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The spectre of socialism is haunting America . . . Bizarrely enough in 2026, a new Red Scare has taken over American politics, with the GOP, the Democratic Establishment, plenty…

Wowza, rare glimmer of good news. We take a moment to honor the stunning Michigan victory of Abdul El-Sayed, who was outspent 12-1 by his opponent's millions from establishment Dems, Zionist PACS and corporations and still managed to win even though he is a progressive Muslim who calls genocide genocide and wants Medicare for all in a Trump state that isn't communist New York. Ha. What millions in dark money buys you these days: "Sweet fuck all, as it turns out."

El-Sayed's inspiring win came against a candidate, Haley Stevens, who was bankrolled by over $60 million from party leaders and outside money from a murky nesting doll of super-PACS and shell corporations but whose campaign still had the audacity to bill her as “the grassroots choice of Michigan working families.” Total spending on the race in a key swing state was about $80 million, most from fat cats, making it "the fattest cat in the history of primaries." El-Sayed reportedly got about $4.6 million in outside money; Stevens and Netanyahu got about $60 million, the plurality of it from AIPAC's United Democracy Project (sic) super PAC - the most they've dumped into a single race, making it what observers call AIPAC's biggest defeat. From I Fucking Love Australia: AIPAC shoved 30 million dollars up Michigan's arse, and Michigan shat it straight back out."

Born in Detroit in 1984, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed was raised by his father Mohamed, an Egyptian immigrant, and his stepmother Jackie, whose Michigan roots go back to the 1800s. After graduating from the University of Michigan Phi Beta Kappa, he earned an MD from Columbia and a doctorate in public health from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, worked as an epidemiologist and became the youngest health official in a major American city when he was appointed Director of Detroit's Health Department, gutted rwhen it was privatized during the city’s bankruptcy, at age 30. Rebuilding it, he went after corporate polluters, stripped lead out of schools, starting offering free glasses to kids in need, expanded Narcan access, and spearheaded a program cancelling up to $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 state residents.

Faced with that resume, AIPAC spent their millions on an ad blitz that managed not to mention any of his policies, or even Israel, though he won the first-ever political endorsement from Jewish Voice For Peace. Instead, they focused on the issues that really matter: They attacked El-Sayed for criticizing the Obamas, allegedly helping Trump win, and sitting for an interview with a streamer they don’t like, Hasan Piker. If he wins the general election against the GOP's carpetbagging empty suit Mike Rogers, he'd become the first Muslim in the Senate. His longtime message to Dems: Stop compromising, ban ICE, end sending arms to Israel, Medicare for All, no more forever wars, get dark money out of politics. On election night, at a podium reading, "MIchigan Is Not For Sale," he celebrated "the movement we were able to inspire," and "the idea that we could take our government back."

El-Sayed's victory, while slimmer than predicted, was seen as pivotal; noted Bernie Sanders, "This is an election between Abdul and the billionaire class.” And the candidate the establishment called "unelectable" won with the endorsement of the United Auto Workers, "the beating heart of Michigan labor." His win was the biggest but not the only news out of Michigan: Sunrise Movement co-founder and data center opponent William Lawrence also took the primary for Michigan’s 7th Congressional district. They join progressive wins elsewhere: Zohran Mamdani in New York. Katie Wilson in Seattle. Three Mamdani-backed candidates in New York primaries, two against longtime incumbents. Melat Kiros in Colorado. Troy Jackson in Maine. It's still a long tough road ahead. But take heart from spineless ghoul Mike Johnson: “The insurgent left is on the rise."

As if we didn’t need another case for building more homes — turns out, it reduces driving.

New planned housing is expected to cut the number of miles driven in California, according to a new study released on Thursday.

Researchers from UC Berkeley and UCLA analyzed the state’s housing plans to understand how changes in supply affect vehicle miles traveled. They found that building more homes can eliminate up to 1 percent of miles driven statewide, inching towards California’s official goal of a 25-percent drop by 2030.

Recommended Letter From Bogotá: How A Great World Capital Puts Housing, Transit and Public Space First Sophia Lebowitz July 29, 2026

Transportation researchers agree that decreasing vehicle miles traveled minimizes pollution, eases traffic congestion, and mitigates roadway fatalities. In some studies, less driving has brought money-saving and public health benefits, too.

“Many existing neighborhoods do have opportunities for people to be able to drive less,” said Zach Subin, one of the study’s researchers and an Associate Director at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center. “There’s very clearly an opportunity to … solve the housing shortage by directing new housing to these places.”

Now, research confirms that the benefits of reducing driving are achievable through building more housing. By growing the neighborhoods where public transit is reliable, walking is convenient, and shorter drives are possible, more Californians can enjoy car-light and car-free living.

The results are an encouraging sign that the state is making material progress towards ending car dependency. They don’t, however, capture its full potential, nor reduce driving to a livable standard.

Recommended California Climate Funding Fight Pits Transit and Housing Advocates Against Oil Industry Giveaways Damien Newton May 26, 2026

More strategic housing placement could reduce vehicle miles traveled by as much as 6 percent per capita, well-above the 0.9-percent currently expected. To reach that more ambitious goal, the study claims that cities would need to locate new housing with the sole intent of reducing driving, which they do not currently do. 

They may not be fully equipped to do so, researchers suspect.

California uses a top-down process in planning for new housing, with mandated growth goals for each city and county. First, state officials conduct a Regional Housing Determination, an eight-year projection of needed housing growth in every region. Regions are then on the hook for their allotted number of homes.

Each region then divides its target number amongst its municipalities based on current supply and expected demand. Finally, every municipality must then pass a state-approved Housing Element that demonstrates how they plan to build new housing, and where it will go.

California requires its cities to build housing, but cities decide where and how to build.

Cities are the focus of the state’s struggle to more dramatically reduce driving. Regional governments, the study finds, are sufficiently investing in housing production in cities and counties where residents drive less on average. But local governments aren’t paying the same attention to their car-light neighborhoods.

Subin theorizes that competing priorities and insufficient state support could both curb cities’ ability to plan more strategically. He notes that the study did not conclude a primary rationale for slowed local-level improvements, and that each municipality had its own unique struggles. However, he still sees clear opportunities for improvement.

“[Cities] can’t just do it on their own,” Subin stressed. “The state really needs to step up in terms of, not just guidance, but high quality data and technical assistance.” The study also recommends a prioritization of state-issued goals to help local governments stay on track.

California has long charted the nation’s path for climate action. To reach its ambitious carbon reduction goals, and to reduce other pollutants, traffic, and roadway fatalities, the state must continue to build. It won’t succeed, however, if cities can’t get with the program.

• The stopgap spending bill recently passed by the U.S. Senate would allow $38 billion in transportation funding to expire Oct. 1, because it does not extend the Biden administration’s infrastructure act. (News From the States)
• Vision Zero is a natural extension of the car-safety legislation the U.S. government passed in the 1960s. (Vox)
• Uber’s defense in sexual assault lawsuits is to blame the victims. (New York Times)
• Past EPA data made it clear that electric vehicles greatly reduce carbon emissions compared to gasoline, even when generating the electricity is accounted for. Now the EPA has stopped collecting that data. (The Equation)
• The Urbanist rounded up all the insane things the Trump administration has been doing lately regarding transportation.
• Street design is as important is zoning in encouraging more housing. (Planetizen)
• Sound Transit is installing fare gates at its busiest stations to boost revenue collection. (KOMO)
• The L.A. Metro is expanding a program that incentivizes households to drop down to one car. (The Source)
• Pittsburgh is stepping up enforcement against drivers blocking sidewalks and bike lanes. (WPXI)
• City of Pittsburgh employees who work downtown will receive free transit passes. (WESA)
• Omaha launched a $5 million relief fund for businesses affected by streetcar construction. (WOWT)
• As places with temperate climates get warmer, there’s a lot they can learn from cities in Southern Europe and the Middle East, such as the need for shade and shelter instead of wide-open paved spaces. (Building Design)
• Brisbane may not be the most walkable city, but it is “permeable,” meaning it’s inviting to explore on foot. (Architect)
• Ontario is a test case for what happens when automated traffic enforcement cameras are removed — speeding there surged. (CityLab)

China’s use of coal for electricity grew in the first half of 2026 as a record amount of wind and solar power was wasted through curtailment, new research has found.

