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Meanwhile, residential prices have been growing in all regions of the United States, “and we expect this trend to continue,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.

In March the world’s largest tourism trade fair took place again in Berlin and was met with resistance from Berlin to Mexico. As the event put the spotlight on the upcoming FIFA World Cup, campaigners called out the deadly impact the tournament and a profit-driven model of tourism have on human rights. Here Asamblea Berlin explain the action they took at the fair to denounce the industry.

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CALGARY — CHRIS SEVERSON-BAKER, Executive Director of the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to the latest news on the federal-Alberta energy MOU:“The federal–Alberta energy MOU is a failure for Canada and Alberta both in the...

Austin and Shannon Ehrisman raise all-natural hogs on a 22-acre patch of once-overgrown Christmas trees in central Pennsylvania. While the area is home to many hog farms, Austin says raising them outdoors is unusual—and he didn’t think it was possible a few years ago. Even his father thought he was “a little bit crazy” when getting started.

“In Pennsylvania, I was taught to believe you can’t do anything independently or all-natural with hogs,” says Austin. “Around here, everybody’s got some kind of contract [with a large pork company].”

But the cost of setting up a confinement barn—how the vast majority of hogs are raised—has risen significantly since the 1990s. Austin’s father, for example, built a 1,100-pig barn in 1989 for about US$100,000. That same barn today, according to Austin, would be US$400,000 to US$500,000 but rarely are new barns built this small. He says many hog farmers today feel the need “to get bigger, bigger, bigger,” typically borrowing US$1 million or more, to support their families with hog farming which may not be economically sustainable long-term.

When the Ehrismans were in their early 20s, they toured 50 to 100-acre farms—what might be a traditional launchpad for a young farmer. But between the high land cost and the expenses to build barns, they couldn’t make it work financially.

Then an old Christmas tree farm, previously used as a weekend cabin site, went up for sale between Austin’s parents’ and brother’s farms. There were hundreds of Christmas trees that had gone untrimmed for more than a decade, but it could be a farm of their own.

The Ehrismans were able to negotiate a deal within their budget, closing on the farm one year after they married at 22 years old. Then the real work began.

Austin took a job packing eggs at a chicken farm and picked up part-time work at another hog farm, while Shannon worked as a dental hygienist. Full-time farming on their own land was the dream, but there wasn’t a straightforward path to make that a reality. Austin says he and Shannon spent several years “throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what stuck” to make their small, nontraditional farmland profitable.  

In 2014, Austin saw a YouTube video by a fellow Pennsylvania farmer that introduced him to a different way of raising hogs. Instead of building a US$1 million confinement hog barn, this farmer raised pigs on pasture or in hoop barns with continual access to fresh air and sunshine. They worked with specialty pork company Niman Ranch, which offered a guaranteed market for pork in exchange for high standards of sustainable and humane farming practices.

Austin realized that this would not only be healthier for pigs but would also work for his 22-acre plot. “Getting started with Niman Ranch is a fraction of what a commercial barn is because you can start at any scale,” he says.

Today, the Ehrismans care for around 200 sows, which are mature female pigs that have raised at least one litter of piglets. Austin also works as a Niman Ranch field agent, helping other independent farmers make small to mid-scale farming work. 

For the Ehrismans, their primary goal is making family life possible on the farm. Shannon has reduced her dental hygiene schedule to two days a week, and the family homeschools their seven-year-old son, Lane. Their daughter, Everley, is four years old, and the family recently welcomed a third child, Nathan.

The Ehrismans value the farm being a place where their children can participate and learn. At the confinement hog barns Austin grew up around, farmers need to “shower in, shower out” and wear protective clothing due to the heightened disease pressures in high-density facilities. But on his farm, the hogs are raised in the open air with space to root around and express their natural behaviors. It’s safe for his children to work alongside him, and his older children already help with chores like taking out the trash.

“A farm is the best place in the world to raise kids. There are just so many little things to learn,” says Austin. “The kids are always running in and out…helping with chores, or playing tag in the farrowing barn.”

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

Photo courtesy of Niman Ranch

The post A Farmer’s Dream Takes Root on 22 Acres of Forgotten Christmas Trees appeared first on Food Tank.

Wine is one of the most delicious agricultural products worldwide, but it leaves behind a less delectable trail: millions of tons of wasted skins, seeds, and flesh. Now a team of researchers has landed on a circular economy solution for these mounds of mush. 

They say it can be used as a replacement antibiotic on chicken farms, working almost as well as the real thing.  

In the United States where the study was based, broiler farms—those that raise chickens for meat—have been trying to wean their livestock off antibiotics, over growing fears about drug resistance and environmental damage. But there’s a catch: these drugs, known as ‘antibiotic growth promoters’ serve a useful purpose because they help fight harmful gut bacteria that cause inflamed guts, make chickens sick, and reduce their growth levels. Farmers have been crying out for a solution—and this is where wine waste comes in.

Building on previous work revealing the possible bacteria-fighting potential of wine waste (known as ‘pomace’), the researchers decided to test it out in a series of experiments on 126 chickens, which they split into different treatment groups. Some were fed a diet containing 30% rice bran which is a known gut-inflamer. Others received that diet, but with the addition of a conventional antibiotic called zinc-bacitracin. Another group were fed the bran diet supplemented with a tiny percentage of grape pomace, which was either plain or fermented. 

Even at a tiny dose making up just 0.5% of the chickens’ diet, the researchers found that the addition of grape pomace brought about a remarkable change in the birds. Compared to those animals that received the diet without any added treatment, their body weight gains increased by 79%, and their average body weight increased by almost 20%, both helpful indicators of improved gut health. 

The fermented grape waste produced the most promising results. The researchers think this may be because fermentation changes the grapes’ chemical composition in a way that appeals to beneficial gut microbes that can boost the chickens’ digestive health. Strikingly also, the grape waste-treated birds showed beneficial physiological changes in their guts, 

Overall, the benefits of adding grape pomace were comparable to those recorded in the birds that received the conventional antibiotic treatment. It’s still not known why grape pomace has this antibiotic-like effect, but the researchers speculate that it could have something to do with a series of bioactive compounds contained in the waste including flavonoids, polyphenols, and tannins, which have been shown to reduce inflammation and to have antibacterial qualities. All of that potential sits untapped in wine waste, like buried treasure. 

But at least now there’s a possible alternative. Fermentation to make wine, and then to treat chickens might be exactly the circular solution that both these industries need. 

Tako et. al. “Dietary grape pomace mitigates high-NSP-induced inflammation and production loss via microbiome-SCFA-immune mediated pathways.” npj Biofilms and Microbiomes. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene

Headline News:

• “Clean Energy Seen As ‘Structurally Immune’ To Hormuz-Style Shock” • The war in Iran provided the transition to low carbon with new impetus, as renewable energy is seen as less vulnerable to price shocks, a group of corporate executives and senior bankers said. “Clean energy systems are structurally immune to this type of shock.” [The Straits Times]

Clean energy (Karsten Würth, Unsplash)

• “Cuba’s Power Grid Collapses And Plunges Eastern Provinces Into A Major Blackout” • Cuba is going through blackouts as its aging power grid deteriorates. The island is facing a prolonged economic crisis, recently made worse by a US energy blockade of the island. In Cuba, daily life can be an ordeal for many of the 10 million people. [ABC News]
• “Global Wind Installations Surge As OEMs Pass 100 GW” • Global wind turbine installations rose sharply in 2025, with five turbine makers surpassing 100 GW of cumulative installed capacity, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. A record 178 GW of wind capacity was mechanically installed and 28,395 turbines were deployed worldwide. [reNews]
• “UK Go-Ahead For 3-GW Dogger South And 1-GW North Falls” • The UK government has given permit nods to RWE and Masdar’s 3-GW Dogger Bank South and SSE and RWE’s 1-GW North Falls wind farms off east England. The 200-turbine Dogger Bank array has a grid connection and is expected to be fully commissioned by 2032. [reNews]
• “Solar-Powered EVs Are Here, All Five Of Them” • After twenty years of fits and starts, US automaker Aptera has finally reached a critical milestone. Aptera has a long way to go before it can catch up to industry leader Tesla, but it has 50,000 reservations in hand for its solar-powered EVs, and five validation vehicles have been rolled off the assembly line. [CleanTechnica]

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

Based on reports that the federal government will announce a deal where Alberta’s effective industrial carbon price reaches $130 as late as 2040, we modeled three emissions scenarios. The delay in reaching $130, and the resulting delay in the...

