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CALGARY — Janetta McKenzie, director of the oil and gas program at the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to the announcement of the Pacific Link pipeline as a project of national interest under the Building Canada Act:“The...

In a world of rising temperatures and growing energy needs, a new material made by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign could be just the answer. The printable textile cools while also generating electricity by harvesting energy from human motion.

The advance paves the way toward smart fabrics that can keep people cool while also reducing the need for external power sources.

Others have previously created materials that provide cooling and energy-harvesting capabilities. Those attempts rely on assembling multiple layers with different functions. What’s novel about the new work is that the researchers combined cooling and power-generating into a single printable material.

The demand for cooling is expected to grow tenfold by 2050 as heatwaves due to climate change get more intense, and more people can afford air-conditioning and refrigeration. But conventional air-conditioning is stationary, energy-intensive, and uses gases that are harmful for the planet. There is an urgent need for innovative cooling technologies that do not consume much energy.

Researchers have stepped up to the plate with many personal cooling technologies. Cooling a person is more efficient than cooling entire living and working spaces. “Efficient personal thermal management remains a major challenge for next-generation wearable technologies,” mechanical science and engineering professor Lili Cai and colleagues write in a paper in the journal Advanced Science.

 

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Passive radiative cooling is an especially promising method. The method relies on materials that absorb heat and emit it at a wavelength that passes through the Earth’s atmosphere out into space. They also reflect nearly all the sunlight falling on them.

The UIUC team came up with a simple way to combine radiative cooling materials with devices that convert human motion into electricity. These devices, called triboelectric energy nanogenerators, produce power from the charges that build up when dissimilar materials contact each other and then separate.

The researchers made a composite textile using zirconium oxide. “We use direct ink writing so the material can be printed into flexible, breathable textile structures for wearable applications like athletic clothing, for example,” Cai said in a press release.

The material has just the right mix of properties for radiative cooling and triboelectric energy harvesting. It has a high refractive index, which means it’s excellent at scattering sunlight. And it has dielectric properties which help it accumulate charge.

The printed textile reflected 96% of incoming sunlight. In outdoor tests under direct sunlight, it maintained temperatures approximately 3–6°Celsius below the surrounding air.

Source: Yoon Young Choi et al. Intrinsic Coupling of Radiative Cooling and Triboelectric Responses in Dual-Function ZrO2 Nanocomposites for Adaptive Thermoregulation. Advanced Science, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Headline News:

• “As Economic Damage From Climate Change Grows, NC Experts Urge ‘Pre-Recovery’ Planning” • Three climate experts who met with journalists said the early nor’easter, Hurricane Helene, and scorching summer heat all underscore the need for communities and governments to rethink their approach to the changing climate. [NC Newsline]

Wrecked road (NCDOT image)

• “World’s Tallest Wind Turbine Reaches Final Height In A Former Coal Mining Region Of Germany” • After roughly two years of construction, the world’s tallest wind turbine now towers over Schipkau, a small town in a region of Brandenburg once dominated by coal. At 365 meters high, the completed turbine is equivalent to a 100-storey building. [Euronews]
• “Nuclear Power’s Quarter-Century Of Stagnation Has No End In Sight, And Has Been Overtaken By Solar PV” • As of 1 July 2026, a total of 411 power reactors were operating in 31 countries, 27 fewer than the historic peak of 438 reactors in 2002. Nuclear power has been stagnant for a quarter-century, a stark contrast to the growth of solar. [Renew Economy]
• “Alight Acquires 2-GW Swedish Solar Pipeline” • Alight has acquired forty solar projects in southern Sweden from Soltech Energy Solutions. They total around 2 GW of planned capacity with options for co-located battery storage at most sites. Alight said the acquisition increases its solar and storage development pipeline in the Nordics to over 5 GW. [reNews]
• “US Startup Adds Another 2,000 Electric Trucks To FedEx Delivery Fleet” • The US sure looks silly now that an ill-advised shift in federal policy tanked the market for EVs, just in time for the price of gasoline and diesel to blow through the roof. FedEx looks prescient in that, as it ordered 2,000 electric trucks from Harbinger, a California startup. [CleanTechnica]

For more news, please visit geoharvey – Daily News about Energy and Climate Change.

Deirdre Macnab was reading her local newspaper this spring when she learned that Rio Blanco County, where she lives in northwest Colorado, had taken the side of oil companies in a major lawsuit before the Supreme Court. Suncor and Exxon Mobil were trying to get out of standing trial — the city and county of Boulder had sued them, seeking damages for the rising costs of adapting to heat waves, wildfires, and floods.

After ranching for a decade, Macnab had seen those costs firsthand. During one of the worst fires in Colorado history last year, 60 of her neighbor’s cows burned to death. Record heat and drought this year parched the land so thoroughly, ranchers had to pay thousands of dollars to haul in feed and water for their animals. Some ranchers, headed toward bankruptcy, had to sell part of their herds or put their land up for sale. 

“It really disturbed me that the county was taking sides,” Macnab said, “and in particular, supporting oil companies whose operations, we now know, are putting the human population and wildlife, livestock, everything, at risk.” Rio Blanco County spent thousands of taxpayer dollars in legal fees to join the brief alongside other Colorado counties where the oil industry has a large presence.

Macnab rallied ranchers around Colorado to join her in urging the Supreme Court to side with Boulder. They wrote that local governments can’t keep absorbing the increasing costs from worsening heat, drought, fires, and flooding and still provide the resources — disaster relief, grants, infrastructure repairs — to keep ranchers in business. The oil companies argue that federal law not only protects them from needing to defend their actions in state courts, but also shields them from being liable for damages. 

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in the case on Monday. The court’s decision could have huge ramifications for efforts to hold companies accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels — and the larger question of who pays for the costs of adapting to a hotter world. Oil majors have pulled out all the stops to stymie the dozens of climate lawsuits that local and state governments have brought against them, with billions and billions of dollars on the line. With a conservative-dominated Supreme Court and the Trump administration’s Department of Justice as a powerful ally, oil companies saw their chance to stop these suits, said Alejandro Camacho, a professor at UCLA School of Law.

That calculus changed slightly this week when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a strong conservative with financial holdings in oil companies, recused himself from the case. His withdrawal makes it harder for oil companies to get at least five justices — a majority of the court — on their side.

The city and county of Boulder, Colorado, originally sued Suncor and Exxon Mobil in 2018. The lawsuit slowly wound its way through the court system. Oil companies tried to dismiss it or move it to federal court, a more industry-friendly venue, but Boulder won at every stage. In May 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the case should proceed in state courts.

Much of the support for Boulder and the oil companies falls along familiar, partisan lines. Republican states and business associations tend to side with the oil companies; Democratic states and environmental advocates typically back Boulder. A watchdog organization found that 25 of the 38 briefs filed to the Supreme Court in support of Exxon and Suncor were written by groups with financial ties to the fossil fuel industry or foundations opposing climate science and regulation. But Colorado ranchers aren’t the only surprising source of support for Boulder’s case — some conservative thinkers are challenging oil companies’ arguments.

Read Next States want to make Big Oil pay for climate harm. Now, courts are weighing in. Joseph Winters

To understand why, it helps to know that the case before the Supreme Court isn’t really about the substance of the lawsuit: if oil companies should pay damages for climate change. The first question is whether the Supreme Court can take the unusual move of stepping in before the case has gone to trial in state court. If the justices decide that they can, then they’ll consider oil companies’ arguments. Suncor and Exxon’s lawyers argue that Boulder’s suit is essentially a backdoor attempt to regulate emissions through state courts. They also say that the Clean Air Act and broader constitutional limits on state power should prevent Boulder’s claims from proceeding.

“If someone has harmed you, you should be able to go to court and make the case that they harmed you and that they need to pay you for it,” Camacho said. “It’s a centuries-old common law principle. And these companies are basically trying to say, ‘You shouldn’t be able make the case in court.’”

Some conservative legal scholars argue that there’s nothing in the federal law or the Constitution that would prevent the lawsuit from moving forward in state court. That includes Jonathan Adler, an environmental law professor at William & Mary Law School. Two former heads of the EPA under Republican presidents, Christine Todd Whitman and William Reilly, are other prominent proponents of that argument. 

The oil companies appear to have recognized that their arguments about the Clean Air Act aren’t very strong, Adler said, because they’ve moved away from them over time, toward other arguments about the limits of state power. In his view, courts generally shouldn’t override claims brought under state law “unless there is a clear basis for doing so.” Adler sees why some conservatives argue that the litigation in state courts is an improper way to drive climate policy, but he thinks it’s possible that skepticism about the merits of the lawsuit might have influenced some of their views on the narrower questions before the court.

Some Republican-dominated jurisdictions have also found themselves challenging oil companies. Coastal parishes in Louisiana are suing Chevron and other oil majors, seeking compensation for restoring coastal lands. “There are going to be conservative communities, or predominantly conservative communities, who see that they are being forced to pay millions of dollars to protect their towns because of the actions of fossil fuel companies,” Camacho said. 

Colorado ranchers, not exactly known for their liberal views, are left with few options for dealing with the environmental changes that are bankrupting them. Macnab said she hopes the Supreme Court sends Boulder’s case back to state court where it belongs, so that oil companies will be forced to face accountability.