The world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter brought 30 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity into operation in the six months to June and coal-fired generation rose 3% after falling last year, according to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Only 2.7GW of coal power was retired in the same period. 

The coal expansion stems from a surge in power plant approvals that followed power shortages caused primarily by high coal prices in 2021, when blackouts and factory shutdowns hit roughly 20 Chinese provinces. Local governments responded by fast-tracking new coal projects as insurance against future outages.

A further 274 GW of coal capacity – equivalent to roughly a fifth of China’s existing coal fleet – is already either under construction or has permits to be built, meaning much of the sector’s expansion is locked in for years, the report says.

• Aug 5, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier Southeast Asia’s fragile grids threaten billions in clean energy investment Renewables developers need reliable electricity infrastructure and stable policies to help the region meet climate goals and surging demand for power Read more
• Aug 4, 2026 Comment Is FOMO undermining climate diplomacy? The negotiating community has not become 20 times larger, but the COP has – and the rising number of participants, from politicians to business executives, is getting in the way of the task at hand Read more

“Climate concern”

Qi Qin, the report’s author, said the coal lock-in is a “climate concern”. “After coal power plants are built, they will seek revenue and operating hours for decades and that can crowd out clean power and slow the retirement of the older coal power units,” she added. 

The coal buildout is happening at the same time as Beijing signals a gradual shift in its energy rhetoric. In a document published last April, the Chinese government called for the country to “reasonably control” both China’s capacity to generate electricity from coal and, for the first time, how much electricity it actually generates from coal.

China has also pledged in its latest five-year plan to cut carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product – known as carbon intensity – by 17% between 2026 and 2030. It plans to reach net zero by 2060.

But, according to Qi, there is still a real gap between the direction of national policy and what is happening on the ground.

Growing renewables curtailments

While China generated less than half of its electricity from coal for the first time in the six months to last June, growing demand for electricity meant coal power generation still rose 3.4%, reversing a roughly 1% decline recorded in 2025, the report said. 

Available clean electricity from solar and wind, which have seen a record expansion in China, would have been more than enough to meet the extra demand and drive coal power down if it had been fully used, the report said. Instead, the amount of clean electricity wasted kept growing.

Estimated rates of curtailment, the intentional reduction of electricity from a source, for wind and solar were up by about a half in the six-month period compared to last year, wasting the equivalent of Indonesia’s annual electricity output. 

Coal’s protected status

Researchers said that was caused by the Chinese grid’s inability to absorb the additional clean electricity, in addition to energy contracts and pricing mechanisms skewed in favour of coal power. 

Chinese coal generators are required to sign long-term contracts covering a fixed share of the previous year’s output, now standing at 70%. Qi said that, out of fear of electricity shortages, regulators introduced these arrangements to protect coal power plants by guaranteeing them predictable prices and utilisation rates.

Additionally, China has also begun paying coal plants to stand ready to generate electricity, rather than for actually running, through new capacity payments introduced this year.

China unveils underwhelming emissions-cutting target for 2035

Qi said that, while each of these mechanisms has a legitimate purpose on its own, they now combine to give coal power excessive protections. “When renewables are abundant, they [coal operators] don’t have the incentive and are not required to ramp down,” she added. 

The report suggested lowering, or even suspending, coal-specific contract minimums in provinces that are experiencing clean energy being wasted or prolonged periods of zero or negative electricity prices. That would help coal transition to a more flexible backup role and facilitate the integration of renewables, the researchers argued.

They also urged the Chinese authorities to halt permits for new coal power projects and reassess those that have already been permitted, while favouring grid expansion, energy trade across provinces and storage as ways to boost energy reliability.

The post China’s coal power rebounds as record clean energy goes to waste appeared first on Climate Home News.

Hundreds of union registered nurses, community allies, and elected officials rallied in Portland, Maine to demand the release of Debora Kapisha, RN, a nurse at Maine Medical Center who is currently detained by ICE. They scored a major first victory by successfully blocking her transfer from Massachusetts to Louisiana, where she would have been far from her family, legal counsel, and support network.

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Karin Kirk

It’s hot. Fans and air conditioners are humming in homes, offices, commercial buildings, and factories. July is the most electricity-intensive time of year in the U.S., and the grid is working hard to keep up.

In many places, high electricity demand equals high pollution. That used to be true in New Mexico, but the state’s electricity supply flipped from majority climate-warming fossil fuels to majority renewables in just five years. Spurred by an ambitious clean energy law called the Energy Transition Act, utilities have been busy building solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and transmission lines. A major coal plant was retired and demolished. Solar panels proliferated on homes, schools, and businesses.

And even while New Mexico was building out its clean energy future, electricity prices remained cheaper than average.

A case study in cleaner electricity

New Mexico’s largest utility is the Public Service Company of New Mexico, or PNM. Only five years ago, most of PNM’s cooling needs were met by coal and gas, which made up 83% of its electricity generation in July 2021.

But the state’s abundant sunshine now provides much of the region’s electricity.

The golden line on the graph below shows grid-scale solar energy production in PNM’s territory every day for a week. The sun generated 41% of the total electricity the week of July 6, when I did this analysis.

Batteries deliver stored sunshine in the evening

The next graph shows electricity stored and generated by utility-scale batteries. During the daytime, the line dips below zero when the batteries are pulling electricity off the grid to charge up.

In the Southwestern U.S., electricity is cheap during sunny days because everyone’s solar panels are cranking out electrons at the same time. The utility could try to sell excess solar energy to other regions, but it’s not worth much. It’s far better to store it for later.

Summer evenings are hot, even as the sun eases toward the horizon and solar production wanes. That’s when PNM’s battery fleet comes to life, delivering the solar energy stored a few hours earlier. The green line spikes upward as the batteries kick into gear.

By around midnight, the batteries are discharged. But metaphorically speaking, so are most people. Electricity demand drops off as everyone heads to bed and temperatures cool off for the night.

Bring on the wind

Sunshine and batteries aren’t quite enough to power everything 24/7. The next big player is wind, shown with the blue line on the graph below. Note how the wind blows strongest in the evening – it’s the perfect complement to solar in this region. Wind accounted for 20% of electricity generation during the week shown below.

New Mexico’s evening wind is also helping out Arizona and California as a result of the recently completed SunZia project. Located in central New Mexico, the project’s 916 wind turbines generate electricity and a 550-mile, high-voltage transmission line carries it westward.

Still some fossil fuels – but a lot less

Only five years ago, fossil fuels were the main characters in PNM’s electricity generation. Now they’re the supporting cast.

The brown line on the graph below shows electricity generated from natural gas, a fossil fuel composed primarily of climate-warming methane. Little gas is needed during the day, thanks to solar energy. In the evening, gas generation picks up, though it’s still generating less than batteries and wind.

The steady black line shows coal generation. Coal plants run best when operated at a constant pace, because frequent ramping up and down causes them to run less efficiently and can lead to more fatigue on aging equipment.

All told, coal and gas made up 38% of the electricity supply the week of July 6, with renewables generating 62%.

It’s worth noting that July’s heat drives the highest rates of fossil fuel use for PNM. About half the days in the past year saw renewables generating 70% or more of the daily electricity need, and in late spring of this year, renewables routinely met more than 80% of demand.

A transformation in just five years

Compare the chart above to the one below from 2021, when coal and gas power plants generated nearly 80% of the total electricity. Every day, the utility ramped up gas power plants to meet the evening peak in electricity demand. Solar and wind were relatively small contributors, totaling just over 20% between them.

So how did this transformation happen? The answer is in part two of this story, coming Monday.

A note on data

The data comes from the Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Grid Monitor. Note that not all of the electricity shown in these graphs is used by PNM. Some of it is exported to other regions, and PNM also imports some electricity into its service territory. Nevertheless, the data paints a picture of how different sources of electricity generation blend together to provide power through the day and night.

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

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If you’ve ever driven through Southern California in late summer, you probably are familiar with the rolling, brown hills that cover the landscape, typical of the coastal sage scrub plant...

In early July, I paid a visit to the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, part of a celebration honoring late Congressman John Dingell’s 100th birthday.  I left with a renewed...

