a complementary initiative that supports climate finance and strengthens partnerships among countries”.

While few further details were immediately available on how it would work or fit into the existing climate finance landscape, Rebecca Thissen of CAN International said adding new processes without simplifying existing systems risked causing confusion and proving counterproductive.

The post COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification appeared first on Climate Home News.

Millions of acres of forest across the country are on the chopping block. Congress can save them.

The following is a statement from Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works, on the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report:

“This is the first Social Security trustees report that begins to take Donald Trump’s second term policies into account: A tax bill that largely benefited the wealthy, economy-wrecking tariffs, a needless war with Iran, and hostility to immigrants. All of these have reduced the amount of money going into Social Security, weakening the system’s finances.

Despite Trump’s damaging policies, Social Security remains fully affordable if the wealthy are required to contribute their fair share. Congress has only two options to address the projected shortfall: Bring more money into Social Security, or cut benefits. Any politician who refuses to raise revenue, including by making the wealthy pay their fair share into Social Security, is telling us that they support benefit cuts.

The American people, including Republicans, are overwhelming in their opposition to even a penny of benefit cuts. Support for means-testing and other benefit cuts (even if paired with revenue increases) is a betrayal of the American people.

Social Security’s future is on the ballot. Any of the U.S. Senators elected this November could become the deciding vote. Accordingly, all of them should tell the public how they would vote.

This is particularly important for Republican candidates, given that Speaker Mike Johnson just announced plans to ‘adjust and fix’ Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid next year. That’s DC-insider speak for ‘cut benefits.’ Outrageously, Johnson claims this is necessary to reduce the federal deficit — even though Social Security is an earned benefit that doesn’t add a single penny to the deficit!

As the Trustees Report plainly states, if there is insufficient revenue, Social Security benefits will be automatically cut. Johnson’s ‘solution’ is to cut them sooner (and likely by a larger amount) instead of making his billionaire donors pay their fair share. Sen. Ted Cruz and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are more specific than Johnson, saying that the Republican plan for Social Security is privatization, handing Social Security over to Wall Street. Do Republican House and Senate candidates agree with Johnson, Cruz, and Bessent?

Ultimately, the Social Security shortfall is cause for action but not for undue alarm. Congress has acted to avert such shortfalls before and will again. When members of Congress act, they should listen to their voters who overwhelmingly value Social Security, not their ultra-wealthy donors who want to steal their voters’ hard-earned benefits out from under them.”

The following statement was issued by Richard Fiesta, Executive Director of the Alliance, regarding the Trustees’ reports on the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds released today.

The report states that the Social Security Trust Fund is able to pay full benefits and expenses until 2032, while the Medicare Trust Fund is projected to remain solvent until 2033. If Congress does not make any changes, the Social Security Trust Fund will only be able to pay 78% of scheduled benefits to all current and future beneficiaries.

“The new Social Security Trustees Report serves as a warning. Congress must act to increase revenue into the Social Security system. This will prevent current and future beneficiaries from losing roughly $500 a month in Social Security benefits they have earned over a lifetime of work in just six years.

“The wrong response is to continue down President Trump and congressional Republicans’ path: passing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that undermine Social Security's finances, and implementing tariffs and policies that harm our economy and put Americans out of work, while laying the groundwork to gut the program through benefit cuts, a higher retirement age, and privatization.

“The right solution is simple, has broad support from the majority of Americans, and would fix Social Security's finances for the next 75 years. Today the wealthiest Americans benefit from a loophole that lets them stop paying Social Security tax after the first $184,500 they earn while the rest of us pay on every dollar we make.

“This loophole is indefensible. Millionaires and billionaires should pay into Social Security at the same rate as everyone else. Closing this loophole would mean a strong, solvent Social Security for the next 75 years.”

“A bankrupt Social Security system is not inevitable, and Americans should reject these scare tactics. However, any politician who refuses to make the wealthy pay their fair share is actively supporting cuts to earned benefits.”

“We also urge Congress and the Administration to strengthen Medicare’s finances by allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices for more prescription drugs, holding Medicare Advantage insurance corporations accountable, and cracking down on practices that increase corporate profits without improving patient care.”

A fundraising campaign launched by the Bellona Foundation has succeeded in securing the organization’s future and averting bankruptcy.

“I would like to express my deepest gratitude for the support we have received, on behalf of everyone at Bellona,” said Bellona founder Frederic Hauge.

On June 1, Bellona announced that it faced the prospect of bankruptcy unless it could raise at least NOK 8 million within one week. The crisis was triggered by the loss and postponement of key sources of funding, leaving the organization in an acute liquidity crunch. After a week-long fundraising effort, the final total reached an impressive NOK 13 million.

“We received NOK 3 million from 4,370 individual donors. That provided a crucial foundation for businesses, entrepreneurs, and major supporters to contribute an additional NOK 10 million,” said Bellona CEO Sveinung Rotevatn. “Together, these contributions ensure that we can continue our operations.”

Bellona’s board met on Monday evening and concluded that the funds raised were sufficient to meet the foundation’s immediate obligations and allow it to continue operating. Nevertheless, Rotevatn emphasized that significant challenges remain.

“This was an emergency effort to ensure Bellona’s survival. We are enormously grateful for the response. At the same time, Bellona still faces a difficult second half of the year, during which we will substantially reduce costs and work to secure a more sustainable financial footing. We take that responsibility seriously. Bellona must never find itself in this situation again.”

On June 16, Bellona will celebrate its 40th anniversary. Until recently, it seemed uncertain whether the milestone would be marked at all. Now, Frederic Hauge is looking forward to celebrating four decades of the organization he founded in 1986.

“Bellona is my life’s work, and I am deeply relieved that this 40th-anniversary crisis has ended well. The fight for the environment continues, and Bellona will remain at the forefront of developing new solutions and advancing the green transition—as we always have.”

The post Bellona Raises NOK 13 Million, Avoids Bankruptcy appeared first on Bellona.org.

American Battery Technology Co. won its appeal after the agency canceled the grant last year. It will continue plans to build a $115 million commercial-scale lithium refinery alongside its lithium-ion battery recycling efforts.

The top court agreed with the Trump administration that Biden-era rules effectively eliminating non-condensing gas furnaces and water heaters from the market are based on an incomplete legal review.

One nurse’s experience attending ANHE’s Hill Day and witnessing nurse constituents voice their concerns about environmental issues affecting their local communities.

By Amanda Dowe, RN, BSN| Chamberlain College of Nursing

Preparation for the Hill

A few weeks ago, I was blessed with an opportunity to participate in the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environment’s Legislative Hill Day. The day before meetings began ANHE held an intensive Hill Day preparation call and walked us through the importance of nursing advocacy, the impact of climate change on public health, and effective means of influencing legislators through storytelling. We not only reviewed the key legislative asks involving rollbacks of the Endangerment Finding, Toxic Substance Control Act, Clean Car Standards, Per-and Poly-Fluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), and cuts to agencies like Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Weather Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), but we made connections to what we as nurses have seen in our practice or personal lives and how it impacts the health of our communities.

On the Hill

During the virtual Hill Day Meetings, nurse constituents from several states met with their elected representatives staffer and engaged in very focused conversations about how the repeals and rollbacks of the laws above would impact the public’s health. There were fifty three meetings scheduled and although I didn’t attend all, I still gained valuable insight. In the first meeting, a nurse from Connecticut explained how in the industrial town of Waterbury, children are experiencing asthma at alarming rates due to poor air quality. Another nurse asked for tax incentives for solar energy. A home infusion nurse discussed the implications of data centers and how decreased water pressure could present a risk for infection to patients if the nurse is unable to wash their hands. A Texan nurse constituent shared a personal experience of her son and husband using inhalers and how she couldn’t imagine the economic burden of emergency room bills for patients with exacerbation of respiratory conditions caused by poor air quality. On day 2, a New Mexico home health nurse expressed concerns of drought conditions and data centers posing a threat to their already low water supply.