“Until they’re held responsible for the consequences that they have known about for decades, they are not going to be part of the solution,” Macnab said. “They need to be brought to the table, because humankind and our food production is what’s at stake.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The surprising allies backing Boulder’s climate case before the Supreme Court on Oct 1, 2026.

Caught between a return to an ecologically blind abundance agenda and degrowth environmentalism that offers no aspirational material vision, ecosocialism can choose a third option: a version of ecological modernisation that champions abundance within planetary boundaries. Revolutions in renewable energy and agriculture bring this outcome within reach.

 “The worst possible crisis, at the worst possible moment.” Xan López’s concise, clear-eyed diagnosis summarises the Left’s position 25 years into the 21st century. We are faced with a political turning point, one that threatens to wipe out democracy and the planet itself in one fell swoop. A reactionary political wave is surging, and must be stopped before it achieves the neoliberal goal of undoing all social progress made since 1945 – even the political progress made since the French Revolution of 1789 is under threat. At the same time, we must fight this wave while also decarbonising the planet within the next 25 years. Failure to do so could result in a climate breakdown that, if left unabated, could leave 3 billion people stuck in uninhabitable regions by the end of the century, thus jeopardising the very existence of civilisation as we know it.

These two colossal tasks will determine the course of our species long into the future, but both rely on the Left at a time when the movement is politically weak and poorly organised; perhaps the lowest point in its entire history. A strategic rethink is now an existential imperative.

The abundance agenda

In recent years, one proposal in particular has impacted the renewal of leftist policy: the abundance agenda. This paradigm emerged after the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 book Abundance, and proposes that the Left cannot simply settle for the redistribution of scarce resources – it has to rediscover its own productivism and offer a new strategy for material expansion. In order to recover its ability to propel massive infrastructure projects – whether in housing, transport, or energy – Klein and Thompson propose that the Left must abandon its current political ethos of shying away from material change. According to their diagnosis, some progressives have retreated into a political culture of caution, regulation, protection, and the preventive vetoing of anything that could upset the established social balance, even when innovations could solve urgent social problems such as Western society’s housing crisis.

In many respects, Klein and Thompson’s book is too US-centric. Not all countries face the same obstacles of hyper-regulation as the US, and many Americans see their relative material stagnation as a sign of an empire in decline, in contrast to China’s rapid rise. Abundance received well-deserved criticism from the Left for its tendency to conflate democratic participation with bureaucratic stagnation, as well as for its centrist (or liberal, to a US audience) concern for the supply of goods while failing to question artificial scarcity, markets, or capitalist property structures.

Nevertheless, the book has resonated far beyond the US progressive scene because it highlights something that the Western Left is missing: that the possibility of restoring our power lies in rebuilding a tangible, compelling, and unapologetic promise of collective prosperity, just as it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. As Matt Huber, Leigh Phillips, and Fred Stafford write in their article “Abundance for the 99 Percent”, “The anarchists planned to take over the mines, not shut them down.”

One of the Left’s biggest political mistakes over the last 50 years has been limiting itself to protecting egalitarian moral values, thus handing the enticing rhetoric of aspiration and civilisation to the Right. However, simply expressing indignation and a desire to topple corrupt elites is not enough for a people to reach its full potential, something requisite for any process of transformation. There needs to be a horizon, an aiming point where things will one day get better. For much of the population – who suffer in precarity and acute material need, and who understand progress not as some tired teleological myth but as a legitimate expectation for survival – this “something better” will always entail an experience of material comfort, and even a certain degree of luxury, that the notion of abundance can offer.

There needs to be a horizon, an aiming point where things will one day get better.

Degrowth thinking

If this historically obvious idea seems provocative to large parts of the progressive community, it is at least in part because ideas of degrowth environmentalism are exerting an ever-growing influence on ecosocialism – and by association, on the Left as a whole. The term degrowth (and its sibling post-development, born from the Global South’s experiences of colonisation) covers a veritable galaxy of ideas that cannot be treated as a whole without straying into clichés. There is a huge difference between, for instance, Jason Hickel’s post-capitalist environmentalism – which champions degrowth via a global “Green New Deal”, a massive rollout of renewable energy – and programmes like that of Spain’s Adrián Almazán and Luis González Reyes, who challenge the renewable nature of any large-scale industrial technology and advocate for degrowth based on mass rural, economic, social, and community development.1

However, some common ground remains. Both ends of the spectrum – though to varying degrees – criticise and reject economic growth; not solely from a moral standpoint, but also because it is biophysically impossible on a planet that is dangerously surpassing its ecological limits. Advocates of degrowth thus envisage a 21st century characterised by forced adaptation – with varying degrees of social disruption – to more constrained material conditions; a new era in which, compared with times of great industrial acceleration, various forms of relative and absolute scarcity will become the new norm. They argue that there is a metabolic bottleneck that technology cannot resolve, which will prevent us from continuing the rapid, expansive trends of the modern era – including population growth and mass urbanisation – that are an exception to the planet’s historical norm.

Under degrowth, future sustainability can only derive from a corrective shift towards more restrictive material and environmental conditions. Degrowth scenarios range from gently bringing ourselves within planetary limits to predictions of widespread impoverishment and the collapse of industrial society, a material step backwards that we would need to willingly embrace and prepare for in order to minimise its impact. The degrowth movement also argues that this historic transformation could be mitigated to some extent through redistribution, socialising consumption, and cultural transformations in our everyday lives. Out of these schools of thought, however, the most politically astute understand that environmental austerity is deeply unappealing to the masses, and instead highlight the social abundance that will follow and allow us to explore new ways of living beyond the modern age.

A non-Malthusian environmentalism

Ecosocialism’s slide towards degrowth is not just a product of capitalism’s broken metabolic systems – it is also fuelled by a cultural, ontological, and moral wariness of modernity as inherently alienating and oppressive, a shift that constitutes a refounding of the Left’s historical strategy.

In the late 18th century, Nicolas de Condorcet and William Godwin laid the axiological foundation of progressive environmentalism. They did this by arguing that, among all of humanity’s possible futures, there is potential for a virtuous circle between societal perfection and ever-increasing material abundance, a self-perpetuating loop that could be brought about through emancipatory political reforms. Thomas Malthus challenged this promise by highlighting the limits of nature as an obstacle that humanity could never overcome. Though his work focused on agricultural productivity – the great environmental cause of his era – his reasoning can be applied to all natural resources. For Malthus, the clash between nature’s limits and human expansion constituted a universal condition – one that is as tragic as it is unavoidable. Accordingly, he suggested that any future for humanity would require societal restrictions, because scarcity could never truly be overcome. As Ernest García points out, this idea shaped the logic and core arguments – now endlessly revisited and reformulated – of two centuries of debate among the Left and the environmental movement.2

Malthusianism has been one of the most vital schools of thought in the environmental movement, and should not be exaggerated or misinterpreted. However, in a distorted yet somewhat effective way, neo-Malthusian environmentalism has introduced the Left to one of environmentalists’ greatest contributions to philosophical thought: the notion of a natural limit that humanity’s social or technological will cannot overcome. This naturalist realism – or, to use Marxist terms, the relatively autonomous reality traditionally categorised as “nature” – offers a vital antidote to the Left’s socio-centric tendencies, especially because it reveals an ontological asymmetry that we are culturally programmed to deny: natural forces can be the undoing of any social project, but no social project can dictate the natural conditions of its own existence. For example, communism cannot magically reduce atmospheric CO2 levels, but a certain amount of atmospheric CO2 can thwart communism because it will thwart all forms of human civilisation. In the absence of this conceptual counterweight, contemporary humans tend to imbue technology with soothingly miraculous qualities, leaving ourselves unable to discern the dangers, harms, and pace of its environmental impacts.  

There is an undeniable cognitive benefit to the idea of a Malthusian natural limit, but it comes at a high cost. Politically, it leads us into very dangerous territory, while also instilling a whole series of scientifically flawed assumptions in our way of thinking. In terms of political dangers, Neo-Malthusianism backs us into a rhetorical corner. In the best of cases, its arguments can easily be interpreted as backing a process of voluntary adaptation to poverty. In the worst, it runs the risk of normalising reactionary ideologies that take root all too easily in society. Ever since Garrett Hardin’s lifeboat analogy laid the foundations of ecofascism, it has been clear that scarcity pairs well with competition, cruelty, hoarding, and the perceived right to defend one’s threatened living space. As Carl Amery was the first to point out – followed more recently by authors such as Andreas Malm and Bruno Latour – the rise of the new far right is inseparable from pre-emptive reactions to an ecologically saturated world, one where supremacists would rather kill than share.3

Transforming our countries into renewable electrostates must be the number one goal of any ecosocialist programme.

But apart from its political dangers, the Malthusian approach also has epistemological flaws – or, at the very least, it is confusingly open to interpretation when applied to specific historical situations. This is particularly true in a modern world-system of intensely interdependent global human networks, driven by unprecedented technological, economic, and scientific dynamism. While some maintain that the “Malthusian trap” persists in industrial civilisation, evidence has repeatedly disproved their warnings: Malthus himself was refuted, as were his intellectual successors, by the “population bomb” of the 1960s and Hubbert’s peak oil theories, which predicted the imminent decline of oil in the 2000s. Malthusian environmentalism’s predictions tend to be disproved because, while natural resources are limited, they are also unknown and dynamic. The resources we use in any given historical context are a combination of our planet’s material potential, variable economic incentives, and technological developments.