On Saturday, Aug. 8, Community First Medical Center nurses will hold a rally and community event in Chicago to highlight their concerns about the impact of federal funding cuts on the hospital, which is already struggling with chronic staffing and equipment shortages exacerbated by poor management. A report from NNU put Community First on “Red Alert” status, warning that it faces a dire threat of service cuts and closure because of its reliance on federal funding.

August 5, 2026 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SUWA Statement on BLM’s Cancellation of 10 New Backcountry Airstrips in Redrock Country – 8.5.26 None of the airstrips were previously designated and many were reclaimed 

Contacts:
Grant Stevens, Communications Director, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA); (319) 427-0260; grant@suwa.org

Salt Lake City, UT – Monday, following a formal appeal from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Canyon Country District withdrew its June 2026 decision approving 10 backcountry airstrips in the heart of Utah’s redrock country. These airstrips, many of which show no signs of recent use and none of which were designated for use, are scattered across some of the most remote and ecologically sensitive landscapes in southern Utah—including the Gemini Bridges/Labyrinth Canyon area and the remote backcountry immediately adjacent to Bears Ears National Monument. Below is a statement from SUWA Wildlands Director Neal Clark and additional information.  

“This is a case of ‘better late than never.’ We’re glad to see the agency pull back its decision, which would have authorized more motorized use in remote, wilderness-quality landscapes,” said Neal Clark, Wildlands Director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA). “BLM’s decision would have benefitted a handful of private pilots to the detriment of wildlife, native vegetation, and public lands users seeking quiet, backcountry experiences. We appreciate BLM’s reconsideration and will work to ensure that these airstrips are not authorized for use in the future” 

Additional information: 

Based on recent on-the-ground fieldwork, SUWA called on the BLM to reject six of the ten proposed airstrips: Spring Canyon, Big Flat, Castle Creek, Nokai Dome, Piute, and Red Canyon; a map of those six airstrips can be found here. None of these airstrips have ever been officially designated, and despite unauthorized past use, many of these locations will require extensive clearing and ground disturbance as they have begun reclaiming and are not functional for takeoff or landing. Reopening them would require removal of mature native plants like blackbrush and junipers, fragmenting habitat and degrading wilderness characteristics. Several locations are within BLM-identified wilderness-quality lands or directly adjacent to Bears Ears National Monument, where aircraft noise and visual intrusions would diminish the solitude, natural soundscapes, and cultural landscapes these areas were meant to protect. 

The Spring Canyon and Big Flat airstrips lie within crucial bighorn habitat along the Green River corridor and near Canyonlands National Park—the same landscape where the BLM already restricts other recreation activities to protect these important species during lambing season. Similarly, raptors nesting near Big Flat, Nokai Dome, and other sites are highly sensitive to aviation noise, which discourages use of otherwise suitable nesting habitat. 

 SUWA’s members submitted over 2,500 comments in opposition to the decision. This decision comes on the heels of BLM approving the Keg Knoll airstrip in the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness on June 12, 2026. SUWA’s previous release on the Keg Knoll approval can be found here.  

### 
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is a nonprofit organization with members and supporters from around the country dedicated to protecting America’s redrock wilderness. From offices in Moab, Salt Lake City, and Washington, DC, our team of professionals defends the redrock, organizes support for America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, and stewards a world-renowned landscape. Learn more at www.suwa.org. 

 

 

The post SUWA Statement on BLM’s Cancellation of 10 New Backcountry Airstrips in Redrock Country – 8.5.26 appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Behind-the-meter batteries and other aggregated DERs could get another lift from a related rulemaking at the California Public Utilities Commission, but a final ruling is unlikely before next year, a regulatory expert told Utility Dive.

Vermont’s main hospital, the University of Vermont Medical Center, is threatening cuts in staffing and wages as well as services in contract talks with UVM Medical Center Support Staff United. The hospital’s parent company, UVM Health, has already eliminated 140 positions. A third of those were union positions.

The Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB), which oversees the state’s hospitals, has mandated that UVM Health overcome its $300 million deficit with more cuts in expenses over the next three years. The cause of this fiscal crisis is not the healthcare system’s workers and patients, but its bosses, their profligate pay, and their mismanagement of the system.

The former Chair of GMCB, Owen Foster, underlined this fact during a board meeting last September. He stated, “It’s essentially an expensive and ineffective layer of overpriced and unnecessary corporate bureaucracy that has proven itself both physically and spiritually distant and unconnected from the mission of our flagship academic medical center and the needs of Vermonters.”

In the midst of this crisis, entirely caused by management, UVMMC Staff United is drawing a line in the sand. The workers are fighting for a fair contract that would put workers and patients first. Their struggle may result in a strike.

The stakes are high. The union is holding the line against the proposed cuts and demanding that the Medical Center ensure safe patient-staff ratios that would improve everyone’s healthcare. They’re also insisting that it sign on to Migrant Justice’s Milk with Dignity program, which protects farm workers’ rights and ensures them better wages, working conditions, and housing.

This panel (video here), organized by Vermont May Day Strong, featured union leaders from impacted healthcare and education unions in Vermont as well as Plattsburgh, New York. The speakers included Melissa Lavalle and Teagan Cook (UVM Medical Center Support Staff United), Jessica Jacobs (Vermont Federation of Nurses and Healthcare Practitioners), Chris Swiesz (New York State Nurses Association), Lou Rochford (Community Health United), Deirdre Manion-Fischer (UVM Staff United) and Matt Gile (Winooski Education Association). This transcript of their speeches has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Vermont health care union members address the urgency of their struggle. Photo Credit: Vermont May Day Strong

Melissa Lavalle: For forty hours a week, I’m the financial and administrative assistant for the psychiatry and mental health departments. I’ve been doing this job for eight years. When we started, it was just for UVM Medical Center, where I work. As of this week, my work has expanded to include Plattsburgh and Elizabethtown, New York, as well as other hospitals in Central Vermont.

I am secretary of Support Staff United as well as vice president of Healthcare for AFT Vermont. When we started talking about bargaining, we realized that both staff and technical workers’ contracts were expiring at the same time. We all know that when we bargain together, we are stronger together.

So, we made sure that we were all on the same page ideologically. We sent out our bargaining survey in both units and our members’ responses showed that folks wanted the same thing, and that the primary thing that they wanted was safe staffing.
We know this is an incredibly hard economic time all around. Our folks are not immune from that in any way, shape, or form. But hospital workers aren’t hospital workers just because they want a fat paycheck. They care about the community and care about providing quality healthcare to the community that we’re all part of, that our families are part of, and that our friends are part of.

After deciding that staff and tech workers bargaining together was going to be the way forward, we combined our economic demands with some common good articles. We believe that we have the opportunity now to start a wave of social justice unionism.

We are asking the hospital to be a part of Milk with Dignity. Our hospital serves a lot of milk. We would like to know it’s coming from farms that treat their workers properly. This is personal for me. I grew up on a farm and know how hard the work is. My parents’ biggest and most effective threat to me was that if I did not behave, I was going to have to work on the farm.

We’re also asking that the hospital not use their very expensive lobbyists and publicity department to fight us in our struggle for universal healthcare for Vermonters. The hospital’s tight on money, so if they agree to not waste it on opposing us in the legislature, we can save them a lot on lobbyists and consultants.

We wrote up these common good proposals and brought them to our 3,300 members. We got a supermajority to sign on to them. Our people are behind us. They want us to use our union power to improve our working conditions, make sure we are running a safely staffed hospital that can properly care for its patients, and improve the community that we are all a part of.

Our people are behind us. They want us to use our union power to improve our working conditions, make sure we are running a safely staffed hospital that can properly care for its patients, and improve the community that we are all a part of.

I think we can all see that for-profit healthcare is not working for any of us. It’s not working for healthcare workers. It’s not working for our patients. It’s time to end the delusion that for-profit healthcare can ever work.

We know there are alternatives. I’ve been to Holland. I’ve been to England. They are not shitholes. People are not dying in the streets. We deserve the opportunity to have healthcare as a human right and that’s what we’re fighting for.

Teagan Cook: I am the operations support specialist at UVMMC. I know that doesn’t mean anything to anyone because they have very obfuscating titles there. What that means is that I am the lead chemotherapy scheduler for outpatient cancer patients.

We have about 54 providers who can prescribe this kind of treatment in our outpatient section of UVMMC. We have seven schedulers. And that is frankly a pretty high scheduler-to-provider ratio compared to some other places in the hospital.