After the Hill

ANHE’s Hill Day was a powerful experience! It was a breath of fresh air to witness nurses from all over the United States, unified with ANHE zoom backgrounds, taking time out of their day to advocate and voice their concerns about repeals and rollbacks of laws that members of their communities aren’t even aware of. The majority of the staffers were very appreciative and had “aha” moments when nurses were able to make relatable connections between climate change and health. But of course, there were some who weren’t impressed by the scientific findings. The one thing we all can agree on is, ANHE’s Legislative Hill Day 2026 proved that nurses have the power to influence policy decisions by reaching out to elected officials, and asking for support of protective policies that impact our environment and our health.

Author’s Reflection

To make changes and improve outcomes, nursing advocacy at the systems level is essential. Many times as nurses we don’t feel autonomous and we always feel as though decisions are being made for us without our inputs. ANHE’s Hill Day helped me realize that ADVOCACY is AUTONOMY! Think about it, at the bedside you can only impact one patient at a time but at the systems level you can help change laws that impact public health! Nurses are trusted messengers who close the gap between patients and legislators. Climate change is a threat to humanity and as nurses we have a moral obligation to raise climate awareness in elected officials as they have no idea of how their laws affect healthcare.  

Bio

Amanda Dowe is a Registered Nurse, and a Chamberlain College of Nursing student pursuing a MSN with a concentration in Healthcare Policy. Her nursing expertise is in Oncology, Home Infusion, and Utilization Management. She knows the disproportionate effects of climate change on vulnerable populations first hand when Hurricane Melissa destroyed Jamaica and she advocated for her family via email to government officials to ensure they received basic human necessities like food, water, and sanitation. Currently, she is working with ANHE to complete a practicum project on data centers. 

 

The post ANHE Hill Days: The Power of Nurse Advocacy appeared first on ANHE.

There’s a particular weight to memory when you’ve lived through a time that others now only reference in shorthand. I don’t mean nostalgia. I mean the physical act of remembering who is missing.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, as AIDS moved through my community with a speed and indifference that still feels impossible to explain, I had address books that became, over time, records of absence. Names crossed out. Numbers that no longer rang. Whole clusters of friends and colleagues gone. Not abstractly, not statistically — specifically. People with voices, habits, jokes, plans. People who should have had the chance to grow older.

They didn’t.

At the same time, I was an undergraduate in marine biology, expected to keep pace — labs, exams, problem sets — as if the world were intact. Animal physiology, genetics, statistics, organic chemistry. Show up. Perform. Pass. All while a plague burned through my community with terrifying precision.

There was no accommodation for grief. No pause. No recognition that anything unusual was happening. The expectation was continuity — business as usual — no matter what was being lost.

And while that was happening, the federal government — under Ronald Reagan — withheld urgency in a way that still feels difficult to describe without anger. Years passed before the crisis was even named at the highest level. The silence was ambient, structural. It told us exactly how much our lives were worth in the hierarchy of concern.

So we filled the silence ourselves.

We marched. We organized. We protested in the streets and in front of federal buildings and in hospital wards. I remember the lines of police in riot gear, the pressure of bodies pushing forward, the stinging waft of tear gas, the sound of voices refusing to be contained. I remember the fear and the adrenaline and the clarity that comes when you understand that no one is coming to save you.

You either act or you disappear.

My generation built something out of that refusal. Not just activism but systems — care networks, research pipelines, legal strategies, cultural shifts. It was blood and sweat and grief. It was also ingenuity and persistence. It forced recognition where there had been none. It changed policy, medicine, and public understanding.

We didn’t win everything. But we won enough to believe that progress, once secured, might hold.

Now I’m in my 60s. There are more years behind me than ahead. This is supposed to be the part where you take a breath. Where you look around and see what endured. Where you enjoy, at least in part, the world you helped fight into being.

Instead I’m watching something else.

A kind of thinning. A quiet unraveling. A great forgetting. I’m watching it in civil rights language. I’m watching it in public institutions. And I’m watching it just as clearly in the environmental work I’ve spent my life in — where the stories we tell about land, water, and who belongs in them are being quietly rewritten.

The language shifts first. What was once widely understood becomes contested again. Terms that carried hard-won meaning — equity, inclusion, justice — are recast as excess, as ideology, as something to be rolled back in the name of neutrality. The current administration under Donald Trump has leaned into that reframing, encouraging a broader cultural move to strip away the very frameworks that made broader participation possible.

It’s familiar, in the way bad patterns often are.

You don’t erase history outright. You erode it. You question its premises. You remove it from curricula. You flatten it into something unthreatening or dismiss it as irrelevant. Over time the edges blur, the urgency fades, and the lessons become optional.

What makes this process so effective is its efficiency. Recast hard-fought struggles under a single dismissive label — “DEI” — and you don’t have to argue against their substance. You simply make them suspect. From there the cascade is predictable. Funding becomes conditional. Curricula are scrutinized. Research agendas narrow. Writing, teaching, and public engagement that reflect lived realities begin to carry professional or financial risk. Not always through explicit bans, but through signals — what is rewarded, what is questioned, what quietly disappears.

Fear does the rest. Institutions grow cautious. Individuals self-edit. The story contracts. And over time a generation comes of age not just without the full history, but with a lingering sense that perhaps those earlier gains were excessive, that something went too far. That equality and justice themselves were the overreach.

And alongside that, something even more unsettling: the return of silence from people who know better.

Allies who once spoke up now hesitate. Institutions hedge. The language becomes cautious, then vague, then absent. Even much of the media — consolidated, risk-averse, and increasingly billionaire-owned — pulls its punches, shaping silence as much as it breaks it. The same dynamic that defined the early years of the AIDS crisis, the gap between what was happening and what was publicly acknowledged, begins to widen anew.

There is, however, a distinction worth naming. The silence of the Reagan years was neglect — devastating in its indifference but defined by what was not done. What we’re seeing now is more deliberate. Federal agencies are being directed to reshape the narrative itself — to remove language, narrow scope, and determine whose experiences are permitted to remain visible. The effect may echo the past, but the mechanism has changed. This is not just silence. It is its construction.

That silence carries a memory for those of us who have seen it before.

As Pride Month arrives, we’re asked — publicly, collectively — to celebrate how far things have come. And there’s been real progress worth marking. But memory doesn’t move on a calendar. For some of us, it remains immediate, shaped by what it took to get here — the years when a “normal” life was never really on offer, when the choice was to fight or risk erasure. Sacrifice isn’t always something you commemorate cleanly. It lingers. It returns. In certain moments, it opens wounds again, often accompanied by a quieter, more persistent weight: the survivor’s question of why I am still here when so many are not.

We learned, very early on, what it meant. “Silence = Death” wasn’t rhetorical flourish. It was observation.

The throughline doesn’t belong only to the LGBTQ+ community. It runs through the broader arc of civil rights in this country.

Black communities fought to be seen in a nation structured to abuse and ignore them. Asian American communities refused to disappear into exclusion and incarceration. Indigenous nations resisted erasure from land and history. Women refused the legal and cultural frameworks that reduced them to property.

None of these struggles were granted recognition voluntarily. Each required pressure against systems that preferred quiet. These histories are not separate from environmental protection. They shaped it. And now, as those same voices are pushed to the margins again, the consequences are showing up in the places we claim to protect.

And here’s where the environmental story enters more fully — because public lands and waters have never just been about scenery. They’re where this country tells itself who it is.

Walk through a national park, a monument, a protected shoreline, and you’re walking through a narrative. These places carry the imprint of who was displaced, who resisted, who built, who endured. They are supposed to hold the full story — messy, uncomfortable, unfinished.

That’s precisely why they are now being rewritten.

What’s less clear to me is what is ultimately gained by narrowing that story. I understand the intent — the impulse to recast this country as the product of a singular lineage, to smooth complexity into something more orderly, more reassuring. There is a kind of counterfeit comfort in that version of history: simpler, less contested, easier to claim. But it comes at a cost. Because the fuller story of American lands and waters — of Indigenous stewardship, of displacement and resistance, of communities shaping and being shaped by these places — is not a burden. It is the substance of what “out of many, one” has always meant. To strip that away is not to clarify who we are. It is to trade a living, contested inheritance for something thinner, quieter, and far less true.