However, there is another environmental philosophy which has freed itself from Malthusianism’s problematic political and scientific influences, while also conserving some of its core truths. This current – which we can broadly call ecological modernisation – has often been scorned by the Left for its seeming collaboration with capitalist goals like sustainable development. It should not, however, be confused with its more extreme counterpart, ecomodernism, which advocates instead for a very particular form of radical Promethean modernisation, rejecting the precautionary principle in favour of technologies such as nuclear power, geoengineering, and transgenesis.

We can think of society’s metabolism like that of an organism: it ingests materials and energy (input) from its surroundings and excretes waste and alterations (output) into its environment. Malthusianism and modernisation disagree not only in how much they trust or distrust technology, but also on what stage of social metabolism is subject to ecological limits. Malthusianism identifies the input as the weak link, interpreting unsustainability as scarcity, whether in the form of shortages or exhausted supplies. Modernisation points to the output, viewing the limit as saturation: carbon sinks overwhelmed by pollution, and destroyed or disrupted ecosystem functions. This difference matters. Politically speaking, the first leads us to view sustainability as a forced reduction in human demand (or even population) in the face of dwindling natural resources, and the future as a zero-sum or negative-sum material game. The second leads to a radical redesign of our socio-ecological metabolism and technosphere, compatible with the promise of progress as a positive-sum material game.

Caught between a return to a classical, ecologically blind abundance agenda and neo-Malthusian environmentalism that refuses to offer the people an aspirational material vision, ecosocialism requires a push towards a third option: a left-wing version of ecological modernisation that champions abundance within planetary boundaries. This ceases to sound like an oxymoron when we consider that, at this very moment, productive forces are undergoing a genuine revolution that is, in its content, origins, and potential, worthy of the label “ecological”.

An ecological revolution

Thanks to Marx’s famous, oft-quoted prologue to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, a segment of Marxist thought has erroneously granted productive forces an almost automatic sense of historical agency. However, as philosopher César Rendueles argues, there is something about this tradition which, without any deterministic illusions, values the analyses of the social sciences and is politically worth championing: productive forces persistently condition both our relationship to the biosphere and the possibility of social organising. This can be both restrictive and empowering. The concept of productive forces is not, of course, simply another way of referring to technology, but a socially structured, politically oriented, and disputed understanding of it. This nuance is vital because the biggest historical impacts of productive forces were not the result of technology alone – they were rooted in its widespread adoption and through deliberate deployment and politically driven economies of scale.

Today, humanity stands on the threshold of three revolutions in productive forces that will expand the anthropological sphere, with potentially disruptive impacts on its evolution. Two of these deserve the title of “ecological” because they bring the goal of sustainability within reach while also increasing productivity – even when measured in environmentally and socially destructive capitalist terms. Both were also born of ecological movements: first the renewable energy revolution, and second, the regenerative agriculture movement. The third revolution, the digital-cognitive, is not inherently ecological – it could theoretically be deployed in such a way, but could also become another vector for contemporary devastation of the natural world.

From the earliest days of computing to the internet, AI, and robotics, the digital-cognitive revolution has commanded outsized attention, what Rendueles calls a kind of “cyberfetishism”.4 The Left has had a somewhat manic-depressive relationship with this technology, oscillating between the edenic naivety of the 1990s and present-day doomerism. Without a doubt, the fears that it raises in 2026 are justified by trends such as technofeudalism, surveillance capitalism, and tech’s contribution to 21st-century fascism. But these productive forces are also subjects to be debated. As authors like Aaron Bastani and Paul Cockshott have highlighted, their rise could offer huge opportunities for socialist causes in terms of economic and democratic planning and streamlining workflows: a literal communist “abundance” in exchange for little to no money. However, if the material abundance of the future is to be environmentally sustainable, then free digital information will never be more than an auxiliary – only a different relationship with the earth and energy can guarantee it.

This is what the regenerative agriculture and electro-renewable revolutions enable. The former combines traditional farming knowledge with cutting-edge science, and is revealing to us that soil, far from being an inert medium, is one of the Earth’s most complex ecosystems. Replacing practices that damage its structure with those that restore it can successfully maintain or even increase industrial agricultural productivity, while simultaneously restoring its fertility. It promises an encouraging evolutionary shift: to restart the Neolithic era and redirect primary biomass production towards restoring the richness of our ecosystems.

But renewables hold the key to a programme of abundance within planetary boundaries. The falling cost of photovoltaic and wind energy, as well as energy storage, is one of the most spectacular changes in economic history, and its rollout is progressing with unprecedented speed. China took 16 years to build the Three Gorges Dam, but in 2025 it installed solar panels with a similar capacity every three weeks. This energy acceleration is not limited to China. Pakistan, India, Kenya, and Vietnam demonstrate that one of the great virtues of the renewable energy revolution is that it will not be monopolistic, but distributed. This opens up a historic opportunity for autonomous development in the Global South.

This is unlike any other energy transition. In most of the world, there is currently no cheaper way to produce electricity than pointing a solar panel at the sky. More than any previous energy transition, the process closely resembles the introduction of microprocessors: a radical levelling that allowed billions of people to carry in their pockets a computer a million times more powerful than those used in the Apollo space programme.

What is happening today with solar energy and batteries is a similar evolutionary leap to the discovery of fire. To paraphrase Marx, we are on the cusp of leaving behind humanity’s prehistorical era of energy production, i.e. burning things. Over the coming decades we will stop regularly burning the molecules created by photosynthesis – whether biomass or fossil fuels – that have ruled our energy systems for a million years, and will enter a new world of unimaginable efficiency and abundance. We will use the free gift of sunlight to move electrons ourselves.

The Left should focus on politically challenging the energy transition in order to harness it in the service of an ecologically rigorous and socially inclusive modernisation.

To this we can add the fact that – thanks to the superior efficiency of electricity over fossil fuels – it is both technically and economically viable for us to electrify around 70 per cent of our material processes, offering a sovereignty, security, and democratising potential that goes far beyond the hypothetical. If we can grasp this, then we already know that transforming our countries into renewable electrostates must be the number one goal of any ecosocialist programme.

Degrowth environmentalism has questioned renewable energy’s ability to ensure a future of abundance through various arguments. The purely technological ones made some sense 15 or 20 years ago, but have now been empirically disproved. Objections regarding impacts on biodiversity are valid, but experience has also shown that renewable energy can be integrated with agriculture and ecosystems. When well managed, it can even enhance biodiversity by, for instance, restoring native vegetation beneath and between solar panels. Furthermore, mineral constraints do not jeopardise the viability of the transition where it matters most: renewable generation, grids, and storage. These are not especially mineral-intensive technologies, and are recyclable. However, it is doubtful whether we could electrify every single vehicle in existence, thus replicating the existing model in an electric version. Here, the bottleneck – at least with current technology – lies with batteries, not to mention that the current model of privatising public space for the benefit of the car has disastrous social effects that ecosocialism must combat.

The energy transition will, of course, expand the mining industry, but it is worth clearing up a misconception that degrowth has helped to spread: rolling out all of the infrastructure needed for decarbonisation over the next 25 years will require fewer minerals than just one year of fossil energy. Though this figure may seem surprising, it has a simple explanation: fossil fuel extraction produces outputs that are continuously burned. Once extracted and processed, metal minerals remain incorporated in the system’s capital as products with a long useful life, and they can also be recycled.5

New mines will undoubtedly open as a result of the green transition, and these processes may, depending on how they are handled politically, be violent and extractivist. But they could also be beneficial. The key lies in challenging them. The same happens with new renewables: if deployed under a capitalist logic, renewables in many areas exacerbate wealth accumulation via dispossession in the name of green progress, and provoke legitimate resistance.

But the ecosocialist’s job cannot be to simply question the widespread rollout of renewables, because this, however inadvertently, places them on the side of the fossil fuel industry. Instead, the Left should focus on politically challenging the energy transition in order to harness it in the service of an ecologically rigorous and socially inclusive modernisation. We can adopt the same kind of proactive, modernising political shift when it comes to issues relating to extractivism. Rather than flatly rejecting extractive processes when they could work against the fossil-fuel model, the ecosocialist left could approach them from the perspective of a new form of popular development. This would place the recovery of material sovereignty on the agenda, but take it beyond classical resource nationalism through strict conditions on investor access linked to technology transfer, cooperative trade frameworks, and the development of endogenous industrial policies.

Our generational mission is to harness capital so that, within 25 years, we can decarbonise the world, fully electrify the global productive structure, and distribute this new source of collective wealth equitably.

Ecosocialism for the masses

While new productive forces are broadening the horizons of ecosocialism with promises of newfound abundance, they do not eliminate the threat of the ecological crisis. We are faced with catastrophic shifts in the world’s climate that urgently require us to slow down, while also demanding a herculean effort to adapt – one which we are failing dismally to make. We continue to wipe out species at an unprecedented rate, and to self-destructively erode vital ecosystem functions. We also continue to exceed seven of the nine planetary boundaries: in 2025 we added ocean acidification to the six already identified (climate change, erosion of biosphere integrity, land system change, excess global freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities).