But we have a unique level of complexity that has caused our understaffing to become critical to the point where I think that we are on the verge of a sentinel event in our clinic any day. If you’re not aware of what a sentinel event is, it is severe patient harm or death due to some kind of mistake by the hospital. That mistake is staffing.

If you get diagnosed with cancer here, you’re going to be sent to the outpatient hematology oncology clinic. What’s going to happen is you’ll have an initial visit with your provider. They’re going to decide what kind of treatment is necessary, and whether surgery is necessary.

They might send you over to surgical oncology for a consult there. Then you’ll come back over to medical oncology, and you’ll get prescribed treatment. And that sounds like a pretty simple thing to schedule.

Unfortunately, a lot of these medications are extremely difficult on the body. For example, a lot of these medications are really hard on your veins, which means that in order to give a patient some of these medications, they have to have a PICC line placed, which is a little tube that goes directly into your heart, or a port placed, which is a plastic device with a tube that goes directly into your heart.

That way, we’re not doinking your veins every time we give you medication. We have, I think, three providers in interventional radiology who can place those ports. We have to get that coordinated with getting an echocardiogram of the patient’s heart to make sure that they are physically fit enough to receive this medication without massive side effects.

We have to coordinate with our specialty pharmacy to give any oral meds that the patient might need. We have to coordinate with our on-site pharmacist to talk to these patients about the treatment that they are receiving because there are a lot of really weird side effects and a lot of really weird no-nos.

For example, there’s one medication that we give where you can’t drink anything cold or your nerves stop working. So, it’s really important that we have all of these things figured out and put together.

That is the kind of thing that we would have to get scheduled out for one visit for one patient, and we haven’t even talked about actually getting the juice in them yet. It’s an incredible amount of coordination for each scheduler, for each different provider that they’re scheduled for. The medications are different depending on the diagnosis, depending on the provider, depending on whether or not the provider does research studies.

We are also operating with an extraordinarily limited amount of chair space, and those chairs are physical chairs where people have to sit and be under the supervision of a nurse to receive their medications. I am not aware of a single person on my team who has not had some kind of stress-related health issue in the past several months.

I was asked by my boss to leave work early on Friday because I was having a stage two hypertension episode. People are getting migraines. I have people on my staff who cannot have conversations about what we are going to do when one of our staff members leaves because they get panic attacks immediately.

We are not in a position to be able to care for our patients anymore. All of us are terrified all the time that we are one mistake away from getting someone killed, that we don’t have enough oversight available. My team has not had a practice supervisor for months now. We’re struggling desperately, and we are trying so desperately to get management to listen to us.

We are not in a position to be able to care for our patients anymore. All of us are terrified all the time that we are one mistake away from getting someone killed, that we don’t have enough oversight available.

I’m on step three in a grievance process to get us more staffing. The solutions that have been presented to us so far are things such as, “You could try working faster.” We can’t get overtime. We can’t get more staff. It takes us about three months to train someone due to the level of acuity in our work. And again, we are not the worst-staffed clinic.

The reason why I’m here is because a rising tide lifts all boats. If we can win a good contract with common good demands met like Milk with Dignity, it will do amazing things for all of us. But if we don’t get safe staffing, if that one load-bearing aspect of our contract is not fulfilled, people are going to die.

It is going to be people who you see every day. It’s going to be people who work at the hospital. It’s going to be people who work for other healthcare organizations. It’s going to be people who work here in City Hall. And that’s simply the fact of the matter.

We do not have the adequate staffing to sustain human life in our hospital anymore, and that has to change. That’s why I’m here and that’s why a large number of our members are fighting so hard for this contract, because we are afraid for you. We are afraid for ourselves. This is not a simple matter of just it’d be nice to get another five dollars an hour. It’s a matter of life and death.

Jessica Jacobs: I work in the sleep center. I have worked there for about 16 years, 15 of which I’ve worked the night shift. This year I transitioned to a second shift position due to health issues caused by working nights. I’ve been there a long time. Along the way, I’ve seen a lot of changes.

We are definitely experiencing safe staff issues. We have shortages and a high turnover rate, especially on the night shift. It’s difficult to recruit new staff. Wages are just not high enough for the cost of living. We get people who apply from out of state and once they see how much it costs to live in Vermont, they don’t come.

We’ve also had to hire staff who we know are going to stay for a short time because it’s just a stepping stone for them before applying to medical school. But the training time is very extensive. It’s about six months to get you at the baseline. Even after that, you’re learning for many years and you still need the assistance of senior staff, which we have very few of. We have two senior staff on nights and three relatively new people, two very new.

When I started at Sleep, we had anywhere between eight and ten night techs. We would occasionally hire a traveler, but not for very long. We currently have two travelers and a third who will be joining us in August. It’s the most we’ve had ever.

The issue with recruiting and keeping new staff is that the work is just too hard. The patients are sicker, and we’re being asked to do too much. It’s too stressful. For our senior techs, it’s a little easier. But it was even challenging for me towards the end of my stint on nights. So, for new staff, there’s just no reason for them to stay.

When we are short-staffed with our night staff, it prolongs the wait for patients to be seen for their sleep studies. So, right now for our in-lab sleep studies, we are booking out to January for adult patients and into February for pediatric patients. The pediatric patients often need to be in a one-to-one ratio, so it pushes them out a little further in the calendar.

With a lot of our adult patients, they have what we call a two-to-one ratio—two patients for each tech worker over the night. But now, because the patients are sicker, those two patients you’re working with take more care and attention. So, it’s very challenging.

The hospital has not kept up with this reality. They have not changed those ratios to reflect the patient population we’re seeing. That’s a big reason why it’s so challenging for our newer techs.

And it’s worse for the patients. If they have their sleep studies delayed, they’re getting their treatment delayed. That puts them at higher risk for heart disease, heart attack, and stroke. Those conditions put them at higher risk to be admitted into the hospital on our inpatient floors. So, our understaffing contributes to overwhelming the whole system, which is understaffed overall.

The other challenge with our traveling techs is a lot of them are not equipped to deal with what we’re experiencing in our lab. They can kind of get by. We can get studies run, but we’re not providing the same quality of work.

The hospital has simply not invested enough money in the sleep program for a long time. We operate out of a hotel, which we’ve been doing since I started. The majority of our sleep studies are in a hotel. It is nice because it’s a little more comfortable, but it’s not the best solution.

Where we work at the hospital, the building’s very old. It’s not really set up well for us. Our equipment is old. It’s failing. And they’re not investing in new equipment. That forces the tech to take time away from care to troubleshoot the equipment and do things like change out old sensors for new ones. It disrupts the patient’s test. It disrupts the patient’s sleep.

All this delays treatment and compromises its quality. If anyone has experienced a sleep condition or knows someone who has, you know that what I’m describing is detrimental to people’s health and their ability to function in life. We’re fighting to change this situation for all our benefit.

Chris Swiesz: I’m a registered nurse at Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital (CVPH) in Plattsburgh. I’ve been there for twenty-five years, and I’m a member of our union’s executive committee as the grievance co-chair. We’re here today to send a clear message to the management of UVM Health that members at CVPH are in solidarity with the AFT members at UVMMC.

This is a fight for our communities and for good union jobs. We all need to fight together to save our essential healthcare services. We are all tired of being asked to do more with less. We are sick of having to pay for management shortsightedness and poor planning. Instead of cutting executive pay, administrative overhead costs, UVM Health is cutting frontline staff and services.

This is a fight for our communities and for good union jobs. We all need to fight together to save our essential healthcare services.

They are cutting the workers who make our healthcare facilities run. That is not right, and that is totally unacceptable. Our contract at CVPH expired December 31. We are nearly nine hundred nurses and healthcare professionals strong. We are demanding safe staffing, fair pay, and staff retention.

As of now, we are taking measures to escalate our efforts if management continues to play games at the table and does not engage in issues that matter most to all of our members. Just as we will not stop fighting for our community, we know that AFT members are just as passionate in the fight for quality healthcare.

I know that you are not done fighting. Know that we are with you. Know that we are with you in solidarity. When the UVM workers stand united, we will never be defeated. We are with you, and we’re in this fight with you.