Recent directives have pushed federal agencies to scrub or soften references to slavery, Indigenous dispossession, civil rights struggles, LGBTQ+ history, and even climate science from the very places meant to preserve them. Exhibits have been altered, language removed, context narrowed. In some cases the stories of entire communities are being reduced or erased in the name of removing “divisive” narratives.

This isn’t just cultural housekeeping. It’s structural.

Because those same communities — the ones whose stories are now being minimized — were often central to the modern conservation movement itself. Indigenous stewardship shaped landscapes long before they were designated as parks. Black, Latino, and Asian communities have borne disproportionate environmental burdens while also driving environmental justice movements that expanded what conservation even means. LGBTQ+ advocates helped build coalitions, institutions, and public will at moments when environmental protection needed it most.

To erase those voices from the story of public lands is to do more than distort history. It is to narrow the present.

If conservation is recast as something neutral, apolitical, and disconnected from lived experience, then it becomes easier to exclude. Easier to decide who belongs in decision-making spaces and who does not. Easier to ignore whose communities are most affected by pollution, climate change, and ecological decline.

The land doesn’t just lose its history. It loses its witnesses. And once that happens, the decisions that follow begin to reflect that absence.

We see it in policy rollbacks framed as efficiency. In weakened protections justified as balance. In the sidelining of environmental justice as unnecessary complication. The same logic that dismisses DEI as “woke” is being applied to conservation — stripping away the very perspectives that made the field more honest, more effective, and more accountable.

Remove those perspectives and the system doesn’t become clearer: It becomes more brittle. Because ecosystems don’t exist in isolation from people. And conservation that refuses to see people clearly will fail to protect either.

This is the same pattern I watched unfold decades ago. Information existed. Communities spoke. The impacts were visible to those closest to them. But the systems in power chose not to see, not to listen, not to act.

That gap — between reality and recognition — is where harm multiplies.

There came a point when I threw my old address books away. The accumulation of loss had become unbearable — page after page of names, each one a life interrupted, a story cut short.

I think about it now as a warning. What we’re seeing this time around is a different kind of erasure. It starts quietly: histories softened, contexts removed, voices pushed to the margins. By the time the loss is visible, the record has already been rewritten.

What I carry from that time isn’t just grief. It’s a kind of pattern recognition — the moment systems begin to look away, the subtle softening of language to avoid discomfort, the speed with which urgency dissolves into ambiguity and then into silence.

And I know what it takes to interrupt that erasure. It takes people willing to challenge the rewriting of the story, to hold onto memory even as it’s being erased, and allies who understand that silence is not neutrality — it is participation in the outcome.

Because silence is still available as an option. It always is.

You can choose to look away. You can tell yourself that things aren’t that bad, or that they’ll correct themselves, or that it’s someone else’s fight. You can let the language erode, let the policies shift, let the history blur.

Or you can recognize the pattern and decide, again, not to accept it.

For those of us who have lived through earlier versions of this, that decision feels less like a choice and more like a reflex. We’ve seen where silence leads. We know what it costs.

And we know, just as clearly, what it takes to break it.

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

Environmental Groups: Earn Your Place at Pride

The post The Great Forgetting appeared first on The Revelator.

Reliability, power price hedging and avoided infrastructure investment are among the top reasons for the battery push.

Welcome to Cited, your essential guide to new climate research.

In the news

SPRING HEATWAVE: Temperature records for May fell across western Europe as the region baked in an “exceptionally early” heatwave, reported the Associated Press. The outlet noted that temperatures reached 35.1C in the UK and 36C in France at the end of last month, with the latter’s national weather service stating that a “heat dome” had produced temperatures more than 10C higher than “usual”. BBC News said temperatures reached 40.3C in Portugal. Carbon Brief explored how the media covered the extreme weather and the role of climate change.

CLIMATE RESEARCH ‘STYMIED’: The White House released draft regulations that would “give political appointees the final word” on federal research grants and other funding across government agencies, reported Scientific American. According to Bloomberg, climate experts said the “sweeping” changes would “stymie research in the field”. At the same time, the Guardian reported the National Science Federation – a US government agency – announced it would be dismantling a $368m deep-sea observation system that provides “crucial” data on ocean systems and climate change. [For more, see ‘Spotlight’ below].

WMO WARNING: A report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and UK Met Office, covered by Reuters, found that average global temperatures are forecast to reach “near-record levels” in the next five years. The newswire said the report projected that average temperatures each year over 2026-30 will range between 1.3-1.9C above pre-industrial levels, with one year where temperatures will top the warmest year on record, set in 2024.

Research picks Impacts

• Climate change and population growth have led to a 51% increase in global exposure to extreme daytime heat in cities over the past two decades | Communications Earth & Environment
• Global warming interacts with poverty to “magnify educational disruption” and “deepen existing inequities” among children and young people | The Lancet
• Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions has increased the likelihood of “landfalling” oceanic heatwaves by a factor of nine | One Earth

Nature

• Wildfire “disturbances” have been shifting Canada’s forests from a carbon sink to a carbon source since the 2000s | Global Change Biology 
• Following decades of rapid decline, mangrove forests around the world have been recovering since 2010, with both forest loss and degradation rates slowing | Science 
• Large-scale cultivation of macroalgae has “low potential” for carbon dioxide removal and unintended consequences that “can be substantial” | Biogeosciences 

Projections

• Global hailstorm-induced damage potential could increase by 37-42% by the late 21st century, depending on the emission scenario | Nature 
• Even under a low-emissions scenario, 45% and 35% of mountain bird and mammal species, respectively, are at risk of seeing losses in habitat range by 2050 that outweigh any gains by at least 20% | Conservation Biology
• Future warming will likely boost natural methane emissions from freshwater, as methane-oxidising bacteria fail to keep pace | Nature Climate Change

Captured

China accounts for more “conventional” carbon dioxide removal (CDR), such as afforestation and reforestation, than any other country in the world. That is according to the third edition of the annual state of carbon dioxide removal report, published last week and covered in detail by Carbon Brief. China’s average conventional CDR of 539m tonnes of CO2 over 2014-23 is more than double that of the US, the next-highest country.   

625

How many times greater cities in the global south experienced “compound” exposure to extreme heat and air pollution than global-north cities over 2003-20, according to an npj urban sustainability study.

Spotlight AMOC observations at risk Ocean Station Papa instrumentation buoy, among those slated for removal. Credit: PMEL

The Irminger Sea, a patch of frigid ocean east of Greenland, plays an outsized role in the Earth’s climate. 

Here, surface water that has travelled thousands of kilometres from the tropics grows cold and dense enough to sink to the ocean’s depths – a transformation that must occur for the water to begin a long journey back to the southern hemisphere.

This makes the Irminger Sea an “action centre” for the mighty Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the vast system of ocean currents that keeps temperatures in Europe mild.

Last week, the US government announced plans to dismantle ocean moorings installed in the Irminger Sea which, among other things, collect data on the health of the AMOC.

This came as part of a programme to “descope” the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368m network of ocean sensors installed in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Two of the moorings earmarked for removal in the Irminger Sea form part of an internationally funded, trans-Atlantic AMOC monitoring array, known as OSNAP, that stretches from Canada to Scotland.

Experts told Carbon Brief the move by the Trump administration highlights the vulnerability of AMOC observation systems around the world. These deep-sea moorings – scattered across the Atlantic – collect real-time data on, among other things, ocean current, temperature, pressure and biochemistry.

Prof Penny Holliday, chief scientific officer of the UK National Oceanography Centre, told Carbon Brief that the OSNAP array, as well as the RAPID array at 26N, are “entirely dependent” on research grants that have to be “continually reapplied for”. 

“Funding is perilous all the time,” she said.

A report prepared last month by scientists for Nordic ministers exploring the security of funding for AMOC observing systems warned that RAPID and OSNAP were in “critical condition” and faced “material exposure over an 18-month horizon”. Meanwhile, other key basin-wide and global components of the global AMOC observing system were rated as “at risk”.