The energy and regenerative transitions are the cornerstones of an ecological transformation of industrial metabolism. They can ensure its long-term viability, but they are not the only pieces of the puzzle. We also need a genuinely circular economy, with far-reaching ramifications, ranging from a new critical mineral recycling industry to a complete redesign of all production processes, including the abolition of strategies like planned obsolescence, which exist only to maximise capitalist profit margins. We need to ingrain various forms of consumption in society, starting with transport. We must also transform practices that are not, and will never be, sustainable in any conceivable scenario of ecological abundance, such as consumerism, throwaway culture, and the unprecedented dominance of meat in the contemporary diet.

None of these changes is easily compatible with neoliberal capitalism – even less so if we also aspire, as the Left should, to an ecological transition that is swift and just. These two features can only come in tandem. If the transition is not just, it cannot be quick, because grassroots opposition will hamper any changes. The reverse is also true; if it is not quick enough, it will be unjust for those most exposed to climate chaos, and for future generations who would be undeservingly condemned to a life of crushingly hostile conditions.

While renewable energy’s new competitive advantage has opened up a profitable niche that capital is already readily exploiting – ushering in a new frontier of accumulation, with all the social upheaval that this entails – ecosocialism’s work cannot consist of holding back this technological change. On the contrary, we must accelerate it through public control, and place it in the service of the common good. Our generational mission is to harness capital so that, within 25 years, we can decarbonise the world, fully electrify the global productive structure, and distribute this new source of collective wealth equitably. Although this may sound provocative, in this historical context of resurgent imperialism, with petrocapitalism morphing into fossil-fuelled fascism in petrostates (such as the US) that dictate the world order, green capitalism is not our main enemy. What is private today can be socialised tomorrow, but a “Hothouse Earth” scenario is irreversible: it would be an anthropological failure, one that would make life extremely harsh for countless future generations of humankind.

The chance to reconcile future abundance with planetary boundaries is perhaps the best news of the century.

Abundance within planetary limits is not some new, technologically enabled time extension that will allow us to continue the same ecocidal patterns that have made the Anthropocene an evolutionary dead-end. It does, however, offer a chance to radically transform our socio-natural relationship with political agendas that could – in contrast to the self-containment of Malthusian environmentalism – lead to a scientifically founded horizon of sustainability that actually appeals to the average person. This is ultimately why it is worth politically exploring the idea of abundance within planetary limits: it offers tangible benefits for political action. Climate action “for the people” will not result from an ontological shift or the moral equivalent of religious conversion; we will build it by challenging the “common sense” of our current anthropological moment, with all its fears, hopes, illusions, expectations, and politically calculated rules.

In a way, the chance to reconcile future abundance with planetary boundaries – thanks to the possibilities offered by an ecosocialist harnessing of new green productive forces – is perhaps the best news of the century. Despite an entrenched (and more than reasonable) sense of catastrophic doubt, we know today that a destabilised climate and biosphere have not, in historical terms, brought to an end what Marx taught us to call the Realm of Freedom. And if there has ever been a goal that works in our favour – one capable of uniting vast numbers of people and forging the sort of collective spirit needed to weather the many trials and tribulations along the way – it is this.

This article first appeared in Nueva Sociedad 323 / August 2026 in Spanish. It was translated by the Guerrilla Media Collective and is republished here with permission, with minor edits.

1. Jason Hickel: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Random House, 2020; Adrián Almazán and Luis González Reyes: Decrecimiento. Del qué al cómo, Barcelona, Icaria, 2023.  ︎
2. Ernest García: Ecología e igualdad, Valencia, Tirant Humanidades, 2021.    ︎
3. Carl Amery: Auschwitz, ¿comienza el siglo XXI? Hitler como precursor, Madrid-Ciudad de México, Turner / fce, 2002.  ︎
4. César Rendueles: Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia, Columbia University Press, 2017.  ︎
5. For a broad, exhaustive overview of advances in electro-renewables that speaks from a position of both activist compromise and academic rigour, see, Daniel Carralero, Marta Victoria and Cristóbal Gallego: Un lugar al que llegar. Mapa político de la transición energética, Madrid, Levanta Fuego, 2025.  ︎

This story is published through the Indigenous News Alliance.

After retiring from a long career as a conservation officer with the Canadian government, Derrick Pottle devoted himself to guiding people on the land, carving, hunting, and training bear guards.

Pottle, an elder and skilled guide from the Inuit community of Tikigâksuagusik in Nunatsiavut, founded BearSafe Planning in 2005. The program trains and certifies students to guard against the polar bears and black bears found throughout northern Labrador. The three-day course is advertised as offering “safety, protection, confidence in bear country.”

More than two decades later, that work has taken on renewed urgency. As climate change reshapes the Arctic — particularly the sea ice polar bears rely on to travel and hunt — Inuit are seeing the animals at different times of year and in places they rarely encountered before. Pottle says those changes are increasing the need for people who know how to keep people and bears safe. That, he said, is “the whole objective of the course.”

Graduates of the program keep watch for bears to prevent encounters and learn to recognize signs that a bear is not comfortable. “They may feel threatened, they may feel intimidated, and they may even charge or attack you,” Pottle said. He teaches students “how to recognize those signs, how to prepare yourself for them, the tools you have to use to do your job.”

Canadian officials say encounters between people and polar bears are becoming more likely as a lengthening ice-free season keeps bears on land longer. Inuit and Cree communities have reported polar bears appearing more frequently and in places where they were once rare. Researchers have linked the increase to several factors, including longer ice-free periods, changes in bear abundance and condition, and growing human activity in polar bear habitat. 

Pottle developed BearSafe Planning’s training program with input from groups that included Parks Canada, conservationists, Inuit elders, and academics. It started “out of a necessity,” Pottle said, after the creation of Tongait KakKasuangita SilakKijapvinga, (Torngat Mountains National Park) under the 2005 Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement. 

“They needed bear guards,” Pottle said. We didn’t have trainers in Nunatsiavut at the time. Somebody had to do it.”

Inuk elder Derrick Pottle founded BearSafe Planning in 2005 to keep people and bears safe. That work has taken on renewed urgency as climate change reshapes the Arctic and encounters with bears grow more common. Frey Blake-Pijogge / IndigiNews

The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet. As climate change remakes landscapes across the North, the need for guards is only for “all species of bears,” Pottle said. 

“We’re seeing more and more bears now in this time of our lives than we ever saw before,” he said.  “People are seeing polar bears in this part of Inuit Nunangat — where polar bears used to travel north late in the spring — and now are staying all summer long.”

The province’s Endangered Species Act lists polar bears as “vulnerable,” while the federal government deems them a “species of special concern.” Sixty to 80 per cent of the world’s polar bear population lives in Canada, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. The massive carnivores, which can weigh as much as 1,400 pounds, rely upon sea ice to travel, mate, and hunt. “Climate change is the main threat to polar bears,” the agency notes.

Becoming a bear guard can offer employment opportunities, but also can be used for personal safety. “Lots of people just use the bear guard course for their own personal protection when they’re out on the land with their families fishing, hunting and participating in Inuit lifestyle.”

Sherri Wolfrey, a mother of four, is a trained bear guard in Tikigâksuagusik. She recounted how, in 2015, she became “interested in the program and just thought ‘OK, maybe someday I might want to try for a job that involves bear monitoring.’”

Wolfrey is the secretary of Northern Lights Academy and uses her training when she’s out on the land. Last year, she put her certification to work professionally for the first time, when she was contracted as a bear guard in Akami-Uapishkᵁ-KakKasuak (Mealy Mountains National Park Reserve). “Especially up in that area in the bottom of the Mealy’s, it was so beautiful up there,” she told IndigiNews.

She finds the skills valuable even when she isn’t working as a bear guard. “It’s good to have the training,” she said, “because when you do what I like to do, especially being at the cabin … you could know what to expect and what to do if you came upon a bear.”

Read Next Troubling scenes from an Arctic in full-tilt crisis Matt Simon

Pottle’s experiences started “before there were bear guards.” People in his community would ask him to escort them on outings with boats, dog teams or snowmobiles because he knew the land. 

BearSafe Planning offers its course on demand, and has taught as many as 30 students at a time. And though he is an instructor, Pottle also considers himself a student, drawing from the experiences of others. 

“I talk to the Elders, I talk to the hunters, I talk to the students,” he said. “A lot of these people live on the land all their lives, so they have lots and lots of experiences and stories. So we learn from one another.”

Employment opportunities for certified bear guards vary by season and can range from day trips to longer-term, full-time work, Pottle said. Cruise ship operators, for instance, hire guards to keep tourists safe when they visit the North, while group outings and land-based programs in Nunatsiavut and elsewhere across Inuit Nunangat also rely on them. Inuit governments and agencies employ trained guards for outings as well.

Pottle sees professionally trained bear guards as “no different than any other aspect of the workforce.”

“It’s not always easy to find employment in the North, and bear guarding can give people — if they choose to — an opportunity to make a good living from it.”

Two decades of teaching students about bear safety has been personally rewarding, Pottle said.

“You’re doing something you love, and you’re going into communities, and you’re … bringing knowledge,” he said. “Our role is to keep people safe, and make sure people enjoy the land and enjoy the surroundings — and get the job done and come home safe at the end of your work day.”

This story was originally published by IndigiNews and updated with additional information by Grist.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In a warming Arctic, Inuit bear guards protect communities on Oct 1, 2026.

The nation-state model sustains itself on the logic that nature – and colonized peoples – are things to be conquered, assimilated, dominated, and exploited. It's time for an Earth-centered form of governance.