Namun di balik keseruannya, tidak sedikit pemain yang justru mengalami kekalahan besar karena kurang memahami cara mengelola permainan dengan bijak.

Banyak pemain pemula sering terbawa suasana ketika sedang bermain. Mereka terus menekan tombol spin tanpa memperhatikan modal yang tersisa. Akibatnya, permainan yang awalnya hanya untuk hiburan berubah menjadi pengalaman yang melelahkan secara finansial maupun emosional. Karena itu, memahami cara menghindari kekalahan besar menjadi hal penting sebelum memulai permainan slot.

Jangan Bermain Dengan Emosi

Salah satu kesalahan paling umum saat bermain slot adalah mengambil keputusan berdasarkan emosi. Ketika mengalami kekalahan beruntun, sebagian pemain justru meningkatkan taruhan dengan harapan bisa mengembalikan modal dalam waktu cepat. Padahal langkah seperti ini sering membuat kerugian semakin besar.

Pemain yang lebih berpengalaman biasanya memilih berhenti sejenak ketika emosi mulai tidak stabil. Mereka memahami bahwa permainan slot tetap mengandalkan sistem acak, sehingga tidak ada jaminan kemenangan akan datang hanya karena taruhan dinaikkan. Mengendalikan emosi menjadi langkah awal agar permainan tetap terasa nyaman dan tidak berlebihan.

Tentukan Batas Modal Sejak Awal

Sebelum mulai bermain, tentukan terlebih dahulu jumlah modal yang memang siap digunakan untuk hiburan. Cara ini terlihat sederhana, tetapi sangat membantu menjaga kondisi keuangan tetap aman. Banyak pemain disiplin yang selalu memisahkan dana bermain dengan kebutuhan sehari-hari.

Misalnya, jika seseorang sudah menetapkan batas modal Rp100 ribu dalam satu sesi permainan, maka ia harus berhenti ketika nominal tersebut habis. Kebiasaan disiplin seperti ini membantu pemain menghindari keputusan impulsif yang sering muncul saat mengalami kekalahan.

Hindari Bermain Terlalu Lama

Durasi bermain juga memengaruhi pola keputusan pemain. Semakin lama seseorang bermain tanpa jeda, fokus dan konsentrasi biasanya mulai menurun. Dalam kondisi lelah, pemain lebih mudah mengambil keputusan terburu-buru.

Karena itu, banyak pemain berpengalaman memilih bermain dalam waktu singkat namun teratur. Mereka menikmati permainan secukupnya tanpa memaksakan diri untuk terus mengejar kemenangan. Cara ini membuat permainan terasa lebih santai dan tidak menimbulkan tekanan berlebihan.

Pahami Pola Permainan dan RTP

Memahami informasi dasar seperti RTP (Return to Player) juga penting sebelum memilih permainan slot. RTP merupakan persentase teoretis pengembalian dana kepada pemain dalam jangka panjang. Meski tidak menjamin kemenangan instan, game dengan RTP lebih tinggi sering dianggap memiliki peluang yang lebih stabil dibandingkan permainan dengan RTP rendah.

Selain RTP, pemain juga perlu memahami volatilitas permainan. Slot dengan volatilitas tinggi memang menawarkan kemenangan besar, tetapi risikonya juga lebih tinggi. Sebaliknya, slot volatilitas rendah cenderung memberikan kemenangan kecil namun lebih sering. Menyesuaikan jenis permainan dengan kondisi modal dapat membantu mengurangi risiko kekalahan besar.

Jangan Mudah Percaya “Pola Pasti Menang”

Di berbagai media sosial, banyak beredar informasi mengenai pola slot yang disebut-sebut bisa memberikan kemenangan pasti. Faktanya, permainan slot modern menggunakan sistem RNG (Random Number Generator) yang membuat hasil setiap putaran bersifat acak.

Karena itu, pemain sebaiknya lebih berhati-hati terhadap klaim yang terlalu berlebihan. Bermain dengan pemahaman realistis jauh lebih aman dibandingkan mengejar janji kemenangan instan yang belum tentu benar. Sikap kritis seperti ini penting agar pemain tidak mudah terbawa ekspektasi yang tidak masuk akal.

Jadikan Slot Sebagai Hiburan

Hal terpenting yang sering dilupakan pemain adalah memahami tujuan awal bermain slot, yaitu sebagai hiburan. Ketika permainan dijadikan sarana mencari keuntungan utama, tekanan mental biasanya akan meningkat. Pemain menjadi lebih mudah kecewa saat kalah dan sulit berhenti ketika sedang mengejar kemenangan.

Pemain yang menikmati slot sebagai hiburan umumnya memiliki kontrol bermain yang lebih baik. Mereka tahu kapan harus berhenti, kapan menikmati kemenangan kecil, dan kapan menghindari risiko berlebihan. Sikap seperti inilah yang membantu banyak pemain tetap nyaman menikmati permainan tanpa mengalami kerugian besar.

Penutup

Bermain slot memang bisa memberikan sensasi hiburan yang menyenangkan, terutama setelah menjalani aktivitas harian yang melelahkan. Namun tanpa kontrol yang baik, permainan ini juga bisa membawa kerugian besar dalam waktu singkat. Mengatur modal, mengendalikan emosi, memahami pola permainan, dan bermain secara bijak menjadi langkah penting agar pengalaman bermain tetap aman dan menyenangkan.

Pada akhirnya, pemain yang mampu menjaga kendali diri biasanya justru lebih menikmati permainan dalam jangka panjang. Bukan semata soal menang atau kalah, tetapi tentang bagaimana seseorang tetap bisa bermain dengan nyaman tanpa kehilangan kendali atas keputusan yang diambil.

As spring weather arrives, drivers in electric vehicles (EVs) may notice that their cars are going farther between charges. They aren’t imagining things — like all vehicles, EVs operate more efficiently in temperate weather. To help grid planners and regulators better account for these seasonal effects, RMI is releasing a set of new scenarios in our GridUp EV load forecasting tool to showcase how changes in temperature can affect EV charging demand throughout the year.

What factors affect EV efficiency?

A vehicle’s efficiency boils down to two main factors: the friction it needs to overcome to keep moving forward, and the energy it uses to keep the passenger comfortable through air conditioning or heating (often called auxiliary energy use).

Friction reduces vehicle efficiency in three main ways: air resistance, rolling resistance (tires on the road), and drivetrain losses. In the case of air resistance and drivetrain losses, EVs are often more efficient than internal combustion engines, thanks to design decisions that reduce resistance and far fewer moving parts.

All vehicles, including EVs, use more auxiliary energy when the ambient temperature is either colder or hotter than what is comfortable (such as 68°F/20°C). In these conditions drivers use climate control systems to heat or cool the cabin. This is energy intensive, especially on very hot or cold days. While some electric vehicles use heat pumps to improve climate control efficiency, warming a vehicle requires more energy when the ambient temperature drops regardless of the technology used.

EVs also have a third, smaller factor that can impact their charging speed. Low temperatures can affect battery performance for most common battery chemistries, so some vehicles are designed to heat the battery pack to keep it within an optimal temperature range. This impact is typically only noticeable during high-speed charging in very cold weather, when the vehicle needs to warm the battery more to receive the higher power of a fast charge.

Why does EV efficiency matter?

Vehicle efficiency dictates overall energy demand, regardless of the fuel source. The efficiency of the EV fleet — including variations due to temperature — has important implications for the electric grid: all else equal, a less efficient EV fleet will require building more charging and grid infrastructure to meet the greater demand. While there are tools to mitigate the impacts of EV charging on the grid, making good, data-driven investments relies on decision makers at utilities and regulatory agencies being able to anticipate the scale and location of EV charging demand. This led us to develop our EV load forecasting tool GridUp.