It is not just US funding that is uncertain. The report notes, for example, that the five-yearly funding the UK provides to RAPID and OSNAP is “at risk from 2027 due to year-on-year budget reductions” at the Natural Environmental Research Council. 

(RAPID is funded by the US and UK, whereas OSNAP is backed by five different countries, with the US contributing half of the total financial support.)

Report co-author Dr Femke de Jong from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research told Carbon Brief that “continued AMOC observations” are under pressure in “multiple countries”. She said:

“While the risk of a declining AMOC to society is starting to be recognised, there is not yet a system or institution in place to guarantee a way to monitor it.”

AMOC monitoring arrays are still in their infancy – RAPID, the oldest, was launched in 2004. Two decades of data captured so far shows that the AMOC is slowing down. However, scientists will need many more years of data to be able to confidently link the decline to climate change, rather than natural variability in the ocean. 

NOC’s Holliday points to the disconnect between scientific and funder timelines:

“The timescale of observations needed in order to be able to detect a climate change signal from the very naturally variable ocean is around 40-60 years…. [And yet], in the Netherlands, they have to apply for a new grant for their ocean moorings every two years. They are going to have to do that for 40 years. 

“This is a very inefficient way of getting funding for what should be critical infrastructure.”

Preprints to watch

Carbon Brief’s pick of new papers still going through peer review

• Urban areas were responsible for two-thirds of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels in 2022 | Nature portfolio
• Climate adaptation measures are responsible for one-quarter of greenhouse gas emissions and three-quarters of human freshwater withdrawals | Earth System Dynamics
• Global food miles – the emissions generated from transporting food – could be “lower than previously estimated”, at around 0.82bn tonnes per year | Nature portfolio

Noticeboard

• 10 June: AMS Washington Forum early registration deadline 
• 10-12 June: Fourth international conference on carbon dioxide removal, Milan
• 11 June: Application deadline for postdoctoral research position in the political economy of net-zero at the University of Oxford; Salary: £39,424-47,779
• Mid-June: AGU annual meeting abstract submissions open
• 17 June: World Weaving climate research programme funding application deadline
• 17 June: CCMC lecture (online): “Temperature, health and adaptation: What actually protects people?”
• 21 June: Application deadline for postdoctoral research position in extreme event health impacts at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Salary: £42,552-66,456

Cited is researched and written by Cecilia Keating, Robert McSweeney, Ayesha Tandon, Daisy Dunne and Dr Giuliana Viglione.

Please send tips, feedback and upcoming climate research to cited@carbonbrief.org

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cited email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The post Cited 9 June 2026: Europe’s ‘exceptional’ heatwave | Warming forecast | AMOC observations ‘at risk’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.

What’s the difference between processed and ultra-processed foods? Ketura Persellin June 9, 2026

Ultra-processed foods. Highly processed foods. Processed foods. All terms we’re hearing more often as research continues to link ultra-processed food, or UPF, to diseases like cancer, depression and even dementia. 

Sometimes, it even seems like the terms are used interchangeably – but they’re not the same.

When it comes to our health, processed food isn’t the problem. For many of us, food processing is what makes healthy eating possible. 

UPF are different. They’re often designed to make people eat more than they need, and they’re associated with less healthy diets and worse health outcomes. 

Here’s how to tell them apart.

Most foods are processed – and that’s fine

Almost all of the food we eat is processed in some way – whether it’s cut, canned, heated, frozen, or a combination of these technologies. Processing makes food safer to eat and easier to transport, store and cook. It’s often essential to getting the nutrition we need.

These are just a few examples of processed food:

• Bananas that are washed, sorted and shipped in temperature-controlled containers before they’re ripened and sold in stores.
• Milk that gets tested for pathogens, separated by fat content, heated or pasteurized, and homogenized before being packaged into cartons or bottles. Yogurt can also be made from milk and active bacteria cultures.
• Nuts like almonds, cashews and walnuts whose shells are removed before they are dried and sorted. Some varieties are also roasted before being packaged and can be ground into peanut butter containing just peanuts and salt.

You might also hear these foods described as “minimally processed.”

The problem is UPF

Food and beverages that are ultra-processed are typically made in industrial settings with ingredients you wouldn’t find in a home kitchen. UPF also often contain high amounts of sugar, salt or fat. These food items are designed to make people want to eat more of them – an effect so powerful it resembles addiction. 

Experts now point to UPF as one of the leading drivers of chronic disease.

Many UPF fit the definition of what people typically think of as junk food:

• Baked goods like packaged cookies, cakes and doughnuts
• Drinks like soda, energy drinks and heavily sweetened ice teas
• Salty snacks like potato chips, cheese puffs and flavored crackers
• Sweets like candy bars, sour candies and ice cream

This category of food also includes many foods and drinks that use artificial sweeteners to advertise themselves as “low calorie” or “zero sugar” alternatives.

But sometimes UPF don’t look like junk food at all. Household staples like bread, breakfast cereal, yogurt and frozen meals can be ultra-processed, too.

When you’re not sure, it can help to take a closer look at the ingredient list for UPF flags.

• Bread. A basic minimally processed bread contains flour, water, yeast and salt. Many store-bought breads are UPF, because they use additives like dough conditioners, emulsifiers and sweeteners, which aid in large-scale industrial processing. They’re also often made with enriched or refined flour that is stripped of key nutrients like fiber. 
• Breakfast cereal. Many types of breakfast cereal – particularly those marketed to kids – contain artificial colors and flavors and are high in added sugar. Cereal can also contain preservatives like BHA and BHT and texturizers or emulsifiers to make it crispy or crunchy. Like bread, breakfast cereal is often made with highly processed grain.
• Yogurt. Plain, minimally processed yogurt typically contains cultured milk or milk and active bacteria cultures. Many flavored yogurts, including those marketed as “zero sugar,” contain additives used to add color, taste and texture, as well as added sugar or artificial sweeteners.
• Frozen meals and snacks. Frozen and prepared meals often contain multiple additives that help them keep their color, smell, texture and taste when they’re reheated. These products can also contain high amounts of sodium and saturated fat.
• Processed meat. Hot dogs, sausages and deli meats are almost always UPF, but they remain a staple ingredient of many sandwiches, pastas, pizzas and other main dishes – despite evidence they are linked to higher cancer risk. They’re also typically high in salt and may contain additives like sodium nitrite or sodium nitrate.
• Spreads, sauces and condiments. Ketchup and barbecue sauce, creamy store-bought dressings, and cheese sauces and dips are often ultra-processed. Ingredient lists can include artificial colors and flavors, natural flavors, emulsifiers and thickeners, as well as added sugar or artificial sweeteners.

For most people, it isn’t realistic to completely cut out ultra-processed foods. You can see some health benefits by starting with small shifts in your diet.

Choosing less processed food

In the absence of federal action, some non-UPF certifications are emerging to help consumers identify less processed alternatives to UPF. 

States are also weighing options for tackling UPF. Last year, California enacted a law to remove the most harmful UPF from school meals.

In the meantime, there are some practical steps consumers can take to shop more confidently.

One approach is to check ingredient lists and nutrition facts, typically located on the back of food packaging. Here are three things you can usually see at a glance:

• Ingredients. Shorter lists of ingredients you might find in your kitchen
• Nutrition. Preferably less than 5% to 10% of your daily value, also called DV on food packaging nutrition labels, for saturated fat, added sugar and sodium
• Serving size. An amount you’ll realistically eat in one sitting.

For more guidance, EWG’s Food Scores is a useful resource, rating more than 150,000 foods and beverages based on nutrition, ingredients and level of processing. Food Scores also flags UPF and can point shoppers toward healthier alternatives.

Those shopping on the go can turn to EWG's Healthy Living app.

Areas of Focus Ultra-Processed Foods Authors Sarah Reinhardt, MPH, RDN June 10, 2026

This article 10 reasons to resist AI was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article is drawn from the author’s forthcoming weekly series “Ten Reasons to Resist AI: A series of AI explainers for the left.” You can read the series introduction here and follow along as each article is released.