It is true that no high-energy society has ever halved its material throughput and existed at that level across generations. But an absent precedent for an unprecedented situation merely tells us the situation is new, not what people will do.

Life after 52 days of wildfire Channel News brendan 1st October 2026 Teaser Media

A city in Washington state is taking rapid action to calm streets almost immediately after people are killed in crashes — debuting a novel new approach to traffic violence response that they think other cities should try, too.

In what its creators say is the first real-world deployment of the “Emergency Streets” concept — which calls on communities to implement temporary traffic calming measures within 72 hours of a fatal crash — the city of Spokane, Washington recently closed a lane at the site where 18-year-old motorcyclist Kiril Herlazhyi was killed in a single-vehicle collision just a few days prior.

In many communities, transportation authorities might have treated Herlazhyi’s death as an unavoidable “accident” for which the teenager himself was to blame, since he lost control of his vehicle at a high rate of speed and crashed into a pole. The city of Spokane, though, chose to treat the tragedy as part of a systemic traffic violence emergency, and take action to compel everyone to hit the brakes along a road where going too fast is all too common — thanks in part to road design that encourages speed.

“I’m hoping this opens up a community conversation, where we don’t focus exclusively on what happened and who’s to blame,” Snyder said. “It’s more like: okay, this is preventable. What can we do to prevent it? Because whatever happened, somebody died … There’s always something that could have been done.”

Recommended Talking Headways Podcast: ‘Normal’ is Not Correct, Someone Died Here Jeff Wood May 8, 2025

The experiment is part of Spokane’s first-in-the-nation “Emergency Streets” pilot, which will provide the city with grant funding for six post-crash deployments between now and June. But Snyder says the program was initially sparked by local advocates at Spokane Reimagined, who installed roadside “Ghost Bikes” at the sites where cyclists lost their lives.

That effort, Snyder says, helped humanize the cost of the traffic violence crisis, and memorialize its victims long after all other evidence of the crash had been swept away to keep the flow of traffic moving.

Over time, though, Spokane Reimagined found they wanted to do more than just remember victims: they wanted real infrastructure to keep drivers from creating new ones. And they didn’t want to wait the months or years it often takes for permanent traffic calming plans to be debated, approved, and installed — particularly along high injury networks where crashes happen over and over again.

“They came to me [to ask]: ‘Can we do something more?'” Snyder added. “‘How can we treat those fatality sites [differently]?”

Recommended What If We Treated Car Crash Sites Like Disaster Zones? Streetsblog August 6, 2024

Snyder found his answer at a presentation by Kevin Krizek to Spokane’s “Cooper Jones Bicyclist Safety Advisory Council,” the name of which itself memorializes a 13 year-old boy who was killed by a driver while riding. An environmental design professor, Krizek co-created of the Emergency Streets framework with advocate Tila Duhaime and went on to launch an organization of the same name.

Snyder says Krizek led a design class that helped hammer out the nuts and bolts of how Spokane’s program would work, down to the (MUTCD-compliant) pink traffic cones and door hangers for surrounding residences with QR links to a survey. He and his collaborator, though, credit the Washington city with having the courage to actually use those tools to test a bold and unfamiliar idea.

“Spokane’s leadership deserves high praise for this initiative, which speaks to a fundamental truth: having community members hurt or killed on their own streets is unacceptable,” said Duhaime in a statement to Streetsblog. “The victims cannot go back to their regular lives, so an appropriate civic response must stress the urgency of using our roads differently.”

Despite months of community outreach, though, Snyder was surprised by how many neighbors were still caught off guard by the city’s first Emergency Streets installation — and how resistant to even temporary change some of them could be.

Prior to the installation, they’d warned Spokanites that “Emergency Streets” were coming soon with notices on streaming services, utility bills, emails and more. Less than a week after the lane first closed, they’d already received more than 300 responses to their survey — which ranged from appreciative to outraged.

“It’s really sad to me to see how callous some people can be,” Snyder added. “Even if [the victim] made a bad choice, most of us probably made bad choices when we were 18. We just were fortunate enough to not make ones that had fatal consequences.”

Snyder looks forward to answering those responses with data, which Spokane is collecting as part of the pilot. At the time of his interview with Streetsblog, he says the lane closure hadn’t resulted in increased crashes, as some neighbors feared; even slowdowns had been minimal, according to comparisons of anonymized cell phone data to comparable periods.

“The inconvenience is so small it’s hard to measure,” he said. “We’re just pinching off the lane for a series of blocks, and then it opens back up again … We’re talking seconds, not even minutes. [But] for some people, that’s just too much.”

Of course, one of the beauties of the Emergency Streets initiative is that the road design changes it creates aren’t permanent — at least for now. And in some ways, the pilot may help the city develop skills to better weather driver backlash, and bring communities more meaningfully into the design process as they seek solutions to save lives.

Snyder argues, though, that grumbling motorists can no longer be an excuse for total inaction — especially when people are dying.

“How much driver discomfort are we willing to absorb in order to do something positive that could have an impact on lower than fatalities and serious injuries?” Snyder asked. “I’m constantly shocked by how much we consign these deaths to acceptable collateral.”

“[Crashes] also act as a kind of terrorism against everyone who uses our transportation system,” he continued. “Even if you are not experiencing one of these crashes [personally], you may pull yourself back from walking, from biking, from taking the bus, or maybe even just driving a smaller car — all because you feel so concerned about safety.”

Snyder hopes that other cities can learn from their efforts and launch Emergency Streets pilots of their own, especially as his program continues to share lessons on how to use the strategy to the best effect. On the other hand, though, he’d be just as happy if Spokane didn’t have any lessons to share — because traffic deaths had stopped, and the Emergency Streets program was no longer necessary.

“I hope we don’t have to do any at all,” he said.

The U.S. economy is undergoing its biggest-ever capital investment boom, driven by government industrial policies, corporate tax cuts and AI data center spending. Profits as a share of the economy are at their highest in eighty years. The stock market routinely smashes records, and the unemployment rate remains near historic lows.

Such economic upswings normally spell political success for a U.S. president. But Donald Trump’s poll numbers are miserable, not only because of outrage over his reactionary policies but also because of working-class frustration about the cost of living and worries about AI-driven job losses. What’s more, the unpopular U.S. war on Iran and its global energy disruption, along with the trade war with China and other countries, have affected the U.S., driving up inflation. Meanwhile, the gains of the economic expansion have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthy—the richest 10 percent of the population now account for more than half of all consumer spending. The top 0.1 percent hold roughly $22.5 trillion—about 13 percent of total household wealth and around 5.5 times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent combined.

When the boom ends, corporate debt amassed in the murky private credit market—estimated at up to $2 trillion—could worsen any subsequent recession. At the time of writing, however, the U.S. economy is powering ahead. To understand why, it’s helpful to look at the turn towards economic nationalism and economic stimulus initiated in Donald Trump’s first term (2017-21) and embraced by Joe Biden’s administration (2021-25). Whatever their political differences, Trump and Biden reflected an emerging policy consensus that a trade war with China was inevitable and necessary to revive U.S. industry, that Washington should prioritise military might alongside tariffs and that economic stimulus is key to reviving the U.S. economy.

The post-pandemic economy

The excruciatingly slow recovery from the Great Recession (2008-09) enabled Trump to tap working-class discontent as he eked out a victory in the 2016 election. His $5.5 trillion in tax cuts favored corporations and the wealthy but failed to deliver the promised boost to economic growth. In part, that was because companies used their tax breaks on share buybacks to benefit investors. At the same time, Trump levied tariffs on China, with the promise of rebuilding heavy industry, but the trade war fizzled and manufacturing job losses continued.

On the eve of the pandemic in early 2020, the economy was growing at a respectable 2.3 percent; the unemployment rate of 3.5 percent was a fifty-year low. When the pandemic produced one of the fastest and deepest recessions in U.S. history, Trump and the Congress pushed through the CARES Act, injecting $2.2 trillion into the economy and preventing a collapse. Unemployment peaked at 14.8 percent in April 2020, the highest level since the Great Depression, but had been pushed down to 6.7 percent by the time of Biden’s election victory in November 2020.

Next came a series of stimulus packages: post-election Covid relief spending of $900 billion in the December 2020 budget, followed by a series of measures by the Biden administration. The American Rescue Plan Act of early 2021 injected $1.8 trillion into the economy, and was credited by Wall Street analyst firm Moody’s with avoiding a second recession. Profit rates as measured by the U.S. government hit their highest since 1950.

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More big spending followed: the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and, in the following year, the $52.7 billion tech-focused CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $500 billion in new spending and tax breaks with a climate change and infrastructure focus. The result was the biggest fixed capital formation in the U.S. in decades as manufacturing construction soared. A writer for the Brookings Institution, a think tank, called this trio of legislation a “national pivot.” The business magazine Fortune called it a “headlong dive into industrial policy.”

The Democratic administration’s stimulus-and-build program was a more sophisticated attempt at industrial policy than Trump’s crude tariffs-plus-tax-cuts method. But it wasn’t enough to lift the political fortunes of Biden and his vice president and would-be successor, Kamala Harris. Not only was it overwhelmed by the global inflationary wave that sent living standards backwards, it was too little and too late to create enough well-paying jobs to revive and energize a Democratic base by election day in 2024.