This latest update to GridUp, which incorporates EV efficiency variations throughout the year, helps stakeholders such as utility distribution system planners and public utility commission regulatory staff gain more confidence in their ability to make the prudent infrastructure investments needed to serve EV load.

Additionally, while EVs have zero tailpipe emissions, their efficiency still influences upstream power sector emissions. As three-quarters of US electricity still comes from nonrenewable sources, lower EV efficiency means burning additional fossil fuels and therefore greater carbon and local air pollutant emissions (although EVs still have a much smaller carbon footprint than gasoline vehicles).

In numbers: the seasonal temperature effects on EV charging energy demand

To demonstrate how seasonal temperature changes can affect the energy needed to charge EVs, let’s take a closer look at the results from the new, temperature-dependent GridUp scenarios for two cities with very different climates: Phoenix and Minneapolis. We modeled the energy use of millions of trips individually, incorporating trip speed and seasonal snapshots of ambient temperature based on hourly weather data to determine how changes in operating friction and climate control use impacted the amount of energy used by a vehicle.

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Phoenix

In Phoenix, the average daily temperature is 76°F (24°C) year-round. On days like that, GridUp’s forecast for unmanaged EV charging in 2035 shows peak power demand reach 2,525 MW. However, on a hot day in July, the temperature climbs to a sweltering average temperature of 96°F (35°C). Then the peak power for charging rises 14% to 2,871 MW. In other words, hot days result in significantly increased energy and power demand from these vehicles, primarily from air conditioning usage. (Gasoline usage is also higher on these days, as drivers of all car types use more energy to cool down.)

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Minneapolis

In Minneapolis, the average daily temperature is 47°F (8°C) year-round. During these days, GridUp’s forecast for unmanaged EV charging in 2035 shows peak power demand to be 387 MW. However, the temperature can plummet to a frigid 16°F (-9°C) on average in January. The peak power for charging then rises dramatically to 540 MW, 39% above the median day. Cold weather also brings additional energy and power demand for cars as drivers try to stay comfortable and their vehicles must overcome an increase in air resistance.

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Seasonal temperature swings change the shape and size of loads that utilities and regulators must plan for, not just the range of an individual EV. For grid planners, relying on EV load forecasts that only consider average conditions can systematically underestimate energy needs for charging, especially during extreme weather, which already stresses the grid. Understanding seasonal variation in vehicle efficiency is a prerequisite for making prudent, least-cost investments that keep costs down and improve reliability.

Consider an example from Minneapolis: In 2035, EV charging is excpected to draw 5,496 MWh for an average temperature day compared to 7,433 MWh in our cold scenario, and this difference of 1,947 MWh occurs day after day. At the end of a cold month (e.g., January), energy demand from charging exceeds an average scenario by 60,357 MWh. Perhaps more importantly, if even a fraction of this demand lines up with evening hours when winter peaks often occur — almost a certainty given typical unmanaged charging patterns — feeders, transformers, and generation capacity that are adequate in an average scenario may become constrained. Planners should treat seasonal EV efficiency as a key part of preparing for peak conditions in different parts of the year.

Whether the weather is hot or cold, utilities and regulators have a set of options to mitigate the impact of EV charging demand; the key will be to plan ahead using good data and planning tools, and take advantage of such opportunities. For example:

• Utilities can and should lean into managed charging and other load management strategies to shift charging to off-peak hours, reducing the need for infrastructure to be built solely for extreme-weather conditions.
• Utilities, regulators, consumer advocates, and other stakeholders can support these cost-effective options by earnestly incorporating EV load flexibility into planning exercises, prioritizing development of programs to harness this flexibility, and ultimately making participation easy for customers.

The new seasonal scenarios in the GridUp tool are designed to make this actionable: they can be used to stress-test infrastructure planning against extreme conditions, model how much incremental load shows up on extreme days, and, importantly, explore what amount of flexibility can be obtained from EV charging to keep upgrades focused where they are truly needed.

RMI’s GridUp Tool

GridUp forecasts when and where energy and power demand will materialize from vehicle electrification. The tool is uniquely detailed and flexible, allowing users to gain greater insight into how driving behavior will create and shape charging demand.

Explore the Tool

RMI would like to thank FedEx for their generous support of this work.

The post How Weather Changes EV Charging Demand appeared first on RMI.

We are disabled, crip, mad, debilitated, and disability activists, advocates, scholars, workers, and home care recipients.

We proclaim our full support for the struggle of the home care workers of New York City who are currently engaged in the “No More 24” campaign. We specifically support their immediate demand for enactment of the No More 24 bill (City Council bill, Intro. 303), and we support the broader struggle of the Ain’t I A Woman?! coalition against the hyper-exploitation of home care workers.

Presently, tens of thousands of New York City home care workers are compelled to labor for 24-hour shifts at only 13-hours pay. These workers are predominantly immigrant women of color, subjected to systematic precarity, vulnerability, under-valuation, overwork, debility, and disablement. They have been unfairly made to shoulder the failings of medical insurance, corporate home care, and municipal and state political systems.

Home care workers deserve far better than the intolerable status quo. So, too, do disabled people and other recipients of home care. Disabled people in New York City and nationwide face disproportionately high rates of poverty, houselessness, unemployment, violence, neglect, discrimination, incarceration, and institutionalization. All disabled people deserve to live dignified, autonomous, well-resourced lives as full members of society in their own homes and communities.

While sympathetic to the concerns expressed by some disabled people about the No More 24 bill, we think it is horribly mistaken that some leaders of disability NGOs and legacy advocacy organizations have publicly framed the No More 24 workers’ struggle as counterposed to the interests of the “disability community.” We know well that disabled people have much to lose (and potentially gain) in the outcome of this fight. But we know, too, that the battle lines in this fight are not primarily between disabled people and the home care workers.

We are further disappointed that some supposed allies of disabled people – including the officialdoms of certain unions, and the Democratic Party state governor and city mayor, Kathy Hochul and Zohran Mamdani – have lent their efforts to stymieing or otherwise slow-walking the No More 24 campaign, citing in part their “concern” for the disabled. We reject this as a hollow alibi for refusal to act on the just demands of the home care workers.

In sum, we endorse the home care workers’ demand for an immediate end to 24-hour shifts at 13-hours pay. We further emphasize what to us is an inextricably linked demand, namely, that disabled people should continue to have the option of receiving care in their own homes and communities, with no reduction in the number of care hours received. We view the home care corporations, “managed care” insurers, and city and state government officials – that is, the most powerful entities in this many-sided relationship – as being squarely responsible for effecting this latter demand by way of their access to ample funding sources (this is, after all, the richest city in the richest country in the history of the world).

This is a crisis of the ruling class’s making. It is the fault of neither the exploited home care workers nor the predominantly poor recipients of home care. Consequently, we believe that the joining of the struggles and demands for both workers’ justice and disability justice will strengthen each in a powerful mutualistic coalition. Thus, we appeal to the home care workers, the No More 24 campaign, and the Ain’t I A Woman?! coalition, as well as to all disability advocacy organizations, to explicitly advance our respective interests in tandem. We say: “No More 24!”, “Put People First!”, and “Universal Home Care Access is a Right!”

Add your signature.

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: Ain’t I A Woman Campaign; modified by Tempest.

The post No more 24! appeared first on Tempest.

Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin speaks to writer Grace Byron about trans representation, artificial intelligence, and the role of criticism in an age of moral panic.

The post Grace Byron on cultural criticism, transphobia and Trump appeared first on Red Pepper.

As the fast-moving blaze rolled toward Fire Chief Jason Schneider’s district in Cozad, Nebraska, he and his crew faced a literal uphill battle.

The Cottonwood Fire was tearing through the Loess Canyons, an area defined by steep slopes, narrow valleys, few roads, and pockets of invasive eastern red cedar trees, which can throw embers and ash and even explode when they burn.

“You think you would have it put out, and you keep on moving north, and you’d look back south and it’s just going again behind you,” Schneider said of the March blaze.