With artificial intelligence so thoroughly embedded within our lives, and the constant surround sound of AI marketing, acquiescence can feel inevitable. This is the precise effect tech companies are banking on when they sign billion dollar checks for Super Bowl commercials. For people engaged in movements, it is our job to be defiant, to insist that our present circumstances are mutable, to imagine a way out, and to get there. Many in the anti-capitalist left have an intuitive understanding of why AI is bad, even a visceral revulsion, but becoming fluent in the details is paramount to mounting an effective resistance. 

The most powerful corporations and their government co-conspirators wield AI as a weapon to wage class war. They are making trillion-dollar gambles on data center development that, if successful, will reap enormous profits at the expense of the rest of us. 

However, these companies have shown their cards. They are placing massive bets on AI years before their business models are profitable. To rig the game, corporations are making two bluffs: 1) that a frictionless AI-powered future will benefit humanity (techno-optimism), and 2) that we are powerless to stop the march of technology (inevitability). The ubiquity of these narratives, which are often parroted by the well-intentioned, is an industry strategy to flood the zone and coax people into complacency.

But if the slog toward an AI dystopia is halted or even slowed, Big Tech’s investments could spectacularly backfire, forcing companies to fold. It’s time to go all-in on AI resistance. Here are 10 applications and impacts of AI that are fueling resistance.

1. Environment 

Data centers are the source of AI’s most catastrophic environmental consequences, both atmospheric and local. A single AI data center uses the same amount of energy as 100,000 homes, and the largest ones under construction today will each consume 20 times more, equivalent to more than half of all homes in New York City. This translates to a substantial bump in carbon emissions, particularly as  data centers’ gluttony for electricity drives a natural gas boom.  

Tech companies are not only putting stress on the existing power grid, but also building new fossil fuel plants alongside their data centers. For example, Meta is building three gas-fired power plants to supply its Louisiana data center, and Oracle recently announced that its 1.4 gigawatt data center will be 100 percent fossil-fueled. MIT researchers estimate that in 2026, electricity consumption from data centers will approach 1,050 terawatt-hours, which, if data centers were a nation, would make them fifth largest in global electricity usage, after Japan and before Russia. 

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In addition to exacerbating the climate crisis, data centers also have catastrophic local environmental effects. Many rely on diesel generators that spew nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter and other carcinogens into the air. Data centers are also intensifying an already-dire water crisis. A mid-sized AI data center requires about the same amount of water as a small town, while the larger ones consume roughly 5 million gallons daily, the same amount as a city of 50,000.

In many cases, Black and Indigenous communities historically harmed by environmental racism are being yet again subjected to a toxic industry. xAI (owned by Elon Musk) built a gas-powered data center known as “Colossus” in Boxtown, a Black neighborhood in Memphis, to power the infamously racist chatbot Grok. Less than two years after the plant was built, nitrogen dioxide levels — which trigger and aggravate asthma — spiked by 9 percent in Boxtown.

While the environmental consequences of AI are grim, local communities are rising up against these behemoths in their backyards and forming a pivotal chokepoint in the AI resistance. A recent report found that local organizing victories that stopped or delayed data centers cost tech companies $156 billion in 2025. At least 142 groups in 24 states are actively organizing against data centers — you can read about some of them here.

2. Labor

There is absolutely no doubt that corporations are already leveraging AI to cut costs, replace workers and bolster profits. AI chatbots, agents and data processing systems are already replacing workers in data entry, customer service and administrative roles.  While job displacement is a real impending crisis, it is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI’s labor implications. 

A frequent rebuttal to concerns about AI’s impacts on labor is: “Sure some workers will be replaced, but jobs will also be created.” And while some jobs have indeed been created during the AI boom, what these jobs actually consist of goes unsaid. Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri coined the phrase “ghost work” to describe the tedious and underpaid labor that corporations disperse to networks of contractors in the Global South, obscuring the true human impacts of their products.

One of the more nefarious forms of ghost work in the AI industry is data labeling — a mind-numbingly tedious task necessary to train generative AI models. For example, ChatGPT was trained on trillions of words scraped from the internet. But a significant portion of those words includes vile, racist, misogynistic bile. Before ChatGPT could be trained, workers — largely in Kenya, being paid $2 an hour — first had to sort through repulsive internet content and flag it as such so that the AI could learn to identify and avoid repeating it.

Companies including Amazon use AI-powered cameras and productivity algorithms to surveil workers. (Dio Cramer)

AI is also supercharging the capacity for bosses to surveil and repress workers. Amazon is one of the most notorious adopters. Warehouse workers are tracked via AI-powered cameras and subjected to backbreaking paces based on AI-powered productivity algorithms. A network of nine mandatory surveillance technologies help the company monitor its nearly 400,000 delivery drivers, including by listening to their personal phone calls. The monitoring is used to enforce arbitrary “driver safety” standards tied to compensation, which experts warn can amount to wage theft. Additionally, Amazon made an AI- generated “unionization risk map” to track relationships between union organizers at different facilities.

Unions are perhaps the most important frontline of resistance to AI. As corporations attempt to introduce AI into more and more industries, more and more workers will have the opportunity to organize their workplaces against AI. In addition to unions that are securing contract protections, such as the Amazon Labor Union and UFCW, some leading groups supporting worker-organizers on this front include the Luddite Lab, The Tech Workers Coalition and No Tech for Apartheid.

3. Militarism 

If there’s one thing AI is definitively good at, it’s killing people. 

The U.S. based-company Anduril has received tens of billions of dollars from the Pentagon for its fully autonomous weapons, including a newly minted $20 billion contract to produce drones for the Iran War. The Pentagon also uses a Palantir-developed AI-targeting system called “Maven,” which builds its lists of people and infrastructure to target by harvesting classified data from 179 sources, like satellites and surveillance infrastructure. Like many surveillance and weapons systems, the technology was tested and refined on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel has its own version of Palantir’s Maven, called “Lavender.” Using civilian surveillance infrastructure in Gaza, Lavender generates a profile of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents, assigning each person a score from 0-100 expressing the probability that they are a resistance fighter. In Gaza, Lavender is judge, jury and executioner: The Israeli Defense Forces reference these scores, which have a 10 percent inaccuracy rate, to generate “kill lists” for its genocide. 

The most powerful militaries use AI targeting systems and fully autonomous weaponry to wage wars. (Dio Cramer)

For militaries, AI solves the problem of humanity — because an automated targeting system has the exact morals of whichever tech company programs it, which is to say: no morals at all. 

So who has the ability to stop wars in the AI era? With AI companies proposing a future in which “warfighters” become “technomancers,” tech workers have taken the lead. No Tech for Apartheid, a campaign led by Google and Amazon workers organizing against their employers’ contracts with the Israeli military is one inspiring example. No Azure for Apartheid recently forced Microsoft Azure to void a contract with the IDF. Local campaigns under the banner “Purge Palantir” also emerged this year, pressuring Congress members to return donations from Palantir and businesses to drop Palantir contracts. 

4. Policing and surveillance

From software targeting migrants to license plate readers, facial recognition programs and border panopticons, AI is a force multiplier in policing and surveillance.

ICE uses a new Palantir surveillance system called ELITE to map immigrants’ locations in real time, reportedly equipping the agency with 20 million potential targets. Facial recognition technology is another part of ICE’s AI-powered arsenal. Clearview AI, a private company partly funded by Palantir founder Peter Thiel, compiles a massive biometric database with billions of images scraped from the internet, leveraging AI to analyze these images and generate “faceprints” of civilians for use by local and federal police clients. 

If you’re sensing a common theme — AI technologies deepening repression — Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, will come as no surprise. ALPRs are high-speed, computer-controlled cameras mounted on street poles, streetlights, highway overpasses, mobile trailers or police cars. They automatically capture every license plate number that passes by, along with data on location, date, time, photographs of the vehicle, driver and passengers. Police can instantaneously access a network of over 83,000 cameras nationwide by searching for a specific plate number or even vehicle characteristics such as “green Subaru with a peace sign bumper sticker.” Police forces have free rein over this data, including enabling police in Texas to track down a woman who conducted a self-managed abortion.