Lou Rochford: We at Community Health United (CHU) are grateful to join this panel. I’m the treasurer of our union and one of the employees impacted by the recent layoffs in the Community Health Centers’ Health Information Management Department, also known as the medical records department, if you don’t know hospital jargon.

I’ll be transferring into a new position that I took as an alternative to being laid off. For those who may not be familiar with what’s been happening, CHU has spent the past two weeks responding to job cuts that followed Community Health Centers’ decision to contract with the third-party billing company, Medusind, in May 2025.

This is the third round of layoffs we’ve had in less than twelve months. Management recently clarified that they only count this as the second round in 2026. They recently clarified this because they only count this as two rounds because the first round was per diem employees.

But, if you’ve ever worked per diem, you know you have a job, but you’re not guaranteed to keep that job because it’s day by day. Nevertheless, it’s still a job, and if you’re laid off, you’re laid off. So, we’ve had three rounds of layoffs.

CHU is still a young union for support staff. Our first contract took effect in 2023, and until now we really haven’t made a lot of noise. What has been inspiring is watching our members come together in this difficult time. The billing department, which has borne the brunt of these layoffs, gathered more than 120 signatures on a petition in just forty-eight hours of the layoff announcement.

For a young union, that’s remarkable. It tells me our members aren’t just fighting for themselves. We’re fighting for each other, for their patients, and for the community health centers.

We met management because we believe layoffs should be the last option, not the first, and we ask for transparency around the organization’s finances, meaningful collaboration to find alternatives to layoffs, an end to spending millions on outsourcing, transparency around the Medusind contract, a CHU-appointed seat on the board of directors, and a commitment to advocate alongside us for union voices healthcare in the next legislative session.

Management has shown themselves to be incompetent. Our Chief Financial Officer, Patty Bratton, made two mistakes in one day. She acknowledged that signing the Medusind contract had been a mistake. Second, after we requested the contract because even our CFO couldn’t tell us what it cost monthly, we discovered that it contains a clause allowing Community Health Centers to end the agreement after management told us that they cannot end it.

But management still kept information from us. They redacted copy of the contract we received. All the financial information was blacked out. We were told if a select few union reps wanted to see the unredacted version, we’d have to agree not to share the financial details.

You can decide for yourselves what to call that. I can only describe that as a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). We cannot agree to an NDA about information that affects our livelihood. Transparency shouldn’t come with a condition of silence. We told them that. But we haven’t received a response.

Before our recent press conference, we reached out to the interim CEO, Dr. Harry Chen, and invited him to sit down with us. His response was simple: “Thanks for reaching out. After consideration of your request, I’m going to respectfully decline.”

As someone who works in healthcare, reading that felt a little like seeing that pop-up that says, “This action may take a few moments.” Healthcare workers know that when you see that, we sigh and wonder what fresh chaos is about to unfold.

Management later defended these actions as strengthening the organization’s financial stability. We know that’s wrong and it will come at our expense. One of my coworkers was denied a replacement prosthetic from our new self-insured health plan after theirs broke. I spent about a month trying to resolve a billing issue for my own preventative care for diabetes care.

Our fight isn’t just against layoffs. It’s about what kind of healthcare system we want—one built on transparency instead of secrecy, collaboration instead of exclusion, investment in people instead of outsourcing. Because when workers lose, patients eventually will too.

Healthcare doesn’t become stronger because a spreadsheet balances. Healthcare becomes stronger when we support the people who answer phones, fight with insurance companies, process medical records, schedule appointments, and help patients navigate a system that is already confusing.

So, our fight isn’t just against layoffs. It’s about what kind of healthcare system we want—one built on transparency instead of secrecy, collaboration instead of exclusion, investment in people instead of outsourcing. Because when workers lose, patients eventually will too.

That’s why we’re asking this community to stand with CHU, not just for our jobs, but for the future of the Community Health Centers, especially in Burlington. These centers are being closed all over our nation. We must stop that from happening here.

Deirdre Manion-Fischer: It’s a great honor to speak on behalf of UVM Staff United, which is the staff union at University of Vermont. I’m part of our leadership team and am a co-lead steward.

I work in the cancer center. I support opening clinical trials. I’m a regulatory specialist. I make Institutional Review Board (IRB) submissions and edit consent forms. I tell patients all the risks of the trials, and each unique trial has different care, different needs, and different requirements. That’s my day job.

I work closely with a lot of medical center staff. They’re the clinical coordinators. They’re the ones who see patients. They’re the ones who make sure all the data gets collected. We have data coordinators who enter all the data so that our patients can get the cutting-edge of care and get the newest trials and also get the data that we need to be able to have these drugs available on the market.

I’m also very active in UVM Staff United. I started here about three years ago. I became an area steward during my probation without knowing what it was. I just want to say that our unions need to stand together.

We’re not in the same place. But each gain we make sets a precedent for each other to fight for. And we’re all in the same medical system. We’re all patients. We’re participants on clinical trials. And our work affects each other. My coworkers are yours.

UVM Staff United have heard the same demands from management that you’re hearing, over and over in our bargaining. UVM’s goal is to reduce costs by rationing care. So, they offer us alternate healthcare plans that have a high deductible. As a result, people don’t seek care. Faced with that we’re saying no.

They call people who use our healthcare “frequent flyers” as if our care is a luxury that’s used. We’ve heard this over and over in these committees. And then during bargaining last time, it took us nearly a year to get a contract. If we had the right to strike, it would have been shorter.

But we still have a law on the books in Vermont that says we don’t have the right to strike. This is a Bernie Sanders state. Why do we have a law that says public employees do not have the right to strike? That has to be struck down. We need that bill in the statehouse to be passed that gives us the right to strike.

We’re all here because we care about patients and their experience. We care about research. We’re not here just to make a good paycheck. We’re here because we believe in the work.

And we’re your neighbors. We’re in solidarity with you. We share the belief in a fighting democratic union. That’s where our power comes from. Only by exerting that power can we get what we need.

We’re not going to get that by asking nicely. I train our shop stewards. I argue grievances. We don’t win them by being right or making the best arguments. We win them by flexing our power.

We know you understand that and are doing it now. So, when you guys win a better contract, we can look at it and say, “Hey, us too.” We all get more together. We all deserve what we need. We are in solidarity with your struggle. It’s ours too!

Matt Gile: I’m a librarian for the Winooski School District. I get to read stories with preschoolers all the way to twelfth graders. I’m also the former president of the Winooski Education Association. Currently, I’m the chair of our political action committee.

Education workers and healthcare workers are facing the same attacks to impose austerity on our schools and our healthcare facilities. Our bosses are using the real affordability crisis as an excuse without actually addressing the underlying cause of that crisis. And that’s our for-profit healthcare system, our for-profit housing system, and our for-profit system as a whole; these are extracting value from working people.

But education workers and healthcare workers also share similar strength. Our work is caring for those in our community. And that connection is so powerful. And so, we say educators’ working conditions are our student learning conditions, and safe staffing saves lives.

That is why it is so important that we’re together in solidarity on this panel right now. I’m really excited to talk about this new burgeoning Healthcare is a Human Right campaign that Vermont NEA and AFT Vermont has just launched. Also, and this is hot off the press from yesterday’s convention, the Vermont AFL-CIO has also committed to join this campaign.

This is all based on the unprecedented, astonishing work that the Workers Center had done in passing Act 48 in 2011. If we’re going to implement that act, we need a movement rooted in the power of working people. Already, the Vermont NEA and AFT Vermont’s healthcare as a human rights campaign is essential. This panel is helping to build that synergy.

Our strengths can overcome each other’s weaknesses. Most of the AFT Vermont’s members are all in Chittenden County, whereas Vermont NEA has committed members who are trusted in their community in every single legislative district in this state.

We need a movement rooted in the power of working people. Already, the Vermont NEA and AFT Vermont’s healthcare as a human rights campaign is essential. This panel is helping to build that synergy.

Education workers aren’t always authorities on healthcare, while AFT represents people with earned and lived experience that can really speak with authority on our healthcare crisis. That’s why we’re always going to be stronger together.

The Vermont NEA really has committed to really work to get our members engaged in this movement. I think one of the struggles that Vermont NEA has is that educators have actually been pretty insulated from this healthcare crisis. Our healthcare is bargained statewide. So, our individual bargaining teams don’t necessarily grasp the issue and its impact on them.