Microchips and other high-tech manufacturing require huge investments but create few jobs. So Biden’s program lacked the immediate social and political impact of the 1930s New Deal jobs programs of President Franklin Roosevelt. And while promised manufacturing jobs awaited the building of new factories, the Biden-Harris administration hammered workers, ending pandemic income relief by cutting the expanded child tax credit (CTC). As journalist Ryan Cooper noted, “[T]he end of the brief CTC expansion made for a terribly toxic combination with the end of the pandemic pop-up welfare state.” That helped smooth Trump’s path back to the White House.

Trump inherited this economy—along with an established get-tough-on-China and rebuild-America bipartisan policy context—when he took office in January 2025. He then dramatically upped the stakes with the “Liberation Day” announcements of steep tariffs on scores of countries, including an island inhabited only by penguins. Since then, tariffs have fluctuated based on various agreements and a U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating many of them. But they remain on average the highest import duties since the 1940s.

Many leading U.S. capitalists considered the Liberation Day tariffs destabilizing, even if they were sympathetic to tariffs as a negotiating ploy. But Trump wanted to force a quick shift in business behavior. The goal was to reshape global trade and investment patterns to benefit the U.S. while allowing him to posture to his electoral base as a defender of the working class. Manufacturing jobs, however, declined by 91,000 between January 2025 and January 2026, before rising modestly in the first quarter of 2026 to 12.6 million. Yet Trump isn’t relying on tariffs alone to stimulate investment. Building on Biden’s pro-manufacturing policies, Trump’s budget bill allows businesses to fully deduct from their taxes the costs of building new factories.

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Tariffs are just one front in a trade war fused to several imperialist power plays, from U.S. threats to annex Greenland and, less seriously, Canada, to the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicholás Maduro. However, Trump failed in his central aim of forcing China to cave under sky-high tariffs of 145 percent after Beijing retaliated by cutting rare earth exports critical to U.S. manufacturing. This led to a trade truce largely on China’s terms. Trump’s much-hyped May 2026 visit to China with several tech CEOs in tow, including Elon Musk, yielded modest results in promised U.S. exports to China, chiefly soybeans and a smallish order of Boeing jets. “Trump and top CEOs leave a more self-reliant China with few deals to show for it,” CNN observed. After the Supreme Court tariff decision, the baseline was 10 percent with higher duties on steel, autos, pharmaceuticals and more that pushed the average to about 30 percent. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was compelled to pay importers $94 billion in tariff refunds.

The U.S. had been moving away from the supposed rules-based trade order for years, going back to the Obama-era sabotage of the World Trade Organization and the “buy American” requirements of the Great Recession government spending of 2009. These were a precursor to Trump’s 2017 tariffs that Biden kept in place.

Today, Trump is replacing the old trade blocs and dispute systems with a hub-and-spoke model with the U.S. at the center. There is now a broad consensus across political parties for an economic nationalism that puts AI, aerospace and tech-driven rearmament at the forefront of a program for U.S. industrial revival to counter China and rebuild the U.S. defense industrial base. The stimulus and pro-manufacturing tax breaks have accelerated the turn to U.S. domestic production, with energy production and AI at the center.

Big business leaders sometimes grumble about Trump’s heavy-handed interventions, but they embrace his economic nationalism.

Republicans and Democrats embrace this approach. Biden’s Department of Defense issued the first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy in January 2024 to “catalyze generational change from the existing defense industrial base to a more robust, resilient, and dynamic modernized defense industrial ecosystem.” Trump put his own stamp on this effort, insisting on a “golden share” for the U.S. government as a condition for a Japanese company’s takeover of U.S. Steel, and investing billions in multiple other companies in what a leading foreign policy journal calls “Trump’s state capitalism.”

Big business leaders sometimes grumble about Trump’s heavy-handed interventions, but they embrace his economic nationalism. “It has become painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products and manufacturing—all of which are essential for our national security,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest U.S. bank, said when announcing a $1.5 trillion investment fund for key minerals and technologies last year.

A few weeks later, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the top foreign-policy think tank, weighed in with a book-length report, U.S. Economic Security: Winning the Race for Tomorrow’s Technologies. It declared: “[T]he United States is engaged in an unprecedented competition with China across military, political, economic, and technological domains. It is therefore imperative that we address the most immediate challenges facing U.S. economic security.” Notably, Biden’s former commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, was a key author.

Thus, by the time Trump’s Pentagon proposed a $1.45 trillion military budget amid the Iran war, the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against was shifting into high gear.

The AI economic accelerator

The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 set in motion the greatest investment boom in U.S. history, surpassing the national railroad expansion of the 1870s and the dot-com internet investments of the late 1990s. In the first half of 2025, spending on AI data centers accounted for nearly all U.S. economic growth, according to a leading liberal economist. Much of the data-center spending is on AI chips imported from Taiwan. But it also radiates throughout the economy, from construction companies and electric power utilities to the revenue of big cloud computing companies that sell AI services to businesses at premium prices. Competition compels such investments, as AI requires power, cooling and networking that older data centers cannot handle.

The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 set in motion the greatest investment boom in U.S. history.

The AI investment in 2026 could be the equivalent of 2 percent of U.S. GDP, which may seem modest until one considers that U.S. GDP was $30.8 trillion in 2025. The AI spending dovetails with the wider favorable conditions for investment in manufacturing created by Biden’s policies, including new semiconductor plants, which drove two-thirds of manufacturing construction by 2024. Trump’s tax cuts of 2025 provided still more incentives, cutting the cost for machinery, fleet and equipment by 21 percent.

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Skeptics have compared the AI investment boom to the tech bubble of the late 1990s and predict a bust. While the boom will certainly end, as all capitalist expansions inevitably must, there are important differences this time. The concentration of technology markets in the hands of a handful of Big Tech companies allowed them to fund their initial investments with their own cash. Only more recently have they begun to issue bonds—totaling $121 billion in 2025, a nearly fourfold increase over the previous four years. This figure does not count off-books “shadow debt,” much of it from private credit, making AI-related financial risk impossible to assess. “The hidden risks are building, we don’t know if that’s ever going to come up,” a prominent Wall Street economist noted this year.

A key feature of the AI economy is tens of billions in circular financing among chip manufacturers NVIDIA and AMD, cloud computing giants Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, and AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar scorpion dance, as established Big Tech firms sell computing capacity to fast-rising AI rivals while holding on to their corporate customers as well as the consumer market, which Meta aims to dominate with its own AI efforts.

If excessive spending ever does get Big Tech and its AI frenemies into trouble, they have a reliable backstop in the U.S. government.

If excessive spending ever does get Big Tech and its AI frenemies into trouble, they have a reliable backstop in the U.S. government. The U.S. semiconductor industry has always been central to the U.S. military, and the AI generation is now cashing in. Elon Musk thus merged his X.ai venture with SpaceX, a company critical to U.S. military and civilian space programs. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is reviving the military-Silicon Valley nexus that gave rise to chip maker Intel, in which the Trump administration took a 10 percent stake. Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz, billionaire tech venture capitalists and Trump backers, are focused on AI and defence. “The technology landscape that we will be investing into is ... intensely competitive with China ... At this moment of profound technological opportunity, it is fundamentally important for humanity that America wins,” Horowitz said in an interview.

The exemplar of this trend is Palantir, an AI company holding contracts with U.S. intelligence services and immigration agencies and the provider of targeting technology for the Israeli military to assist the genocide in Gaza. Trump’s AI policy chief, David Sacks, is Big Tech’s agent in the White House. The godfather of the tech-Trump-AI alliance is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is close to both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and whose company has deep relationships with the U.S. and Israeli militaries.

The entry of AI into the longstanding Pentagon-Silicon Valley network underscores the role that AI will play in the wider economy. While U.S. policy wavers between a hands-off approach and some nominal regulation as a concession to the growing anti-AI backlash, there is no question that AI is central to corporate America’s drive for competitiveness and the projection of U.S. imperial power. If the AI bubble bursts, the biggest players will get a bailout.

Stocks, profits, debts, deficits and doubts

Tech companies’ disproportionate weight in the U.S. stock market is unprecedented. Just seven—Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla—account for more than 30 percent of the value of the S&P 500, an index of the biggest 500 publicly traded companies in the United States. All have market values exceeding $1 trillion as investors hope to cash in on AI. Certainly, their share prices will fluctuate and may even dive sharply when the AI boom runs its course. But the current stock price surge is based not only on AI, but on record profits.

Consider the U.S. government’s own measure of profits before and after taxes. Corporate profits before taxes have reached $4.2 trillion, or 13.7 percent of GDP. Since 2021, corporate profits before taxes have been at their highest since the Second World War and the Korean War, when military production was the driver. Trump’s biggest gift to capital—an effective tax rate of about 16 percent—funnelled the great majority of these profits into corporate coffers and benefited shareholders, adding to a concentration of wealth in the U.S. more extreme than even in the days of the robber baron capitalists of the late 1890s. While technology companies were central to these profits, other sectors also scored big: financial services, oil and gas, and infrastructure-related industries benefited from the investment boom. Manufacturing profits were beginning to flow strongly in 2025, even if the promised jobs boom was more of a trickle.