Dystopian surveillance tech is animating resistance across the U.S. Organizers developed a digital resource called DeFlock, crowdsourcing information on the locations of ALPRs and helping local communities build public pressure campaigns against municipalities with Flock contracts. Victories against AI-assisted surveillance tech are mounting: 68 cities across the U.S. have rejected proposals to implement Flock or cancelled existing contracts with local law enforcement. 

5. Algorithmic racism 

Yes, sometimes racist tech CEOs and developers deliberately program AI systems to reflect their values. But far more often, algorithmic racism occurs when the machines are trained to reflect the way people communicate on the internet, which — if you hadn’t noticed — is overwhelmingly racist.

To program AI systems, tech companies scrape data from trillions of words on the internet, training the model to recognize and replicate patterns in human language. A study published in Science looked under the hood of generative AI systems and found that the word “pleasant” was associated far more often with the names of white people than Black people. 

The widespread algorithmization of our society, from court sentencing to hiring decisions, means that AI is exacerbating systemic racism. On the grounds of eliminating bias, companies increasingly make hiring decisions with AI tools that scan and analyze data from resumes, online profiles and employment histories. But studies show that AI-based hiring decisions are actually more biased than human ones. 

AI systems trained on large swaths of the internet mirror racist attituds found in abundance online. (Dio Cramer)

Courtrooms in states across the U.S. use AI to generate “risk assessment scores,” which are referenced by judges at every stage of the criminal justice system, from bond-setting to sentencing. When ProPublica investigated risk score algorithms in Broward County, Florida, courtrooms, it found that Black defendants were twice as likely to be falsely labeled as likely future criminals than white defendants. 

Organizations such as the Algorithmic Justice League are tackling algorithmic racism and exposing the ways that AI systems can perpetuate discriminatory practices. And while organizing to eliminate algorithmic racism is an admirable endeavor (AI recidivism predictors should, at the very least, not be racist), it is insufficient in isolation. Because the primary flaws of prison and policing systems are not individual racist attitudes, algorithmic or otherwise (though that is of course an issue), but the broader function that these systems serve.

Addressing individual bias of cops and prosecutors does not alter the essential function of carceral systems — putting humans in cages. The same may be said for algorithms. Without combatting the fundamental issues at the heart of these systems — without abolition — AI simply tosses the hot potato into a robot’s heat-proof hands.

6. Health

While AI is not the root sickness of our terminally ill health care industry (that would be the profit motive), it is a contributing factor. This is also true of mental health, where tech executives offer their chatbots as substitutes for therapists and even friends — exacerbating social isolation. In both industries, corporations are offering AI as a quick fix to the crises they created. 

UnitedHealth Group developed an AI-backed algorithm called nH Predict to determine whether patients’ insurance claims are approved or (more often) denied. The algorithm is wildly inaccurate, consistently determining that physicians’ decisions were not medically necessary, and thus, not covered. Patients can in theory appeal denied health insurance claims, but it’s an arduous, soul-sucking process, and healthcare companies know that a minuscule fraction of policyholders – 0.2 percent, to be exact — will do so, the vast majority instead paying out of pocket or forgoing necessary care. Sure, some patients will die along the way, but it’s more profitable to delay, deny, depose. 

In the realm of mental health, a recent crisis of AI-assisted suicide is inflicting young people across the U.S. Researchers estimate that about 12.5 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 21 solicit mental health advice from generative AI. This same study found that every week 1.2 million users express suicidal ideation to ChatGPT. Rather than encouraging children to seek professional support, in some cases the chatbot dissuaded them from talking to their parents or calling a suicide prevention hotline. On April 11, 2025, ChatGPT helped 16-year-old Adam Raine tie a noose, then said: “I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.” This was the final message Adam received before he took his own life. His parents referred to the ChatGPT as a “suicide coach.” 

After ChatGPT instructed 16-year-old Adam Raine on how to tie a noose, his parents called the chatbot a “suicide coach.” (Dio Cramer)

The American Psychological Association warns that generative AI can contribute to deteriorating social skills, an inability to develop emotional connections and a loss of real-world relationships. 

The same tech industry that disregarded evidence of rampant social isolation now claims that its suicide-coach robots are the solution. There is a growing movement to enact government policy regulating generative AI chatbots. In October, California became the first state to pass legislation to protect children from predatory AI companion behaviors. Now, companies must implement safety features like age verification, publicize self-harm protocols and face liability for illegal deepfakes. New York followed suit with similar protocols in November. 

Pursuing regulation in every state and eventually the federal government is a necessary near-term safeguard, as organizers simultaneously work to convince the public that AI companions simply should not exist.

7. Art and music

Art and music are under attack by tech companies building AI products. AI image generators are trained on datasets containing billions of copyrighted images, often without the artists’ knowledge, consent or compensation. These models analyze images for patterns, stripping art down to raw material inputs fed to sophisticated algorithms that generate “new” images. Art becomes coal. Music becomes oil.

AI companies are flooding streaming services with ersatz music that is in direct competition with human art. Many of the songs recommended by our streaming services — often unbeknownst to us (Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music don’t mandate labeling AI-generated music) — are AI slop. Publishers are also using AI image generators for book covers and editorial illustrations, displacing human artists.

One famous site of AI resistance in 2023 was the Writers Guild of America strike, when AI usage by Hollywood studios was one of the main points of negotiation. After months of picketing, the writers won a contract that implements guardrails to give workers agency over AI implementation, rather than their bosses. While writers, artists and musicians should indeed be primary agents deploying new technologies in their fields, it’s worth going a step further. It’s worth asking whether AI-generated art should exist at all. Is art a pure form of human expression or will we allow it to be captured by synthetic machines?

A broad cultural shift is necessary to beget mass AI rejection. An effective strategy may simply be to make it profoundly uncool to use AI by making fun of cartoonishly anti-human products — as when New Yorkers defaced subway ads for an AI-companion called “Friend,” inspiring a Boycott AI campaign.

There are plenty of signs that “ridicule as praxis” (a phrase minted by Alex Hanna, co-author of “The AI Con”) is working — and costing tech companies billions of dollars. The Metaverse, an oft-mocked $80 billion project by Meta, unceremoniously shut down this year. OpenAI also recently pulled the plug on their video-generation business, Sora, despite a massive investment from Disney. The reason? People weren’t using the products.

8. Education 

There’s a litany of problems besetting the U.S. education system — chronic underfunding of public schools, private capture of what should be a universal human right, one-size-fits-all pedagogies, “teaching to the test,” and a racist school-to-prison pipeline, for starters.

Yet, tech companies are marketing AI as a one-stop-shop solution to “empower” teachers and “streamline” learning. School districts across the U.S. are welcoming AI with open arms, signing contracts with companies such as Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. Eighty percent of K-12 teachers reported their school districts use Google Chromebooks, which now come pre-installed with the generative AI system Gemini. 

According to the College Board, as of May 2025 about 84 percent of high school students in the U.S. use generative AI for schoolwork, inside and outside of school. Higher education is capitulating, too. Academic institutions are enthusiastically adopting untested products. ChatGPT Edu is being embraced at universities such as Columbia. Arizona State also recently rolled out an AI tool called “Atomic” that generates modules scraped from webinars without the professors’ consent. 

As schools and higher education institutions adopt AI products in the classroom, studies show that students experience “cognitive debt.” (Dio Cramer)

A recent study shows that students reliant on AI experience a phenomenon called “cognitive debt,” in which their ability to retain information deteriorates. Education Week found that 20 percent of students’ generative AI use in school “involved cheating, self-harm, bullying and other problematic behaviors.” 

Students are increasingly rejecting AI, even organizing high school Luddite clubs. Harvard recently cancelled its contract with ChatGPT, after its senior advisor on artificial intelligence said “the uptake among undergraduates was far less than we anticipated.”