But the situation started to improve when Schneider’s crew connected with the South Loup Burn Association, a group of landowners and ranchers who were also fighting the fire. They showed Schneider and his volunteer crew how to do back burns — setting controlled, low blazes in the path ahead of the Cottonwood Fire to consume any flammable material — to contain the wildfire. About 92 percent of Nebraska’s fire departments listed with the National Fire Department Registry are volunteer-based.

A drip torch owned by Austin Klemm was used to help contain the Cottonwood Fire that burned in Nebraska’s Dawson, Lincoln, and Frontier counties in March. Courtesy of Austin Klemm

“It would have burned a lot more if they hadn’t showed up and helped us get it stopped where we did,” Schneider said.

Unlike other parts of the country where wildfire season peaks in summer and late fall, Nebraska is set ablaze in the spring. This year has marked the state’s worst on record. As of May 6, conflagrations burned about 981,502 acres and dealt a blow to ranchers. They also brought to the forefront the growing debate over a controversial and centuries-old land management practice: using fire to fight fire. 

The Cottonwood Fire, contained by prescribed burn techniques and past prescribed fires, made the case for the practice. But during the same month, separated by just a county, heavy winds turned the smoldering remnants of a prescribed burn in the Nebraska National Forest into the Road 203 wildfire, which devoured nearly 36,000 acres.

Decades of fire mismanagement and climate change have primed America’s landscapes to burn. Today, fire districts, land managers, and local authorities from California to Florida to New Jersey are increasingly embracing the use of prescribed burns to prevent the most severe blazes. According to the National Association of State Foresters and the Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina burned between 250,001 and 1 million acres, while California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona burned between 50,001 and 250,000 acres, in 2020 alone. In the Great Plains, these burns are now common practice in states like Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, said Dirac Twidwell, a rangeland and fire ecologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

In Nebraska, too, particularly in east and central parts of the state. The Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council estimates that 2025 saw the most acres burned by prescribed fire in one year during recent times. 

But in areas of the state like the western Sandhills, the practice has sparked backlash.  

“There was a [prescribed burn] group that tried to establish a couple of years ago up around the Tryon, Mullen area up in there. And they almost lynched that group,” Keystone-Lemoyne Fire and Rescue Chief Ralph Moul said. “They said ‘No, we do not want fire in the Sandhills,’ because there’s nothing to stop it up here.”

Despite the fear, there is overwhelming evidence that prescribed burns, when done correctly, can help prevent massive wildfires by burning up volatile fuels like cedar trees. They can also replenish nutrients in soils, making the land ecologically healthier, boosting plant and wildlife diversity and saving ranchers money. The grass that comes back after a burn is often preferred by cattle.

“The wildfires you’ve seen here in Nebraska the last few years are also a consequence of removing fire from the landscape,” said Kent Pfeiffer, program manager for the Northern Prairies Land Trust. “You don’t get rid of fire, you just change the nature of it … instead of having frequent low-intensity fires, you end up with infrequent, high-intensity fires.”

Nebraska’s mild and dry winter set up the state for major wildfires early this spring. Graphic by Quentin Lueninghoener of Hanscom Park Studios for the Flatwater Free Press. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor and wildfire.gov

The issue is growing more urgent as the state faces dual threats. Suppression of natural fires has allowed cedar woodlands to creep into Nebraska’s native grasslands, with more large swaths at risk and an already costly headache for ranchers. Meanwhile, climate change is bringing more extreme conditions, including intense stretches of drier and hotter weather that can fuel more destructive, less controllable blazes.

“What we know is that overall, our fire management is not working,” Twidwell said.

Tucker Thompson was in his 30s back in the early 2000s when he first helped out on a prescribed burn on another person’s property near Gothenburg. The rancher, who summers cattle in the Loess Canyons, knew some neighbors would be upset, but cedar trees were starting to sprout across his land. He wanted to get ahead of the problem, and he was curious.

By today’s standards, the group’s equipment was basic and their knowledge limited. Even though everything went fine, Thompson left thinking the entire practice was insane. He went home and took a chainsaw to the cedar trees across about 400 acres of his property.  

“I’m like, ‘I am never going to be responsible for another fire,’” Thompson said. “And then five years later, they all start coming back. Ten years later, it’s like, I have no choice. There’s no way of killing these dang things, so I burned them.”

Now, Thompson continues the practice and is a member of two burn groups. He helped firefighters contain the Cottonwood Fire, even as it ravaged his grazing lands.

Prescribed burns “decrease the fuel load in these canyons, so we can control these fires to some degree,” Thompson said.

The Loess Canyons area has one of the most advanced prescribed fire cultures in the entire country, Twidwell said. It has reduced the risk of catastrophic fire and made the land more suitable for grazing, which has boosted landowners’ profits.

Up until the last 150 years, fire was common in Nebraska. Wildfires would naturally control species like eastern red cedar, and Indigenous peoples would run prescribed burns to clear underbrush, remove dead biomass, replenish soil nutrients, and encourage new plant growth. 

Prescribed burn associations, nonprofits, and state, federal, and municipal agencies burned more than 92,700 acres in prescribed fires in the first six months of 2025 alone, according to a survey by the Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council. It’s likely the most acres burned through prescribed fire in the state in one year during recent times, the council said.

But conducting these burns requires a lot of planning, monitoring, money, machinery, and manpower. And even when it comes together, a change in weather can cancel the whole operation on a moment’s notice.

Brian Sprenger checks on his cattle in 2023, in Sidney, Nebraska. Cedar trees are creeping into the state’s grasslands, fueling more several wildfires. AP Photo / Brittany Peterson

Semi-retired rancher Jon Immink coordinates burns across multiple landowners’ properties near the Nebraska-Kansas border to help manage cedar trees. He plans years ahead as he maps out which plots of land need to burn when, typically in the stretch from January to March.

“I do not sleep well in burn season. You wake up 4 o’clock in the morning and all you can think of is … you prepare for what could go wrong,” Immink said. 

In order to conduct a land management burn, a landowner or tenant has to apply for a permit and submit a burn plan to their local fire chief, who decides whether to waive Nebraska’s standing open burn ban. By law, the plan requires a lot of documentation and forethought, including a list of on-hand equipment and a description of the weather conditions needed to burn safely.

Fairbury Fire Chief Judd Stewart’s jurisdiction is filled with landowners and managers who use prescribed burns. Stewart had to cancel 40 to 50 burn permits in March when Governor Jim Pillen ordered a temporary statewide halt in issuing due to the devastating wildfires. Stewart wishes the governor would have given more consideration to areas like southeast Nebraska, where fire danger was lower.

“These areas that people had this heavy vegetation, and now they still have that heavy vegetation, but they’ve got new grasses growing in it, and it makes it very difficult to burn,” Stewart said. “As we approach mid- to late summer, when we start getting high temperatures … that vegetation will carry fire again, and now we’ve got those heavy fuel loads that are going to be hard to contain.”

The governor’s order has impacted landowners and managers who have invested thousands of dollars, conducted years of planning, and deferred grazing for prescribed burns that might now have to wait another year, said Austin Klemm, board member of the South Loup Burn Association, the group that helped Schneider and others contain the Cottonwood Fire.

Right now, he is working with about six landowners who have invested roughly $250,000 to $275,000 to plan a burn that might not happen this year.

“Some of these guys have invested tens of thousands of dollars in prep work to be able to burn,” Klemm said. “These guys have deferred grazing, did not graze at all last year, had to go find a place to stick cows or feed cows all last year.”

Becky Potmesil doesn’t have to look far to see the devastation wildfire can cause. Potmesil raises cattle in the Alliance area of the Panhandle, on the western edge of the Sandhills. To the south, the Morrill Fire burned an estimated 642,000 acres, making it the largest on record in the state’s history. To the southeast, the Ashby Fire burned another 36,000 acres.

The winds have blown away the black, burnt grass, leaving behind only sand dunes. It looks like a moonscape, she said. 