But it’s having an enormous impact. It’s the largest cost that’s driving up our school budgets. To deal with that, our employers try to suppress our wages. So, education workers are starting to see the need for this campaign. It’s our task to make sure that they’re committed and engaged in this fight for healthcare as a human right.

And we have to see it in all its dimensions. It doesn’t matter how good our health insurance is, if your local clinics close or if your birthing centers close. This crisis is going to escalate with cuts to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) cuts and Medicaid. Those will mean that people are not getting the type of care, the preventative primary care that actually addresses and supports people’s health.

Without that care, people’s health will worsen and the cost of their treatment will increase. So, we’re headed for increased overall healthcare spending, which is going to send us very predictably and foreseeably off of a fiscal cliff.

But Vermont NEA is showing that it’s committed to the campaign. We have pledge cards that we’re going to be rolling out to members at the beginning of the school year. School boards are beginning to realize the nature of the crisis. So, we’re aiming to pass school board resolutions in support of the campaign.

And we’re getting involved in taking on solidarity actions to support healthcare workers. I got to have the opportunity to speak next to Lou at the press conference for the Community Health United earlier this week. It’s going to take this kind of solidarity and unity to build a powerful movement to win.

We can’t just elect a new state representative who will say, “Hey, has anybody ever thought of universal healthcare?” That’s not going to cut it. We need a coordinated movement to sustain pressure across our state over the long term to make sure that we can carry this campaign to victory.

This Healthcare is a Human Right campaign is the fruit of the May Day Strong Coalition, which has been holding May Day rallies, where we march on ICE detention facilities in solidarity with Migrant Justice. We’ve held Labor Day rallies. We’ve held a People’s Summit and solidarity schools, building connections of solidarity across unions.

That’s how we’re going to build a movement that is able to demand the things that working people need. The fight for affordable housing, the fight for universal healthcare, the fight to protect our public schools, the fight for migrant justice, all these are not separate fights. These are fights of working people fighting for what they need. Remember, an injury to one is an injury to all. And when we fight, we win!

The post Put workers and patients first! appeared first on Tempest.

DENVER—As voters head to the polls across the Mountain West, one of the most prominent and bipartisan throughlines in 2026 is protecting America’s public lands and natural resources. Broadly, we have already seen public lands serve as a salient and decisive issue across elections, central to the identity of voters across the states highlighted. This report highlights recent data from multiple polling firms that surveyed Mountain West voters:

View the 2026 Winning the West polling guide here

Topline takeaways:

• For an overwhelming percentage of Mountain West voters, public lands rate incredibly positively, and are understood as valuable to the economy. Even in the context of other important issues like affordability, health care, and education, 86% of voters see issues involving public lands, waters, and wildlife as a motivating factor in supporting an elected public official across Mountain West states.
• Funding cuts, rollbacks of protections, and loss of natural areas rank as top concerns for voters across states.
• Selling off public lands is a third rail for Mountain West voters; majorities as high as 85% in one state (Montana) prefer to keep public lands in public hands.
• When given a direct choice, more than three voters to one favor protecting America’s natural resources and public lands rather than maximizing the land available for oil, gas drilling, and mining. This preference for protecting public lands is consistent across party lines, and concern over the impact of oil and gas drilling continues to steadily rise year over year.
• Across a variety of individual actions that give preferential treatment to oil, gas, and mining companies over national lands, over 70% of voters across Mountain West states opposed those actions.
• Regardless of party, Western voters demonstrate a clear preference and priority for renewable energy sources over fossil fuels, a pattern that has only increased over the past 14 years.

The post Public lands win elections: The Mountain West polling guide for the 2026 miderns appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

When people talk about living near mountain lions, it’s usually about the threat they pose. But what if these big carnivores are also making us safer?

Having more of these big cats in the neighborhood can translate into fewer car collisions with deer, according to research published today in Current Biology.  

“Living alongside large carnivores isn’t simply about protecting wildlife; it’s about protecting the many ways they quietly benefit us every day,” said ecologist Mark Elbroch, who was involved in the new study and heads mountain lion research for the conservation group Panthera.

The findings in some ways resemble the more widely known story of how wolves helped revive Yellowstone vegetation by driving down elk populations that had spiraled out of control due to a lack of predators. The actions of one species can ripple through an ecosystem, sometimes in unexpected ways. In the case of mountain lions in Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula, add the unnatural automobile to the equation.

The discovery of this phenomenon emerged from years of work by native tribes of the peninsula to track deer and mountain lion populations. The research involved scientists from the Lower Elwha Klallam, Skokomish, Quinault, Makah and Port Gamble S’Klallam tribes. Wildlife cameras placed at more than 500 locations, combined with GPS-equipped collars on 59 mountain lions, provided a detailed picture of where the cats and their prey were spending time.

The researchers paired this data with the locations of nearly 1,000 collisions between cars and wildlife on the peninsula between 2020 and 2025. Those crashes were associated with more than 80 injuries, two fatalities and $14.7 million in car repairs and medical care.

 

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The pattern of where these collisions happened couldn’t be explained simply by the abundance of deer (based on the wildlife cameras) or by the level of human development and traffic. But when the scientists added the data from the mountain lion collars, it revealed that these cats were a major factor.

In places where mountain lions occurred with relatively high frequency, the likelihood of a car running into a deer was 67% lower, the scientists found. Overall, having lots of mountain lion activity in an area translated into a 76% drop in the total number of expected collisions over five years, according to a model scientists used to analyze the interactions between the cats, their prey and motorists.

The dynamic appears to be related to how deer behave when mountain lions, also known as pumas, are in the area. Much as mountain lions adjust their movements when people are nearby, deer do the same when one of their most fearsome predators is on the prowl.

“Deer alter their use of both space and time where pumas are present, overlapping less with roads and reducing activity at night, when some of the most dangerous collisions occur,” said lead author Justin Suraci, an ecologist at California-based Conservation Science Partners. “Increased road safety thus represents an ecosystem service that large predators like pumas can provide to human communities.”

Wildlife advocates are hoping awareness of benefits like these might help make the case for conserving such species, which often make the headlines only when they attack people.

“Carnivores may well be providing a similar road safety service elsewhere around the globe where populations have persisted and this valuable ecosystem service has just gone unnoticed,” said Suraci.

In fact, deer are far more deadly than mountain lions. A 2011 study by the U.S. Geological Survey found that mountain lion encounters at their 1990s peak resulted in approximately 5 injuries and 1 fatality per year in North America. Two deaths involving mountain lion attacks have been reported in the 2020s.

By contrast, in 2024 alone more than 200 people died in vehicles that ran into wildlife, mostly deer.

Suraci, et. al. “Large carnivores shape road safety through effects on prey space use.” Current Biology. Aug. 5, 2026.

Photo: ©Glen Kalisz, WSDOT

U.S. Attorney and top D.C. prosecutor Jeanine Pirro brought a box full of evidence to a meeting with President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum at the White House on Monday to prove that the damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was caused by shoddy construction and not by vandals. Both Trump and Burgum had publicly rebuked Pirro for filing a motion last Friday to dismiss the felony case against Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who was accused of vandalizing the pool.

The motion blamed the Interior department for holding back critical evidence from prosecutors that they claimed they did not see until after they had secured the indictment for Hearn from the grand jury in D.C.’s Superior Court. The U.S. attorney’s office has also moved to dismiss criminal charges against three others accused of vandalizing the reflecting pool.

According to sources familiar with the Oval Office meeting on Monday, Pirro accused Doug Burgum of misleading Trump, making the case that Burgum had promoted a self-serving cover story to conceal his own missteps. Pirro said that her staff relied almost exclusively on claims by Interior department officials that extensive damage to the lining was caused by Hearn and other vandals who were observed tugging at or removing pieces of material from the wall. After reviewing thousands of pages of evidence, Pirro concluded the Interior department’s rushed timeline and “botched” renovation was responsible for the damage, and that bad information from Park Police officials had led her to cite “tremendous evidence” against Hearn that did not exist.

Center for Western Priorities Communications Director Kate Groetzinger writes in a new Westwise blog post about Burgum’s reflecting poll lies: “For six weeks, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told the country that vandals gutted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He said it on CNN. He said it on Fox. He said it was caught on camera and backed by eyewitnesses.” Groetzinger raises the question, if Burgum lied about the reflecting pool damage even after learning the truth, what other lies will he tell?