Teachers trying to curb AI use without resorting to surveillance and punishment are resurrecting low-tech methods like in-class blue-book writing assignments, or instructing students on the flaws of generative AI and the inimitable qualities of human intelligence.

Meanwhile, advocacy groups such as Schools Beyond Screens, based in Los Angeles, are pushing for stricter education policy to limit AI use. In New York, NYers for an AI Moratorium is taking things a step further: calling for a complete halt to AI use in classrooms. 

9. Media and misinformation

AI is fundamentally altering the information ecosystem. Media conglomerates are inviting AI into the newsroom, while social media companies are opening the floodgates for AI deepfakes that erode our ability to discern truth from hogwash. 

During the federal occupation of Minneapolis, organizers relying on Instagram to disseminate information about rapidly shifting conditions were deluged with AI-generated videos depicting fake confrontations between ICE and protesters, muddling the crystal clear evidence of ICE’s abuses. To the untrained eye, these deepfakes can be indistinguishable from reality. 

We are facing compounding crises: a torrent of AI slop on social media, an unregulated digital information ecosystem, a distrustful public and a fascist government casting doubt on basic reality. 

Good journalism has never been more important. But corporate media is capitulating to the tech industry. Dozens of publications, including The New Yorker, Associated Press, Vox Media, and The Wall Street Journal, signed secretive deals to license their stories to ChatGPT, often without the consent of journalists. 

Meanwhile, outlets are also inking deals with tech companies to automate crucial aspects of journalism. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post recently launched “Ember,” an AI-writing coach for op-ed contributors to more efficiently churn out op-eds — now required by Bezos to promote the virtues of capitalism — with fewer pesky humans involved. The Baltimore Sun publishes political analysis using generative AI. An editor at Fortune has “written” over 600 stories with generative AI.

Unionized journalists across the U.S. are campaigning under the banner “News Not Slop” to defend their work from “media companies implementing artificial intelligence in ways that damage the credibility of journalism.” 

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And while pushing back against vampiric tech companies encroaching on the media industry is necessary, resisting AI in the media and tackling rampant misinformation will require transforming the media landscape and taking back ownership from oligarchs. (Yes, that means reading and supporting independent media is a crucial AI resistance strategy.)

10. Human Dignity

If we are to resist AI effectively, this fight must also be waged on the existential territory of what it means to be human. 

Our foes — the misanthropic class of tech billionaires, the Zuckerbergs, Musks, Altmans and Thiels of the world — have their own vision of humanity. And they are not shy about expressing it. “I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.” Sure, the rhetorical decapitation is a figure of speech, but it’s an awfully revealing one for a tech CEO whose profit margins rely on cutting costs by replacing human brains with synthetic ones.

We might also question whether artificial intelligence is intelligent at all. Whereas human thought involves “organic associations, speculative leaps, and surprise inferences, AI can only recognize and repeat embedded word chains, based on elaborately automated statistical guesswork,” write the editors of n+1. 

This distinction between the dynamic chorus of human intelligence and the monotonous drone of AI is backed by science. “The more you delve into the intricacies of the biological brain, the more you realize how rich and dynamic it is, compared to the dead sand of silicon,” writes neuroscientist Anil Seth. Relying on dead sand to think for us has immense effects — the crisis at hand is nothing short of brain-breaking. MIT researchers found a correlation between reliance on generative AI and “cognitive atrophy.” AI is literally shrinking people’s brains. 

Crowning AI systems with parallel, if not superior, intelligence erodes our humanity, chipping away at our strengths until we concede to this enfeebled conception of ourselves. 

Through our resistance, we get to assert an alternative vision of humanity, one rooted in solidarity, collectivism and reciprocity — those wonderful features of humanity anathema to Silicon Valley, which they dismiss as “bugs.” Communing with others, bouncing ideas off of actual human beings, making connections across our beliefs and lived experiences, identifying points of tension and agreement, being wrong, very wrong, feeling upset, then elated, and finding enlightening moments of connection through a ballad of conversation – that is irreplaceable. If we are to succeed, this vision must be so irresistible as to form its own narrative of inevitability. 

Because AI is increasingly ubiquitous, we have boundless opportunities to affirm our humanity and to invite people along with us. You don’t need permission to perform anarchic acts of AI rejection — refusing facial recognition technology at the airport, stickering AI subway ads, reducing your personal reliance on Big Tech, standing in the path of delivery robots, the list goes on. (There is an actual AI Resist List where you might find some inspiration.)

Bravery begets bravery begets movements begets revolution.

This article 10 reasons to resist AI was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

In markets where supply and demand are out of balance, grid connection increasingly comes with a choice: either bring the needed power yourself, or bring flexibility, write experts at ICF.

Australia's biggest transmission project to date - hit by delays and cost overruns - has finally been energised and should be commissioned later this year.

The post “Not easy:” Australia’s biggest transmission project energised after delays and cost overruns appeared first on Renew Economy.

Co-authored by Jenny Silva is the Executive Director at Call Marin Home and Member of the Executive Committee of the Marin Group of the Sierra Club SF Bay Chapter.
Jessie Rountree is the Marin Resilience Manager at Greenbelt Alliance.

The housing and climate crises are often regarded as separate problems, when in fact they are intertwined. In an increasingly urbanized world, there is one powerful solution that addresses both: building more homes where people already live. 

This type of development is called infill. It places new and modified homes within existing neighborhoods and developed areas. The contrast to this is sprawl, a familiar practice in much of California that includes low-density residential housing, often on rural, natural, and agricultural lands. Sprawl fragments habitat, severs wildlife corridors, and disrupts the carbon sequestration and flood-prevention benefits of healthy ecosystems.

Because we share these beliefs, Greenbelt Alliance is proud to join Call Marin Home, a coalition of leading organizations expanding housing through production, preservation, and protection for an inclusive Marin County. We know that increasing housing supply is essential to advancing our mission and sustaining a thriving, equitable community. 

By choosing infill housing instead of sprawl, we can address both our housing shortage and climate challenge to create healthier communities.

Protecting the land we can't afford to lose

Marin’s environmental ethos is evident in our abundant open spaces. Over 85% of Marin County is restricted from development, consisting of federal parks, agricultural land, water district lands, and open space preserves. However, we seem to limit our value of open space to only our County boundaries. 

Because we have simultaneously limited affordable and moderate-density homes in Marin, our community members have been forced to move elsewhere in the region and commute in for work. The direct result is that we are disrupting more lands by creating sprawl further out in Sonoma, the East Bay, and beyond. Since 1950, outer-metro locations like Santa Rosa have increased in physical size by over 300%, mostly through low-density development.

When we build inward instead of outward, we reduce disruption to the soils, trees, and plant communities. These healthier landscapes sequester carbon, improve water quality and quantity, and offer connected habitat to wildlife. The good news is that we have substantial options within already developed footprints to build the housing we need without disrupting our beloved open space.

The more housing density we build now, the more land we can preserve for our future.

Reducing our emissions

Transportation accounts for the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in Marin County. 64% of Marin’s workforce commutes from outside the county due to its high cost of living and age distribution.

When homes are built closer to jobs, transit, and services, people drive less. That means fewer and shorter car trips—one of the most effective strategies California can use to address climate change. In fact, building affordable housing is one of the most effective strategies for reducing carbon emissions, far more effective than transitioning to EVs. 

Less driving also improves our notorious Bay Area traffic and reduces wear on roads and bridges, so that local government budgets can be allocated to needed adaptation investments. Further, density creates the demand that makes buses, trains, and public transit economically viable. Centralized and denser housing is what makes public transit actually work.The emissions benefits are not limited to transportation. Newer units also tend to be more compact than suburban single-family homes, which require less energy and use less water.  

Connecting our community

Building new homes in existing communities puts families closer to jobs, schools, parks, and shopping, giving more Californians access to vibrant, connected communities. When a new building is nestled amongst a storefront or café, it generates foot traffic that supports local businesses, activates streets, and makes walking and biking safer and more enjoyable options.