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It is too soon to say whether this represents a long-term restoration in the rate of profit and a sustained increase in the average U.S. economic growth. Following the Great Recession, U.S. GDP growth averaged 2.4 percent per year, jumping to an average of 3.3 percent from 2021 into 2025 amid the post-Covid recovery and economic stimulus. Nevertheless, it marks a big turn in the U.S. economy—a boom driven by industrial capital investment for the first time in decades. Whether this is sufficient to counter China’s challenge is a separate question. But the U.S. economy is being reshaped by a revived industrial sector.

This boom has several contradictions. Some are chronic, others are Trump-induced. Deficit spending by Congress has been amplified by Trump’s tax cuts, while the high level of government borrowing since the Great Recession and immediately after the pandemic has pushed federal debt to more than 100 percent of GDP. Some of this is the result of the calculation by successive U.S. administrations that the lack of a credible international alternative to the U.S. dollar as a universal trading currency means that buyers will always be found for U.S. government bonds to finance that debt. Trump wants to double down on this bet by pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to fuel an even hotter economy, tolerating higher inflation as a means to reduce government debt in real terms over time.

The other factor is that even U.S. capitalists who oppose Trump have mostly kept their mouths shut while benefiting from his smash-and-grab agenda of cutting taxes and slashing social spending. They may complain about Trump’s government deficits but see them as political cover for still more cuts in social programs.

From boom to bust?

The AI spending boom looks unhinged, and the associated debt could detonate a financial crisis and undermine U.S. economic growth. But from the standpoint of the companies involved, the decision to undertake vast investments is perfectly rational if it allows them to retain market dominance. In the view of U.S. government officials across successive administrations, tech companies are the flagships of a new wave of industrial investments encouraged by government policies, demanded by national security considerations and serving as economic engines, with serious regulation unlikely unless popular pressure or a crisis forces the issue.

Debt is the wild card in this high-stakes AI investment poker. The novelty of private credit’s big role in the financial system—along with shadow banks and cryptocurrency outfits—makes it impossible to do more than speculate about the impact of an AI bust. And the ripple effects of the energy crisis created by the U.S. war on Iran have disrupted global supply chains and hit consumer demand in the U.S., which could also continue to drag down growth.

When the AI expansion finally ends, working-class people already soured by the current economy are likely to turn bitter.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: George Hodan; modified by Tempest.

The post The economics of U.S. imperialism (part 1) appeared first on Tempest.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) extends its warmest congratulations to the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA), one of its core members, on being named a 2026 Right Livelihood Laureate. The Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” honours RWA “for organising rural women across Southern Africa into a united force defending land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate and patriarchal dispossession.”

The recognition belongs to a movement built from the ground up. Since 250 rural women founded it in Limpopo Province, South Africa, in 2009, RWA has grown into a self-organised movement of more than 178,000 small-scale farmers in eleven countries: Angola, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Through its flat, volunteer-led structure and its Agroecology and Feminist Schools, RWA advances feminist agroecology and food and seed sovereignty across the region. It has established 24 seed multiplication sites and documented hundreds of Indigenous seed varieties, protecting farmer-managed seed systems from commercialisation and strengthening communities’ resilience to climate shocks. The movement’s collective voice helped secure Zambia’s 2016 law mandating equal land allocation to women and Eswatini’s landmark 2018 Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Bill.

Dr Million Belay, General Coordinator of AFSA, said:

“Our hearts are full today. We congratulate our sisters of the Rural Women’s Assembly on this richly deserved recognition. For years, RWA has shown all of us what food sovereignty looks like when it is built by the women who grow Africa’s food, save its seeds and hold its communities together. This Award honours every woman farmer who has stood her ground for land, seed and dignity. It also sends a message to social movements across Africa: our struggles for agroecology, for justice and for control over our own food systems are seen, they matter, and they are bearing fruit. The future of African food is being sown, patiently and collectively, by rural women.”

For AFSA and its members, this Award affirms a conviction we share: food sovereignty is inseparable from women’s rights to land, seed and bodily autonomy, and lasting change grows from people organising together.

RWA’s journey, in the words of its Regional Coordinator Mercia Andrews, shows that   “no single voice moves a mountain; it is the patient, collective weight of thousands of rural women organizing together that has shifted what was once thought immovable.”

AFSA is proud to stand alongside RWA and joins the global community in celebrating this achievement. The 2026 Laureates will be honoured at the Award Presentation in Stockholm on 1 December 2026.

When a fatal crash occurs, we tend to focus immediately on the individual: What was the driver doing? What did the cyclist or pedestrian do? Who made the mistake? 

Emergency Streets aims to shift that framing. A fatal crash is also a failure of the surface transport system. And often it is a failure that, at some level, was predictable. For aviation or rail sectors, thorough review protocol are enacted upon to reveal systemic failures. Why not for streets? 

Those of us who study streets know that certain priorities have become deeply embedded in transport planning in the United States. Speed and vehicle movement are institutionalized through turning radii, lane widths, multiple travel lanes, sight distances, signal timing, slip lanes, pedestrian crossing times, and measures such as automobile Level of Service.

No single one of these practices created our safety problem. Collectively, however, they have shaped the system we have today—and what we expect.

The problem is that when the system fails, our normal response is often to clean up the crash, restore the street, investigate what happened, perhaps conduct a traffic study — and eventually, return the system to normal. But what if the crash itself became a reason not to return immediately to normal?

Recommended Steal This Idea: ‘Emergency Streets’ Strategy Gets First Real-World Pilot Kea Wilson October 1, 2026

That question led us to develop Emergency Streets. The idea is straightforward: following a fatal crash, temporarily change the street in ways that meaningfully reduce kinetic energy. Make the intervention visible. Explain to the community why it is happening. Use the event not only to respond to one crash, but to ask what the crash reveals about the larger surface transport system. And, how to prevent such crashes in the future — including how money flows and how future practices are prioritized.

The underlying proposition is that we already know a great deal. We know the relationship between speed and crash severity. We know that accessibility, particularly local accessibility, does not necessarily require maximizing vehicle speed. And we increasingly have new ways to provide access, from e-bikes and smaller mobility devices to changing patterns of connectivity and travel. 

So the question becomes: Can a fatal crash become a catalyst for doing something differently?

Spokane: The Real-World Test

That idea has now moved from a theoretical idea, to an academic proposition, to a municipal practice. Spokane, Washington, has adopted an Emergency Streets pilot protocol and recently deployed its first intervention following a fatal motorcycle crash. 

The significance isn’t simply the cones or temporary street treatment. Spokane has created an institutional response: following a qualifying crash, the city must develop and implement a temporary traffic-management plan. That means the crash triggers action, rather than simply analysis.

The intervention is deliberately temporary because part of its purpose is learning. It is temporary to shortcut/circumvent traffic engineers’ long habits to over-engineer and study stuff, to provide decision-makers cover from public pressure for making uncomfortable changes to the street, to use swift timing to tie the error with the correction, to allow drivers to practice more careful driving for a non-trivial but non-disruptive period of time, etc. 

Recommended Talking Headways Podcast: ‘Normal’ is Not Correct, Someone Died Here Jeff Wood May 8, 2025

At the end of the treatment period, the city must decide what happens next: extend the intervention, return the street to its previous condition, or meaningfully move toward a more longer-lasting change.

That creates an unusual opportunity. Emergency Streets isn’t simply a traffic-calming intervention. It’s intended to become a way of asking whether a disruption to normal practice can change the trajectory of future transportation decision-making.

So what should we measure, and how? There are at least three dimensions.

First, physical and behavioral change, largely tied to kinetic energy. Did speeds decline? Was hard-braking reduced? Did vehicle behavior change around the intervention? Did the kinetic energy around the crash site lessen? These are relatively tangible questions and can be measured using speed observations, GIS and mobility data (including vehicle characteristics), and other behavioral indicators.

Second, institutional change. Did professional understandings change? Did organizational routines change? Did departments begin working together differently? Did the intervention influence subsequent funding, design standards, or decisions about how accessibility should be provided? 

An institutional trace is evidence that something generated through Emergency Streets persists beyond the physical removal of the temporary intervention. This trace may not be immediate or tangible. It might be visible in changed professional understandings; altered organizational routines; new relationships between departments or agencies; different expectations about how fatal crashes should be treated; changes to approval, design or decision-making processes; the use of evidence generated during deployments; subsequent temporary interventions; proposed capital works; allocation of funding; or permanent physical changes to the street.

Recommended What If We Treated Car Crash Sites Like Disaster Zones? Streetsblog August 6, 2024

The institutional part of the evaluation therefore distinguishes between temporary effects and institutional consequences, without assuming that institutional change must result in permanent infrastructure at the crash site. Rather than simply asking “does Emergency Streets reduce vehicle speeds?”, this study asks whether temporarily refusing to restore a fatal-crash site immediately to “normal” can interrupt the routines, assumptions and institutional relationships through which unsafe street conditions are reproduced.

More specifically, a thorough evaluation can reveal:

• What, institutionally, is different from when the trial began?
• How did Emergency Streets contribute to those changes?
• What mechanisms appear to have enabled change?
• What institutional structures or countervailing mechanisms constrained or prevented change?
• What disappeared when the cones disappeared, and what remained?

A null or uneven outcome can reveal organizational, legal, procedural or resource barriers that prevent rapid-response approaches from influencing longer-term infrastructure decisions. The broader theoretical contribution is to understand whether deliberately disrupting the normal institutional response to road death can create conditions for institutional change.