“Anybody who’d do a prescribed burn out here in the [western] Sandhills in western Nebraska is crazy, and it’s dangerous,” she said. While she sees how there could be benefits in some parts, like the meadows, she doesn’t think it would be worth the risk in her area.

Moul, the Keystone-Lemoyne Fire Chief, is cautious about issuing burn permits in his district, especially in the Sandhills. He likes for there to either be snow or green grass on the ground. Unlike in other parts of the state, the Sandhills have fewer fire breaks, less infrastructure, and more extreme weather conditions like high-speed winds and very little humidity, Moul and Potmesil noted.

A prescribed burn conducted south of Callaway, Nebraska, in 2022 by the South Loup Burn Association.
Courtesy of Austin Klemm

Moul, who was an incident commander on the Morrill Fire, understands that prescribed fire has its place if it is done safely. However, after seeing damages from prescribed burns escaping in his career, he said fire chiefs should not allow prescribed burns on or right before red flag days in their districts. 

“Some of these burn groups, they’ve been burning for years and years and years. For the most part, they know what they’re doing out there, but there are a few, like I said, that have convinced these fire chiefs to write the permit on red flag days, because that’s when they get the best kill of the trees,” Moul said. “But it was my experience when I worked with the state that we went to a lot of escaped fires because of prescribed burns that got away.”

The Road 203 wildfire initially started as a prescribed burn in the Bessey Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest. More than a day after the fire ignitions ended, heavy winds created a spot fire outside the original boundary as firefighters mopped up and patrolled the area, according to the Forest Service. The agency said 99.84 percent of its prescribed burns go according to plan. This one didn’t.

According to the Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council’s survey last year, 1.6 percent of burns surveyed escaped and required outside assistance, primarily from volunteer fire departments. Changing weather patterns and the spread of cedar trees are the primary reasons for escapes, the Fire Council said in an email.

“When the gap between prescribed fire acres and fuel load increases, it also increases fire behavior in both prescribed fire and wildfires, causing us to adapt to riskier burns with increased planning and equipment,” the Fire Council said. 

When Twidwell came to Nebraska in 2013, he was told prescribed fire would never be used in the Sandhills. Since then, he’s seen multiple burns happen there as the culture continues to shift. 

He knows some landowners will never be convinced, and he understands their concern. But beyond protecting the grasslands, Twidwell believes Nebraska needs to have more conversations on how to mitigate the large wildfires that have torn through the state.

“Everybody understands … the wildfire risk playing out. Fewer understand the benefits and why certain groups are using prescribed fire,” Twidwell said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Nebraska wonders which is riskier: The fires it starts, or the fires it fights on May 15, 2026.

Democrats and Republicans agree on virtually nothing at this point, except the desperate need to build more housing in the United States. Depending on your viewpoint, the country needs new domiciles because it puts people to work and stimulates local economies, or because it creates affordable homes and drives down housing costs, thus reducing homelessness. Affordability, including in housing, is now one of the biggest political issues in America.

Neither party, though, is talking about the secret superpower of new apartment buildings: They’re much better for the planet than constructing single-family homes. According to a new report, these units are “an almost automatic form of building decarbonization,” because three-quarters of new apartments are heated electrically. That means they can run on rooftop solar panels or tap into grids humming with clean energy, instead of burning plant-warming natural gas in furnaces or boilers. 

While the Trump administration and the Republican Party at large try to roll back as much climate progress as they can, they’re inadvertently bolstering that progress by calling for new construction. Deep-red Montana, for instance, recently passed a flurry of bills to get more multi-family housing built. “Apartments are the climate solution hiding in plain sight,” said Alan Durning, executive director of the nonprofit Sightline Institute, which authored the report. 

Nothing against single-family homes, but apartment buildings and condos are much more efficient for a number of reasons. For one, residents share walls, floors, and ceilings with their neighbors, surrounding them with excellent insulation. Secondly, the square footage of each unit tends to be smaller than detached homes, so there’s less air to manage. Accordingly, it takes less energy to climate-control apartment units and keep people comfortable: The typical resident of a downtown high-rise emits one-third as much greenhouse gases as a resident of a detached house in the suburbs.

Because of this inherent efficiency, apartment builders have for decades opted to install what’s called electric resistance heating, like baseboard heaters, instead of gas furnaces. That’s because wiring them up is cheaper than piping in all that methane. “If I am building something with the intention of renting it, I really want to minimize my upfront costs,” said Amanda D. Smith, senior scientist at the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, who studies the built environment but wasn’t involved in the new report. “Often electric water heaters and electric heaters for space heating make sense from that perspective.”

Economic forces, then, have long encouraged the adoption of such systems: 68 percent of apartments built since the early 1970s have been heated with electricity, the report notes. Half a century ago, no one was campaigning to decarbonize buildings to fight climate change — going electric was just the better option. Today, if you live in an apartment, you’re 60 percent more likely to be all-electric than your neighbor living in a house.

And apartments can get even greener. Heat pumps — which move warmth from outdoor air inside, instead of generating it like a gas furnace does — are around three times more efficient than space heaters. Over the past few decades, the technology has gotten more powerful, capable of extracting heat from even freezing outdoor air. That’s helped heat pumps proliferate across even the chilliest climes: Maine installed 100,000 of the appliances two years ahead of schedule, and almost two-thirds of households in Norway use them. Heat pumps are increasingly popping up in American apartment buildings, too: While quite rare in the decades after the 1950s, heat pumps have been incorporated into 18 percent of these structures in the Northwest since 2010, the report notes. (Overall, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. for several years now.)

While traditional electric heat pumps work like air conditioners, in that you need an outdoor unit that connects to an indoor one, new varieties are easier to incorporate into apartments and condos. One from a company called Gradient fits like a saddle over a window sill and plugs into a regular outlet, with installation taking less than a half hour. (Think of it like those old-school AC units jutting out of city apartment windows, only much cooler looking.) Another launching this winter combines the two units into one attached to an interior wall, where it exchanges air with the outside. “Making retrofits simpler will be a game-changer,” Smith said.

If new buildings in hotter parts of the U.S. rely upon gas heating, they’d still need an air conditioning system. The beauty of a heat pump is that it can reverse in the summer to fill a home with cool air. As temperatures rise across the country, heat pumps will not only work more efficiently than space heaters and gas furnaces to warm apartments, but to provide invaluable cooling to keep people healthy. Already in the U.S., heat kills more people every year than all other forms of extreme weather combined.

Making a building’s heating fully electric encourages the adoption of another appliance critical for reducing greenhouse gas emissions: the induction stove. “If you’re building a building and you’re heating and cooling with heat pumps, it doesn’t really make sense to hook it up to the gas system to pipe a tiny bit of gas in for people to cook on their gas stoves a couple of times a week,” said Matt Casale, managing director of states and regions at the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition, which wasn’t involved in the report.

All this electrification could potentially slot into a burgeoning technology known as networked geothermal. Instead of a building’s heat pump using outdoor air, it uses liquid pumping underground. Because the earth’s temperature remains a more consistent temperature year-round than the air, these heat pumps are even more efficient at warming a space. If all of an area’s buildings — apartments or otherwise — are hooked into a networked geothermal system, there’s no need to pipe gas into the neighborhood at all. “It’s a real community-based energy system, and you’re using energy that’s literally homegrown,” Casale said. “It’s right under your feet.”

Beyond their superior energy efficiency and tendency to go electric, apartment buildings provide denser housing, fitting far more people into a footprint than a single-family home could manage. If located near daily essentials, like grocery stores, residents can walk instead of drive, further reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Ideally, robust public transportation systems can get those apartment-dwellers anywhere they can’t walk to. 

Building big apartment buildings of just apartments, though, just won’t cut it, said Cécile Faraud, head of the clean construction program at C40, a global network of climate-focused mayors. These structures need mixed uses, where living spaces sit atop commercial spaces, like markets and doctors’ offices. “So you can access care, you can access education, you can access your needs in terms of shopping,” said Faraud, who wasn’t involved in the report. “But also in terms of health, so being able to exercise in parks, etc., and access to nature.” 