Quick hits Doug Burgum’s reflecting pool lies lead to an Oval Office showdown

New York Times | CBS News | USA Today

Energy developer backs off swapping solar farm for data center and gas plant

Heatmap

Diné woman fights for water rights and environmental justice on the Navajo Nation’s Black Mesa

Arizona Republic

Controversial mineral access deal takes Colorado oil and gas battle to a new level

Denver Post

Former park ranger says removing placard at Grand Teton visitor center about a massacre of Blackfeet people is censorship

Cowboy State Daily

The future of Wyoming’s federal coal reserves depends more on demand than availability

Cowboy State Daily

American Prairie files lawsuit to halt BLM bison grazing decision

Bozeman Daily Chronicle

U.S. Supreme Court sets date for blockbuster climate case

E&E News

Quote of the day

All of the blame for this waste of taxpayer funds and lying to the public about it falls at the feet of Secretary Burgum and President Trump. The career staff at the National Park Service are some of the most dedicated and committed public servants who work every day to preserve and protect our national parks. They don’t deserve the blame for this mess.”

—Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, E&E News

Picture This

@usinterior

Six years ago today, the Great American Outdoors Act became law, making one of the largest investments in America’s public lands in a generation.

Today, those investments are restoring historic landmarks, rehabilitating iconic roads like Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road, improving trails, and expanding access for millions of visitors.

Get outside and celebrate the great outdoors.

Photos of Going-to-the-Sun Road by @glaciernps

Featured image: Doug Burgum appears on CNN on July 5; Credit: Aaron Rupar/X.

The post Doug Burgum’s reflecting pool lies lead to an Oval Office showdown appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

A photo submitted to the court by federal prosecutors as evidence in the ongoing “Blooming Onion” prosecution shows a shrine to the Santa Muerte found in the home of Javier Sanchez Mendoza Jr., a farm labor contractor convicted of Conspiracy to Engage in Forced Labor and sentenced to 30 years in prison earlier this year. La Santa Muerte, or the “Angel of Death”, the skeletal figure located in the middle of the photo and shown here holding a scythe, is known to be widely celebrated by violent narco-traffickers in Mexico. Forced labor convictions are cause for celebration, but alone they cannot end modern slavery. Together, with the Fair Food Program, we can prevent the next slavery operation.

This summer, federal prosecutors concluded the criminal forced labor case known as Operation Blooming Onion—the largest modern-day slavery prosecution in the history of U.S. agriculture.

But while the convictions mark an important victory, they also leave us with an urgent question: How many more trafficking operations are still out there, hidden in far reaches of our food supply chain today?

According to federal prosecutors, the Blooming Onion conspiracy exploited tens of thousands of farmworkers for more than a decade. The ringleaders maintained their power to abuse their workers and steal their wages through the repeated use of violence, threats against their families, and involuntary confinement. One woman was held in sex trafficking for two years, and two workers died from heat exhaustion while trapped in the operation.

The case began in 2015, when the Coalition of Immokalee Workers received a call from a guestworker who had witnessed horrifying abuse while harvesting onions in southern Georgia. The worker described an operation that recruited hundreds of H-2A guest workers each year, charged illegal recruitment fees, confiscated workers’ documents, stole their wages, threatened workers and their families with violence, and confined workers who resisted.

The CIW documented the allegations and shared its findings with federal authorities, helping launch the federal investigation in 2016. Over the following years, CIW human rights investigators continued working with federal law enforcement to expose the full scope of the trafficking ring. In 2021, more than 200 federal agents executed over 20 search warrants across southern Georgia, rescuing hundreds of workers. Nearly two dozen traffickers have now been convicted.

An editorial cartoon published by the Naples Daily News in the 1990s following the successful slavery prosecution US v Cuello, one of more than a dozen such cases where the CIW uncovered forced labor operations and helped law enforcement agencies prosecute the ringleaders.

The CIW’s work in uncovering the Blooming Onion operation and helping federal authorities bring its ringleaders to justice was not a first. For more than 30 years, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has helped uncover and combat modern slavery in U.S. agriculture, assisting in the liberation of thousands of workers trapped in forced labor.

Yet, with each successful prosecution, the same conclusion only grows stronger: We cannot prosecute our way out of modern slavery. We must prevent it.

That initial realization led farmworkers to launch the Campaign for Fair Food in 2001, educating consumers about the abuses at the bottom of the food supply chain in this country and mobilizing students, people of faith, the labor community and others to call on the billion-dollar food brands to ensure their supply chains are free from forced labor and other abuse.

Throughout the 2000s, farmworkers from Immokalee and consumers from Florida to California marched, protested, and pressured brands from Taco Bell to Whole Foods to support their demands, winning agreement after agreement for “Fair Food”. With that growing market power behind the farmworkers’ vision, the CIW was finally able to launch the Fair Food Program in 2010—a unique human rights enforcement program designed to stop abuse before it happens by changing market incentives that have long rewarded the lowest-price producers at the cost of often brutal exploitation, and failed to punish abuse, even when the abuse manages to make headlines.

Today, tens of thousands of farmworkers across 22 states and three countries are protected by the FFP’s worker-led mix of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms: worker-to-worker education, a 24/7 complaint line, independent monitoring, rigorous audits, and legally binding agreements with major food retailers that create swift market consequences for human rights violations. Human rights experts have credited the Fair Food Program with effectively eliminating forced labor, sexual assault, and other zero-tolerance abuses from participating farms.

The Program is also growing. Worker organizations in industries ranging from construction and sugarcane to bananas and plant nurseries are partnering with the CIW to bring this proven Worker-driven Social Responsibility model to millions of more workers in the United States and around the world.

How you make all this possible

But whether or not the Fair Food Program—and its invaluable impact on the lives of workers and their families—continues to grow truly depends on people like you.

Every worker who learns their rights and overcomes their fear of standing up against abuse. Every complaint investigation that establishes the facts and remedies an injustice. Every new employer or corporate buyer that joins the Fair Food Program and expands the program’s power to ever more workers. Every new industry transformed by workers empowered to serve as an army of frontline monitors of their own rights.

None of that happens without your sustained support.

We are asking all who can to become Fair Food Sustainers—monthly donors who help ensure the Fair Food Program can continue to guarantee unparalleled protections for farmworkers on existing FFP farms. And we are asking all who are already Sustainers to consider increasing their commitment—to help the Fair Food Program meet the surging new demand for its services, both here in the US and around the globe.

With your support, we will not only ensure the continued growth of the Fair Food Program, but we will also keep the pressure on companies like Kroger—the food industry giant and Fair Food Program holdout that has been connected to the Blooming Onion prosecution—through the Campaign for Fair Food.

To quote Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands and the first major tomato grower to join the FFP in 2010, in speaking with the national news outlet Axios for their in-depth report on the Blooming Onion prosecution:

“If all retailers joined the Fair Food Program, the most egregious criminal behavior would end, and lesser crimes would be quickly uncovered.”

With Kroger’s massive purchasing power behind the FFP’s unique enforcement expertise, we can stop the next slavery operation in Kroger’s supply chain before it gets started… because four slavery cases in five years is enough.

To do that, we need your help.

Become a Fair Food Sustainer today.

The short-term load demands that will be placed on the electrical grid over the next four years will be unprecedented. After several decades of near zero load demand growth, the system is about to see an energy shock akin to the oil crisis of the 1970s.

Unprecedented Load Demand Growth

In combination, the added load demands on the nation’s grid from the following sources may well see an over 40% growth by 2030.

• Data centers (+12% – S&P Global Research1)
• Crypto-currency mining (+3% – Carnegie Mellon University2)
• Electric vehicles (+9% – NREL3)
• Shifts towards the electrification of heating and industry (+8% – International Energy Agency4)
• Climate change (+10% – IEA5)

Assuming these projections are accurate, the US grid would have to add about 126 GW of new generating capacity each year for the next four years. Current trends would indicate that it will not even come close to meeting those numbers. The most ever added to the grid in a single year occurred in 2002 when nearly 60 GW of new generation came online. And permitting already in place for 2026 indicates that at best the grid will see the addition of 40 GW of solar, 20 GW of battery storage and 10 GW of new wind generation (70 GW total).6

Projections from various studies indicate the US grid may experience over 40% in load demand over the next four years. © Firefly generated

In sum, new generation capacity can only meet a fraction of the anticipated load demand growth. So where will this new power come from?