Third, public expectations. Did people begin thinking differently about what a street is for, what constitutes an acceptable level of risk, or what should happen after someone is killed? Did the intervention create public discussion about what could be done differently to provide for accessibility?

And that leads to the larger research question: To what extent can Emergency Streets empower municipalities to adopt meaningfully different transportation-planning practices?

The cones eventually disappear. The more important question is what remains after they are gone. 

If professional practices, institutional relationships, public expectations, investment decisions, or street designs begin to change, then Emergency Streets has accomplished something much larger than temporarily slowing traffic at one location. It has used a specific failure as an opportunity for the system to learn from itself — and change. 

• The Trump administration’s war on electric vehicles continues, as the U.S. DOT rolled back average mileage standards from 50 miles per gallon by 2031 under President Biden to 35, which will further increase the amount of greenhouse gases vehicles are pumping into the air (New York Times). The decision will cement this country’s reliance on fossil fuels for years to come (Heatmap). Not only that, it will cost the average driver up to $1,600 a year, thanks to Trump’s war with Iran driving up gas prices — far outpacing the $1,300 the administration claims consumers will save when buying a vehicle (Autoblog).
• Meanwhile, we’re falling behind the rest of the world. China has developed a charger than can refuel an EV to 70 percent in five minutes (Ars Technica). And in Europe, driving an EV is now only half as expensive as a diesel-powered vehicle (Transport and Environment).
• Politicans who call for suspending gas taxes are just pandering to voters. It has a minimal effect on gas prices, but blows a big hole in transportation budgets (Politico). A better way to reduce household costs is to invest in transit so that people don’t have to drive so much (Urban Institute).
• Federal transit funding from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expired at midnight, meaning steep cuts are coming for passenger rail and local transit. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Jalopnik explains how a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rule meant to protect car drivers and passengers from rollovers resulted in thick A-pillars around windshields that put cyclists and pedestrians in blind spots.
• Philadelphia is creating green corridors to connect an increasingly dense and walkable city. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
• Some Philly bikeshare users who want exercise are frustrated that 70 percent of Indego’s offerings are electric. (Billy Penn)
• Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law giving the California High-Speed Rail Authority eminent domain power. (Railway News)
• The Federal Transit Administration is only giving the Utah Frontrunner double-tracking project half the money it requested. (Railway Supply)
• Cyclists took over Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. to emphasize the need for better bike infrastructure. (WUSA)
• A debate is brewing in Houston over whether Metro funding would be better spent on infrastructure or improving service. (Fox 26)
• Ontario health care providers denounced Premier Doug Ford’s plan to rip up Toronto bike lanes, citing the lives they save. (CBC)
• Aukland leaders hope the city’s first subway line will erase its reputation as a cultural backwater. (Monocle)

Frontline municipalities, worker cooperatives, and civil society prove decentralized organic waste systems are ready for immediate scale as climate finance continues to favor capital-intensive disposal. 

Jakarta, Indonesia 29 September 2026 — At the conclusion of  the Second Regional Congress on Organics and Climate held on September 23-24, city and municipal leaders, civil society organizations, researchers, and waste workers across Asia united to adopt the Jakarta Declaration.  The declaration sets out a roadmap calling on national governments and financing institutions to halt funding for  incinerators and redirect climate finance into low-cost decentralized organic waste management systems and measures for food loss and waste reduction. 

With COP31 approaching and as governments face mounting scrutiny to demonstrate tangible climate mitigation measures, delegates  underscored a staggering funding imbalance: while the world has funneled nearly 4 billion USD into capital-intensive waste incineration projects, capturing 94% of waste-sector methane finance, barely 1% reaches organic waste management and food rescue systems. 

Speakers at the Congress, which was organized by GAIA Asia Pacific together with Dietplastic Indonesia and Aliansi Zero Waste Indonesia, demonstrated that preventing food loss coupled with scaling low-cost, decentralized organic waste diversion is  the single fastest climate intervention. Organic matter, primarily discarded food and agricultural matter, makes up 50% to 70% of the total municipal solid waste stream in Asia, rotting under anaerobic conditions in landfills and open dumps, generating climate superpollutants such as methane. 

Participants of the Second Regional Congress on Organics and Climate.

For the delegates, the debate over whether community-led solutions work is closed. The urgent challenge now is securing the policy mandates, institutional support, and dedicated public financing to make decentralized organic waste management and food waste prevention a permanent public service. 

The human and environmental toll of centralized dumping took center stage as a spate of landfill disasters, from massive fires to landslides, struck the region within months, blanketing cities and  towns in toxic fumes and claiming residents’ lives, many of them waste pickers

GAIA Asia Pacific’s Regional Coordinator, Froilan Grate delivers keynote address.

“The landfill crisis is not telling us to set up more landfills. It is telling us that our disposal-dependent system has reached its absolute breaking point,” said Froilan Grate, Regional Coordinator, GAIA Asia Pacific. “When communities prevent food waste and sort organics at the source, we win twice: we cut methane emissions at the source and eliminate the toxic landfill fires choking our neighborhoods. This is justice-centered, cost-effective climate action.”

Economic data released by the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) dismantled the myth that high-tech, centralized infrastructure is  superior. CPI’s cost-benefit analysis of decentralized systems in Bandung, Indonesia,showed  that community initiatives save local governments up to IDR 30 billion (USD 1.7 million) annually in avoided transport and tipping fees. 

Bandung is not an exception. Other communities in Asia taking a similar approach are proving that zero waste systems deliver measurable economic and environmental results:

• Barangay Potrero in Malabon City, Philippines: The community of 43,000 residents proved that operational costs must prioritize people over machines. With 19% of its total budget allocated to integrating  80 waste workers into its waste management system, it diverts over 100,000 kg of organic waste annually.
• Hoi An, Vietnam: Tackling commercial food waste driven by tourism, the city secured voluntary reduction commitments from over 50 hotels and restaurants to eliminate single-use plastics and curb kitchen surplus. Edible surplus is addressed upstream, while residual prep discards are channeled to the converted Eco-Hub, where workers process 200 kg of organic material daily per person via composting and bioconversion. 
• Hong Kong: Partnering across wet markets, bakeries, and supermarkets, Greeners Action established daily logistics pipelines to intercept unsold fresh produce and staples at risk of being discarded. The program routes fresh, safe food daily to registered low-income beneficiaries, proving that retail-level surplus redistribution effectively prevents edible food from entering landfills. 
• Pune, India: Solid Waste Collection and Handling (SWaCH) leverages its 4,000 door-to-door waste pickers to enforce daily source segregation across 1 million households. By working directly with 3,000 commercial bulk waste generators to prevent mixed dumping and running in-situ treatment at 270 sites, workers divert 25 tonnes daily of organic waste while eliminating secondary municipal transport entirely. 
• San Fernando City, Pampanga, Philippines: The city paired strict source-separation ordinances with commercial food-waste monitoring for restaurants, markets, and institutions. By enforcing on-site organics management for commercial establishments alongside 35 barangay recovery facilities, the city pushed municipal waste diversion to an unprecedented 89%. 
• Siquijor Island, Philippines: Lacking space for an extensive landfill, the island mandated backyard composting and decentralized collection,preventing 70%of its waste, mostly biodegradable food discards, from going into landfills.
• Surakarta (Solo), Indonesia: Confronting a city landfill where food waste makes up 60% of daily intake, youth-led network Care Food Solo partnered with hotels, bakeries, caterers, and farmers to intercept edible surplus. In 2025 alone, the initiative rescued and redistributed 46 tonnes of surplus food to vulnerable households and care homes through 12 neighborhood storefronts, routing only non-edible scraps to black soldier fly processing. 
• Tanzania: Starting in Bonyokwa, community-built recovery facilities and door-to-door education proved zero waste works in East Africa. The model has expanded to seven communities and across four major cities, replacing centralized dumping with local sorting. 

These cities and communities do not only illustrate that Zero Waste solutions are key to effective organic waste management, but, more importantly, that the path forward is to scale these proven solutions, while placing the people who make them possible at the heart of policy, program design, and implementation.

“We cannot continue treating waste management as an exercise in disposal while volumes of food and organic matter rot in landfills,” said Shibu K. Nair, Regional Organics Campaigner for GAIA Asia Pacific. “Infrastructure alone is a hollow investment if we do not fund the people who run it. Waste workers are the backbone of public health and climate infrastructure.”

GAIA members Dietplastik Indonesia and AZWI pass the baton to the Philippines—represented by Mother Earth Foundation, PNWWA, and the Zero Waste Cities Network—as the next hosts of the Regional Congress.

As the world marks the International Awareness Day for Food Loss and Waste, delegates sent a clear message to COP31 negotiators: The solutions already exist. The task now is to make them the norm.

The post Regional Leaders, Waste Workers, and Cities Urge COP31 Negotiators to Defund Incineration and Finance Community-Led Methane Solutions first appeared on GAIA.

Governor Gavin Newsom's veto of AB 2575 gives hospital corporations a green light to discipline nurses who override unsafe artificial intelligence (A.I.) to protect their patients, enabling tech companies to blame health care workers when tech products cause harm.

A few days of rain does not change the low groundwater levels after a long drought. 

Diamondback Energy's acquisition of Endeavor Energy Resources will create the region's third largest energy producer.

The impact of the energy industry on Texas' economy shattered records, but that performance is not guaranteed to continue

The Texas power grid operator will add nearly $119 million to its annual budget.