Indeed, what surrounds these apartment complexes matters too. Green spaces reduce temperatures, boost residents’ mental health, and provide habitats for native plant and animal species. Better yet, “agrihoods” surround working farms with multi-family housing, generating nutritious produce for residents to enjoy or sell. (Faraud stresses that in addition to creating more housing, cities need to retrofit existing buildings to be more energy efficient, like with double-paned windows and better insulation.)

Constructing apartments, though, is often way more difficult than it should be, housing advocates say. The new report notes that “apartment buildings of at least four stories are currently allowed on less than 1 percent of the residential land in all but 10 Oregon cities” — even in progressive Portland, that figure is 14 percent. “The main thing that we need to do is re-legalize apartments in a much larger area of our cities,” Durning said.

Cities and states are responsible for that, not the feds. But the growing national push from both parties to get more units built will be a win-win for people and the planet. “Even across a political landscape that’s as fractured and divided and as contentious as what we’re seeing now,” Smith said, “I think most people are willing to say: We want people to have homes.” 

toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A powerful greenhouse gas that accounts for about 11% of global emissions, methane is the primary component of natural gas and is emitted into the atmosphere by landfills, oil and natural gas systems, agricultural activities, coal mining, and wastewater treatment, among other pathways. Over a 20-year period, it is roughly 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The surprising climate fix that Democrats and Republicans both love on May 15, 2026.

Ten candidates are vying for two seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission in the May 19 primary. Early voting is already underway.

The commission oversees utilities, including telecommunications, natural gas, and electricity, and has final say over how Georgia Power, the state’s largest electric utility, makes energy and what it charges customers. This gives commissioners substantial power over Georgians’ energy bills and the state’s climate future, because burning fossil fuels to make electricity is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. By the PSC’s own description, “very few governmental agencies have as much impact on peoples’ lives as the PSC.” 

Still, elections for the commission have rarely received much attention. That changed last year. Amid frustration over rising energy bills, voters overwhelmingly ousted two Republican incumbents, sending Democrats to the five-member commission for the first time in 20 years. With two seats up for election again this year, majority control of the commission is at stake. 

Most candidates, regardless of party, broadly agree on the issues commanding the most attention: that energy bills should be kept in check and that the commission should do more to protect ordinary customers from the costs of powering data centers. But they bring different backgrounds and approaches to the job.

District 3

The seat for District 3, which encompasses the metro Atlanta counties of Clayton, Dekalb, and Fulton, was on last year’s ballot, but only for a one-year term. Democrat Peter Hubbard won that election and is now running for reelection as the incumbent. Hubbard told Grist he’s running for reelection because he needs more time to enact changes like expanding renewable energy and ensuring Georgia Power is getting the most out of existing resources before building expensive new ones. A full six-year term, he said, would include the “big, meaty decisions” of Georgia Power’s long-term resource plan and rate case. Hubbard said he wants to take an active role in shaping those plans, rather than reacting to what the utility proposes.

“There’s just a baseline to acting as a shield to imprudent spending. But I also think that a proactive commissioner can find even lower-cost solutions than what otherwise would be provided,” he said.

Republican Fitz Johnson, who had been the incumbent last year, lost to Hubbard in 2025 and is running against him again. He told Grist at a campaign event that he’s “got some unfinished business.” While most other candidates in the race have said the commission should do more to shield ordinary customers from data center costs, Johnson said the commission has “100 percent, without doubt” protected them.

“When it comes to the data centers and the large loads, we put the ratepayers first,” he said. “We said we’re not going to put any burden on our ratepayers.”

Read Next Many companies want clean energy. Georgia Power will soon let them build it. Emily Jones

During his time on the commission, Johnson voted for the current rate freeze and the contract terms designed to ensure data centers pay for their own infrastructure, though critics argue those protections aren’t enough. He also voted in favor of Georgia Power bill increases that became the focus of last year’s election and for the utility’s multibillion-dollar expansion to serve rising demand coming mostly from data centers.

Another Republican, Brandon Martin, is running against Johnson for the party’s nomination. He did not respond to requests for an interview. According to his campaign website, Martin is a graduate of Georgia Tech and now works as a purchasing manager in a “multi-billion dollar industry.” His website stresses the importance of reliable energy for Georgia’s growing economy and calls for electricity generation that’s “flexible and as U.S.-centric as possible” in light of uncertain global fuel markets, though the site does not offer specifics.

District 5

District 5 covers a stretch of west Georgia from the Tennessee border south nearly to Columbus. Republican Tricia Pridemore has held the seat since 2018 and is running for U.S. Congress instead of seeking reelection. Three Democrats, three Republicans, and a Libertarian are all running to replace her.

All three Democrats stressed that their party’s majority on the commission would bolster support for renewable energy programs.

“Two commissioners can demand better analysis. Three can stop the rubber-stamping of utility requests,” said electrical engineer and lawyer Craig Cupid, one of the Democrats running in District 5. He grew up in a working-class family, he said, after his parents immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago to Augusta. “Every penny counted,” Cupid said. “I understand when a rate increase affects someone, particularly lower-income families.” Cupid also emphasized his technical background, saying it gives him the expertise to act as a “watchdog against monopoly utilities.” 

Democrat Shelia Edwards told Grist that she was inspired to run for a seat on the PSC after getting a power bill of nearly $500. Edwards could pay it, she said, though it was “painful.” “But what about the families that are struggling to keep a roof over their head, or food on the table or medicine?” she said. “How are they gonna afford this situation?”

That was in 2022. Edwards won the party’s District 3 primary that year and was preparing to face Fitz Johnson in the general election when it was canceled because of a voting-rights lawsuit. Edwards, who has worked on political campaigns and in local environmental advocacy, is running again in District 5.

The third Democrat on the ballot in District 5 is Angelia Pressley, who told Grist she’s running because of the PSC’s “dismissal” of the public’s environmental and cost concerns. “The public has to have more voice,” she said. “There has to be more balance at the commission between business concerns and public concerns.”

Pressley said if elected, she plans to host listening sessions around the state to hear Georgians’ concerns and educate them about the work of the commission. 

Sparta residents at a Georgia Public Service Commission hearing. Charlotte Kramon / AP Photo

The Republican candidates all stressed the importance of reliable energy. They said they support affordable clean energy as part of the utility’s overall mix, but would not impose a renewable mandate.

Republican Bobby Mehan has spent most of his career in health care records technology and now works as a mediator. He said that work has taught him “to be open-minded and kind of take this all-the-above approach,” a philosophy he said is key to innovating the energy grid. In a debate hosted by the Atlanta Press Club, Mehan pledged that he would not vote for new rate hikes and pushed his opponents to do the same. 

“I’m willing to put my neck out there and say, ‘six years, not a single rate increase from Bobby Mehan,’” he said in the April debate.

When pressed on the feasibility of that promise, Mehan clarified that he meant he personally wouldn’t vote for rate hikes.

Carolyn Roddy is a regulatory lawyer who has worked for the Federal Communications Commission and on a rural electric service program in the first Trump administration. She is also running in the Republican primary for District 5 and told Grist her experience would help her keep utility costs in check.

“The Georgia Public Service Commission can do a better job of what they’re doing,” she said. “How dare you impose these kinds of rate increases when people’s family budgets are already stretched really thin?”

The commission, she said, should question and guide utilities but should not be either “a big impediment or a big rubber stamp” for their plans.

Republican Joshua Tolbert is an engineer who’s worked in several different types of power plants, a perspective he said is missing from the commission. Without specific technical expertise, Tolbert said, commissioners are less able to question and push back on proposals from utilities. That pushback is critical, he said, because Georgia Power is a monopoly, so the commission has to provide the kind of “consequences and feedback” that would normally come from free market competition.

The Libertarian party doesn’t have a primary, so the path to November’s election for Libertarian Thomas Blooming is different from the other candidates. He needs signatures from voters to appear on the ballot, though the party can collect those signatures for their slate of candidates as a whole.