It is clear that the adoption of AI is part of the problem (see chart above – data centers), but perhaps it can also be part of the solution. Integrating artificial intelligence into the management of energy consumption and distribution of homes, businesses, and even the grid itself may go a long way towards addressing these shortfalls.

The Grid has a lot of Headroom

While total load demand is important, from the grid’s perspective it is even more important when the demand occurs. The electric grid is designed to meet peak demand, the few hours in a year when the most electricity is used, not average load demand. In other words, build for the worst and hope for the best.

As a result, there is extra generating capacity built into the design – but only if it can be used effectively. AI may be just the tool required to assist in making that happen.

In 2026 the capacity utilization for U.S. electric power generation, transmission, and distribution sits at about 72%.7 This means that on average, the grid operates at about 72% of its maximum sustainable capacity. This is an historically low percentage (see chart to the right), meaning there is a tremendous amount of potential generating capacity that could be unlocked with the right management tools.

The grid currently has about 1,353 GW (1.35 terawatts) of generating capacity. Unlocking this capacity potential is the equivalent of building an additional 380 GW of new power generation.

Much of the additional capacity headroom is the result of the grid’s greater reliance on renewable energy such as wind and solar. Given the variability of these resources, a larger cushion has been required to ensure grid resilience. But the addition of batteries and the integration of demand response tools may allow operators to unlock that capacity while still maintaining a resilient grid.

Grid Demand Management

Utilities can employ a combination of technologies, software, and management strategies designed to better balance electrical supply with demand. These can be especially useful in reducing peak load demand. The most direct way of lowering peak energy demand is to deal directly with the sources of that demand. This may involve reducing loads through predictive heating/cooling systems that monitor weather forecasts and minimize heating and cooling when the space is unoccupied — but then pre-cool or pre-heat living spaces just prior to when people return. AI can also be instrumental in monitoring and controlling adaptive lighting and reducing the need for phantom loads.

The Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that 20-60% of all energy used in the average US home is wasted.8 Minimizing even a fraction of this waste can go a long way towards bridging the looming energy gap.

Additionally, the promise of the “smart grid” may actually become a reality with the help of AI. Controlling certain loads during times of peak load demand – such as turning off hot water heaters or EV charging stations – can significantly flatten the demand curve.

Real-Time Pricing

Economics are obviously a huge incentive. Time-of-day pricing schemes have been implemented across the country in an effort to entice consumers to use more power when it is readily available and cut their consumption during high demand periods. These pricing schemes reflect the reality that utilities often face quite different costs when providing power, depending on load demand.

Average wholesale electricity prices across the U.S. generally hover between $20-$40 per MWh. However, during extreme weather events those prices can soar to several thousand dollars per MWh. As a result, consumers often purchase power at prices that are well below cost during some hours and well above cost in others. Trying to match these events can be confusing, causing consumers to simply ignore complex rate structures. As a result, a study by Wharton estimates that traditional time-of-use pricing policies only deliver 17-20% of the efficiency gain that would be possible with real-time pricing.9

Real-time pricing (RTP) seeks to lower cost and reliability risks by passing through actual supply costs to consumers as they occur. Imagine a time when the price of electricity will vary second-to-second based on how much demand is on the grid at that moment. By encouraging load shifting (running loads that are not critical during a time of lower-cost power), RTP can help smooth and flatten demand curves.

In order to meet anticipated load growth, the grid will need to unlock over 120 GW of new power sources each year through 2030. © Firefly generated

But clearly, in order to make this vision a reality, constant and real-time monitoring and controls must manage the system. And here is where AI comes into play. Utilities will require AI-enabled systems that track and price energy costs on a real-time basis. And consumers will need AI-enabled systems, controls and appliances to take advantage of the dynamic pricing. Everything moves simply too fast for humans to monitor and control these constantly shifting systems.

Utilization rates have steadily declined since 2000 as more and more renewable generation sources have been added to the grid. © FRED

Virtual Power Plants

The grid was designed as a network of utilities which controlled (within their service area) all electrical generation as well as all electrical loads (turning them off when supply could not meet demand). This is clearly no longer the case.

The proliferation of distributed energy resources (primarily solar and storage) is taking control out of the hands of the utility and placing it into those of the customers. All those distributed sources of energy represent yet another potential energy resource that could be better harvested to meet the needs of the grid.

SEIA (the Solar Energy Industries Association) tells us that “Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are a network of small energy generation sites—think hundreds of homes with rooftop solar—that are combined with storage technologies like home batteries and electric vehicles to help grid operators manage peak demand, improve affordability, and bolster grid resilience.”10

And there is a lot of potential energy out there. The DOE estimates that by 2030 virtual power plants could provide 80-160 GW of capacity, meeting 20% of peak load demand. And this is energy that can be had at an affordable cost. The DOE further estimates that a new 400 MW virtual power plant would have a net cost of $43 per kW-year, while a similarly sized gas peaker plant would cost about $99 per kW-year.11 Once again AI will be required to effectively manage these resources, moving power from where it is available to where it is needed on a real-time basis.

Predictive Everything

With the integration of AI into all aspects of the grid, comes the ability to predict events and control response to all aspects of the grid.

Predictive hyperlocal weather data will enable grid operators to analyze temperature, humidity, and extreme weather events on a granular level, allowing utilities to anticipate load spikes during heatwaves or cold snaps, optimize renewable generation (solar/wind), and pre-position crews for potential outages.

Predictive equipment maintenance will soon allow utilities to forecast equipment failures before they cause power outages. Rather than dealing with failures as they happen, utilities can reduce unplanned downtime by 50–70% and lower maintenance costs by 20–40% according to studies by the DOE.12

AI has the potential to change nearly every aspect of our lives. The grid will be no exception.

The nation’s utility grid is a highly complex network of millions of interconnected devices. A perfect playground for AI. Grid operators are already envisioning a day when AI models will investigate and troubleshoot potential problems, automate workflows, and take autonomous actions based on AI-driven insights.

Is the grid now a relic of the past?

As the way power is used and delivered is altered dramatically over the next few years, it is not outside the realm of possibilities to assume that AI will also reshape the very utility model that has remained largely unchanged since the days of Edison and Tesla.

With the rise of virtual power plants, it may prove to be only a short leap in regulatory logic to find the first virtual utility competing with the traditional investor-owed incumbents. Virtual utilities that manage vast amounts of power transactions without owning a single power plant or a meter of wire.

And as homeowners and businesses find that they can install off-grid systems more cheaply than continuing to purchase power from the grid – utilities will have to change their business model from thinking of themselves as electricity providers to thinking of themselves as the facilitators of connected energy services. We have seen these transitions before as technology reshapes long entrenched systems: the destruction of “Ma Bell” in favor of wireless telephony and the explosion of the Internet; the emergence of virtual banks such as PayPal and Venmo.

As Douglas Adams once said, “Technology is the name we give to stuff that doesn’t work properly yet.” And AI certainly fits that bill at the moment. But once it gets its act together, it will help to transform how we use electricity in ways we cannot yet imagine.

About the Author
Jay Warmke is the author of numerous green technology books and has developed renewable energy curriculum for many colleges and universities across North America in his capacity is the owner of Solar PV Training LLC. He has served as vice president of the board of directors of Green Energy Ohio and as president of the International Certification and Accreditation Council. In 2015 he was elected to ETA’s Board of Directors and for the past 10 years has served as Chair of the Renewable Energy Committee. He also currently sits on the ASES editorial advisory committee.

1. tinyurl.com/SPGlobaldata
2. tinyurl.com/cryptoloaddemand
3. tinyurl.com/EVloaddemand
4. tinyurl.com/heatloadIEA
5. tinyurl.com/climatechangeIEA
6. tinyurl.com/2026newgen
7. tinyurl.com/gridcapacityutilization
8. tinyurl.com/DOEenergyefficiency
9. tinyurl.com/TOUpricing
10. tinyurl.com/SEIAVPP
11. tinyurl.com/SEIAVPP
12. tinyurl.com/DOEpredictmaintenance