Walkability also rebuilds the kind of social connections that keep communities healthy and resilient in the face of climate change. Neighbors who walk the same streets, share the same corner store, and know each other by name are more likely to support one another when climate impacts occur.

All Californians should have the opportunity to live in healthy communities and enjoy the natural lands and open spaces that make this area unique.

Creating a greater variety of homes in connected communities can help increase affordability, address climate change, and improve quality of life for Californians. That is the future we want to build in Marin.

Local decisions about housing are being made now, and elected leaders need to hear clearly from residents who support building more homes. Stay connected with Greenbelt Alliance via email and social media and sign up for Call Marin Home’s email updates to stay informed about key upcoming meetings and get the tools you need to make your voice heard.

Header Photo: Scott Hess

The post Housing Builds a Healthier Climate Future for Marin appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

In April 2026, California farmer Terri McCall stood on the steps of the Supreme Court at a rally protesting pesticide use, telling the story of how her husband and dog both died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease she believes was caused by pesticides. Her husband, Jack, had used Roundup for more than three decades on their 20-acre ranch before dying of cancer in 2016.

Over 57,000 pesticide products are currently registered for use in the United States, ranging from powerful chemicals used in conventional agriculture, to common insect repellents approved for use on children. Scientific evidence is accumulating that some of them are linked to illnesses ranging from cancer to Parkinson’s disease. 

But beginning in 2024, a powerful coalition of chemical manufacturers and industry groups launched a coordinated national effort to pass “immunity laws,” bills designed to shield companies from potential legal claims tied to harms from their pesticide products. Over the past three years alone, industry lobbyists attempted to pass pesticide immunity legislation in 15 different states.

The battle over ‘failure to warn’

At the center of the industry’s lobbying effort is a key legal question: What responsibility do pesticide companies have to warn users and consumers about potential health risks from their products? In many states, individuals can currently bring “failure to warn” claims if they believe a company withheld information about harms associated with a pesticide.

The chemical makers advocating for pesticide immunity laws argue that companies should be protected from those lawsuits as long as they use labels approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But opponents say that standard is dangerously inadequate.

There are longstanding concerns about the EPA’s pesticide review process. For example, the official EPA labels for glyphosate still do not carry a cancer warning, despite mounting evidence that it may cause cancer and other groups like the World Health Organization calling it “probably carcinogenic.” 

“The science is pretty clear,” said Daniel Hinkle, the senior counsel for policy and state affairs at the American Association for Justice. “The evidence continues to accumulate, and the pesticide makers continue to lose in the courtroom.”

Meanwhile, a growing body of research links a broad range of health harms to commonly used pesticides, including neurodevelopmental impacts, respiratory problems and reduced IQ in children, health problems like liver and metabolic diseases, and cancer.

The pesticide lobbyist’s playbook

Several landmark court cases have found chemical makers responsible for illnesses like cancers and neurological diseases, resulting in billions of dollars in payments from pesticide makers. Bayer alone has paid over $11 billion in cancer settlements linked to its products. In response, the chemical industry has poured millions of dollars into lobbying for pesticide immunity laws at the state and federal levels, and in the courts. “It’s very clear that this is a coordinated campaign by the industry to absolve themselves of legal liability for health harms from these chemicals,” said Hinkle.

In the last three years, advocates fought against proposed immunity bills in 15 different states. While defeated in a dozen states, the bills passed in Georgia, North Dakota and Kentucky. “The states where these bills are passing have some of the highest cancer rates in the nation,” said Joy Reeves, the director of policy and strategic development at the Rachel Carson Council. “The reality now is, if you’re a farmer and get sick, you have fewer options to hold the pesticide companies accountable.”

Environmental and legal advocates say the campaign behind the pesticide immunity laws is both sophisticated and well-funded. Hinkle says a central driver of the effort is the Modern Ag Alliance (MAA), a lobbying and public relations group founded by Bayer, the maker of Roundup, in 2024. 

While many states do not make lobbying expenditures easy to track, those that do show huge sums are being spent on pesticide immunity legislation. According to public filings, MAA spent roughly $1.6M lobbying in Tennessee in 2025. Reporting by the Idaho Sun found that MAA was the top outside spender in Idaho politics that same year. 

What pesticide immunity could mean for families

As industry groups push for legal protections around pesticide injury, there are growing concerns about what these bills could mean for public health, accountability, and local input.

In 2012, on a warm July afternoon in Iowa, organic farmer Rob Faux was working in his poultry yard. He heard an airplane roar overhead, and then droplets began raining over him and his chickens and turkeys. A crop duster kept the sprayer on as it passed over Faux’s farm twice, covering them with fungicides and insecticides. 

Subsequently, Faux was diagnosed with cancer. Recent data shows that Iowa, which has one of the highest rates of pesticide use in the country — in 2025, 53 million pounds of pesticides were used in the state — also has the second-highest cancer rate in the nation.

Faux is now the communications manager and resident farm expert for the Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network (PAN). He says that many products that people use every day, from ant bait to mosquito repellent, will similarly fall under the scope of the new immunity laws. 

“If these laws pass, and someone sells a mosquito repellent for children that makes them sick, for example, these pesticide immunity bills will eliminate pathways for families to hold the makers accountable,” he said. 

He also points to the loss of local control as a key concern. “If I live in a town where the drinking water comes from a local lake, but pesticide applicators are using chemicals that are getting into the water, the community should be able to protect people,” he said. Many of the proposed immunity bills would prevent that, because local or state governments wouldn’t be allowed to set pesticide rules that are stricter than federal standards.

A pivotal moment in the pesticide immunity fight

These concerns brought together a broad coalition spanning left-leaning environmental advocates and members of the Make America Healthy Again network. Protestors gathered outside the Supreme Court for a rally the last week of April as the justices inside heard opening arguments in Monsanto v. Durnell. The closely-watched case could reshape the future of pesticide litigation nationwide.

The case centers on whether federal pesticide labeling laws and EPA labels override state-level failure-to-warn lawsuits. A ruling in Monsanto’s favor could dramatically weaken legal pathways for people alleging harm from pesticide exposure. “This is a case that is largely about states’ rights,” said Reeves. “It will affect states’ ability to regulate pesticides.”

Just a few days later, federal lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected an effort to insert pesticide immunity language into the Farm Bill. Seventy-three Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the pesticide immunity provision. 

“It was a pretty astounding defeat,” said Max Sano, a senior policy and coalitions associate with Beyond Pesticides who helps organize a national coalition of farmers, farmworkers, scientists, and advocacy groups. “But these bills are still popping up everywhere [on a state level], so we can’t afford to slow down.” His organization is currently monitoring newly proposed pesticide immunity legislation in 10 states.

The rise of a new pesticide reform movement

As momentum grows against pesticide immunity laws, Reeves described the current moment as “today’s Silent Spring movement,” referencing Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book that helped ignite the modern environmental movement. “Today, the pesticide reform movement is diverse,” Reeves said. “It’s cross-partisan. It’s far-reaching.” 

Advocates like Reeves, Sano, and Hinkle are taking a multi-pronged approach to fighting pesticide immunity laws: organizing national coalition calls, educating lawmakers, tracking bills across states, mobilizing grassroots campaigns, and coordinating legal and public awareness efforts.

And individuals can have a deep impact on the fight, too, Hinkle said. “It is incredibly important to be in communication with your lawmaker,” he said. “Every single call or email matters. Concerned constituents and grassroots organizing have really been the decisive forces in holding off this onslaught.”

Reeves echoes him, saying, “If you care about your family and your community, you should engage on this issue. It affects us all.”

The Rachel Carson Council (RCC), founded in 1965, is the national environmental organization envisioned by Rachel Carson to carry on her work after her death. We promote Carson’s ecological ethic that combines scientific concern for the environment and human health with a sense of wonder and reverence for all forms of life in order to build a more sustainable, just, and peaceful future. The Rachel Carson Council is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

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This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The quiet push to shield pesticide makers from lawsuits on Jun 9, 2026.