Blooming is an electrical engineer who’s worked on data centers for Google and Facebook and now works for Utility Innovation Group, which builds microgrids with a focus on decarbonization and resilience. Blooming stressed that he’s not against data centers, but that problems come up when the grid can’t support them. More nuclear energy could be one route to serving data centers, he said. Blooming also highlighted the risks of relying too heavily on any one source of energy. Too much natural gas could drive up costs, he said, while overreliance on renewables could make the grid less reliable.

“You have to protect the ratepayers, but you also have to make decisions that keep Georgia Power healthy,” he said. “It doesn’t do anyone any good to just absolutely lock down on Georgia Power and then they’re not able to provide the power that they should.”

Rahul Bali contributed to this report.

toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Energy bills keep rising. These candidates in Georgia say they can help. on May 15, 2026.

Renee Costanzo cranked on the rusty pulley with both hands, watching the greenhouse roof creak open in sections. A breeze of spring air swept over 12,000 seedlings lined up in plastic trays in the Kilbourn Park greenhouse.

Costanzo, the Chicago Park District’s only full-time employee at the north-side greenhouse, spearheads a months-long effort to grow more than 15,000 plants, including vegetables, greens, and flowers, to get them ready in time for the Kilbourn Park’s annual plant sale.

The massively popular sale, which took place earlier this month, typically draws upwards of 1,100 people every year, with local gardeners lining up around the park waiting to snatch up plants at $4 a piece. But this year, attendance broke records — more than 2,300 shoppers turned out.

“We generally start these annuals at the end of February,” said Costanzo, pointing to rows of popular annual flowers like zinnias, marigolds, and geraniums, which provide bright blooms all summer long before dying at the end of the season. “So we’ve been coddling and loving these babies for months now, and we just want to get them into happy homes.”

Volunteers at Kilbourn Park prepare for the Mother’s Day plant sale. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ

For decades, Chicago gardeners flocked to the Kilbourn Park sale to pick up tomatoes, cucumbers, and some annuals — the standard starter kit for backyard gardeners. But this year, the park responded to a relatively new demand: Nearly 1 in 5 plants for sale are native plant species that have adapted to the local climate and wildlife and are generally low maintenance. 

“Just in the last five years, people have asked for more natives, which is why we’ve been increasing our production,” said Costanzo, who experimented with 30 different native species in November ahead of the plant sale this year. 

For a long time, native plants were seen as little more than weeds, but their value has grown significantly in recent years. Other local plant sales across Chicago and the country are incorporating native species at a pace surprising to even veteran horticulturalists who remember a time when they couldn’t give them away. 

“I’ve watched this for 44 years, from almost zero to now,” said Neil Diboll, the president of Prairie Nursery, a Wisconsin-based nursery dedicated to growing and shipping native plants across the country. 

“It’s not a fad,” Diboll said. “This is a long, steady climb.”  

Last year, Diboll said his nursery experienced a 7 percent increase in native plant sales. This year, they’re shipping out about 500,000 plants and even more seeds. Back in 1982, when Diboll first started selling plants, business was tougher: The company grossed just over $13,000. These days, he said, “you can add a few zeros on there.”

That relatively new mainstream demand has been driven, in part, by concerns about dramatic declines in insect species and climate change-powered extreme heat, drought, and flooding. The caterpillars of the Monarch butterfly, for example, depend on native milkweed as a food source. But as land use patterns have changed, local milkweed species have disappeared, leading to recent declines in Monarch populations. 

The Kilbourn Park annual plant sale is now in its 30th year. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ

“Native plants have been adapting to change for thousands of years,” said Tiffany Jones, who leads habitat education throughout the Great Lakes region for the National Wildlife Federation. “They need less water, less maintenance, and they’re incredibly resilient — not to mention they help flood prevention with their deep root systems and provide habitat for all kinds of crucial species and pollinators. They’re practical and beautiful.”

In Minnesota, Becky Klukas-Brewer, co-owner and head of marketing and sales at Prairie Moon Nursery, a popular native plant nursery, said the Midwest greenhouse is shipping more plants and seeds than ever before. “In the last seven years, we have seen a 350 percent increase in sales, which is pretty awesome,” said Klukas-Brewer. At the same time, the 44-year-old nursery has seen its orders triple. She credits that success, in part, to the growing number of local plant sales across the country, drumming up interest in ecologically-minded gardening. 

For nearly 50 years, Wild Ones, a national nonprofit, has been educating the public about the benefits of reintroducing native plants back into their habitat. What started as a gardening club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ballooned into a nationwide organization with over 14,000 gardening enthusiasts putting on plant sales, seed giveaways, and exchanges. The group has also been noticing an uptick in native plant sales. 

Over 110,000 native plants were sold last year through the organization’s 107 plant sales, according to Josh Nelson, development director with the Wild Ones. He added that another 40,000 native plants were distributed as part of the group’s various programs.

Lourdes Valenzuela works on transplanting young plants before Kilbourn Park’s annual plant sale. Manuel Martinez / WBEZ

As the native plant business continues to grow, the annual Kilbourn Park plant sale is helping meet some of that demand. To make it happen, a team of local volunteers came out on a weekly basis over several months to help sort, pot, and move seedlings. 

“It’s completely worth it,” said Lourdes Valenzuela, a retired schoolteacher who has volunteered at the north side plant sale for 12 years. Valenzuela is part of the Friends of Kilbourn Park Greenhouse, a dedicated group of local volunteers who fundraise to help expand the resources at the nursery. With help from funds collected at previous plant sales, they’ve been able to buy benches, a shed, and even a patio — increasing the footprint of the educational center. The goal this year was to raise $25,000, about half of the total projected cost, for a new outdoor learning center. But Valenzuela said the plant sale was a huge hit, and they easily surpassed the goal. The Chicago Park District confirmed the sale generated approximately $48,000. 

“We literally sold every possible plant, all the compost, lots of baked goods,” she said. “We’re not fighting against the climate here. We’re working with it because it’s what’s native to this area, and they’re beautiful.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Once dismissed as weeds, native plants are now flying off the shelves on May 15, 2026.

Oh man. Same old clown show, awash with boondoggles, each more cringey than the last. As the mad man-child deconstructs DC and slaps his hideous face and name everywhere - historic buildings, fascist arches, garish statues, possibly imaginary gold phones - others have taken his lead with their own patriotic spinoffs. Cue "Fuck You" upgrades, a Strait to Hell arcade for a video-game war, and a Trump/Epstein "Memorial Reading Room" packed with 3.5 million pages of files, where "the truth is hard to deny."

Trump's narcissistic vandalizing of D.C. - couldn't his KKK dad have just hugged him now and then? - is "something dictators have done throughout history," noted Bernie Sanders of his proposed SERVE Act, or Stop Executive Renaming for Vanity and Ego. Co-sponsored by six Senate Dems, the bill would bar any sitting president from naming federal properties after themselves, an act both "arrogant" and illegal. At this rate many weary Americans would likely argue, "Let the chiseling off begin," but for now the bill sits in legislative limbo and we're stuck with the resulting atrocities; they continue to multiply like locusts, even as he's proposed a $10-billion fund for more "beautification" projects around "the capital of the greatest Nation in the history of the world."

Though he increasingly nods off in public - or per the White House, blinks - he still clutches at a farcical show of dominance he's leaned on in the endless self-glorification campaign that is his execrable life. There are posts quoting fictional "fans": "Remarkable leadership,” "Master of the Deal,” "THE GREATEST PRESIDENT WE HAVE EVER KNOWN." From the guy who's "confused the country for his living room," there's D.C's re-branding: the plaques, name changes, razed East Wing for a billion-dollar "albatross" nobody wants. There are new massive Stalin-esque banners at construction sites proclaiming, “Thank you, PRESIDENT TRUMP”- "like Michael Scott buying himself a World’s Best Boss coffee mug" we paid for - to which unenthused residents added, "Fuck You Cunt."

Snug in a delusional bubble where his approval is def not in the toilet, he feels free to rant, lie, melt down online without consequence. In one manic night, he posts 55 times in three hours: “Arrest Obama the traitor” and “DEMONIC FORCE,” also Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Kelly. Asked how much he thinks about the cost to Americans of his calamitous war, he blurts, “Not even a little bit.” His lackeys follow suit: Ka$h Patel yells, lies, hustles bourbon, pads his stats and takes a "VIP snorkel" in Pearl Harbor around the tomb of 900 U.S. soldiers as Sean Duffy takes his nine offspring on a "patriotic," seven-month Great American Road Trip filmed for YouTube and complete with "head-spinning" corporate sponsorship, both on the taxpayers' now-rapidly-shrinking dime.

Meanwhile, another project nobody asked for - draining and repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, aka "reflective pond," from traditional grey to garish blue - has shockingly veered off course. After boasting his bestest golf course pool painters could easy-peasy do a no-bid, $1.8 million, "smart and beautiful construction" that Dems stupidly opposed - "Dumacrats love sewage" - the cost has soared to $13.1 million, it's now by a contractor he "did not know and have never used before,” staff are worried the job is behind schedule, with "uneven application" leaving bubbles, holes and "mottled shades of blue" in the pool, and a judge has set a May 21 hearing for a lawsuit charging the project wasn't properly vetted, ditto a color "more appropriate to a resort or theme park."

More winning in Miami, where another lawsuit charges three acres of multi-million-dollar waterfront land were illegally grifted by DeSantis to Trump for $10 for his presidential “library,” actually a gaudy hotel with no books but more vitally two gold statues of, you know. They will presumably join in grotesque kinship with the $300,000, crypto-bro-funded, bronze and gold leaf Don Colossus just unveiled at Doral Miami, "where the Republic is currently moldering." Before "a robotic chorus of evangelical functionaries who (have) transformed themselves into the most theologically humiliated cohort in modern memory," the statue was honored as, not an idolatrous golden calf, insisted Pastor Mark Burns, but "a celebration of life" and symbol of "the hand of God over (Trump’s) life." Definitely not a cult.

Tacky is as tacky doesBluesky screenshot

Despite being heralded as God's second favorite son - one who "understands the Scriptures better than the Pope" - Trump is also widely deemed "an economic serial killer" presiding over an "America First Corporate Graveyard," skyrocketing inflation, national debt, farm bankruptcies, and energy costs, and possibly "the largest single act of grand larceny in American history" with a $10 billion payout by his own DOJ against his own IRS to settle his bullshit lawsuit for their leak of his tax returns, which every other president has released. Still, because grifting chutzpah thy name is, and because there's never enough money to fill the ugly gaping hole where a soul should be, he's still running penny-ante scams. Up next: Trump Mobile, "for the forgotten MAGA man."

Last June, his huckster spawn announced the launch of "a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance.” The T1 Phone, "proudly designed and built in the United States,” would be available in August at $499. For almost a year, they urged followers to make $100 "deposits" to "pre-order" the beauties; over half a million did, ponying up about $59 million. Then, the bait and switch. The terms of service quietly changed: The "deposit" provided "a conditional opportunity" to buy if Trump Mobile chose to sell. Pricing, production schedules, shipping costs were "non-binding." "Made in the USA" became "Proudly American Designed." "Delivery" dates got pushed back. Unexplained charges appeared. A reporter who called "Customer Service" got “Omega Auto Care." To date, no fantasy Trump phones have shipped. Cheap Crooks 'R Us.

"Service for the forgotten MAGA man"Image from Bluesky

Also, liars. With even neo-cons now deeming the Iran War potentially more of a debacle than Vietnam, the good folks at Secret Handshake, creators of the Trump/Epstein bestie statues, decided that with the regime hyping war like a video game, they might as well turn it into one. Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell , which is also online, features three working, arcade video games set up inside DC's War Memorial; they promise "high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground...pure pixelated patriotism," or, per Hegseth, "laser-focused maximum reps annihilation mission crushing (with) sustained unrelenting pressure." Battles - by tweet, not gun - pit US forces against ”Iranian schoolgirl,“ "DEIyatollah,“ low-flow shower heads, the Pope and other "threats to American freedom."

Games open with Trump declaring, “Another big, beautiful day as the best President ever.” Options for the prompt, “Ready to ROCK Iran back to the Stone Ages?” are “Not Yet...” “Yes” and “Hell Yes.” Yells Pete, “Let’s liberate some oil!” Trump can order a Diet Coke or bomb Iran; search for barrels of oil, ideas for Truth Social posts, or endless threats that lead nowhere; he vows to “fight this war and win it by hamburger o’clock.” Melania: “I WAS NEVER ON THE EPSTEIN JET...Did you burn the files yet?” JD, fat-faced: “I love couch.” The only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania’s hand, which abruptly ends the game; otherwise, it’s impossible to end or win it. Irony never dies: Images have surfaced of bored National Guardsmen - a $1 million a day deployment - playing.

Another piece of protest art brings the truth of "one of the most horrific crimes in American history” to Trump's hometown. "The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room,” in New York's Tribeca, is a first-of-its-kind, 5,000-square-foot installation containing all the unsealed Epstein files - 3.5 million pages printed and bound into 3,437 volumes weighing 17,000 pounds, "a physical, undeniable record of corruption, cover-ups, and crime." The pop-up project in the Mriya Gallery was created by the non-profit Primary Facts; it took them about a month to print the files. The exhibit is on view through May 21; admission to groups for a one-hour session is free; organizers are raising funds to cover the New York premiere and bring it to other cities.

The Trumpsonian installation is built around a candlelit tribute to Epstein's more than 1,200 victims and survivors, whose names are all redacted here in closed binders - unlike at the DOJ, where they were badly, only partly redacted, a failure adding insult to injury along with an ongoing, multi-pronged cover-up. The Trump and Epstein Reading Room also includes a timeline documenting the decades-long crimes, legal proceedings and intersections between the two men's lives, all underlining the criminal absurdity of federal claims "there's nothing left to investigate." The vast trove of information, organizers say, is "what 3.5 million pages of evidence looks like." Trump, as deeply complicit as he is narcissistic, "wanted his name on stuff." Now, here it is.

From the TrumpsonianImage from Memorial Reading Room

May 13, 2026,

Moab Times Independent article
“Protest Planned near La Sal over Uranium Mining Concerns”

https://www.moabtimes.com/articles/protest-planned-near-la-sal-over-uranium-mining-concerns/

Pig gas slaughter 'backed by ministers' Channel News brendan 15th May 2026 Teaser Media

“The lust and the avarice
The bottomless, the cavernous
greed”
– Natalie Merchant (‘Motherland’).

“One thing about us wise guys, the hustle never ends.” – Tony Soprano. 

Overview

This article takes as its starting point the U.S. attacks on Venezuela and Iran in early 2026. Both attacks, it is argued, demonstrated distinguishing characteristics of the Trump administration: greed, short-termism, incompetence, and an obsession with violent, egotistical gestures rather than strategic calculation. Trump does not pursue any version of the U.S. national interest. Nor does he consistently pursue the long-term interests of the U.S. ruling class and its empire, though the regime is backed by members of the ruling class who share its penchants for short-term gain and narcissistic gratification. The upshot is a decline in U.S. hegemony in the world and a boost to the ambitions of China and other powers.

Introduction

The U.S. government launched two unprovoked acts of military aggression in early 2026. The first, in January, saw U.S. forces violently kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and first lady Celia Flores and bring them to the U.S. to face spurious charges of drug trafficking; the new head of state (the former vice-president) accepted the Trump administration’s demands to open Venezuela up to U.S. capital, assume liability for past corporate claims made against the state, and bow to U.S. oversight of how the country’s oil revenues would be managed. The action was protested worldwide but sparked no serious retaliation from other governments. On its own terms, this seemed a clear victory for the U.S. empire.

The second act of aggression, begun in February, saw the U.S. and Israel launch a massive military campaign against Iran, a war that quickly escalated into a colossally expensive catastrophe in human, environmental and financial terms. Despite the current impasse in negotiations following a ceasefire, it is hard to dispute Owen Jones’ verdict when he describes Trump’s “excursion” as “the biggest strategic defeat suffered by the U.S. since its emergence as a superpower”. This assessment is widely held. Ryan Cooper calls it “an immense strategic defeat – and one that knocks the legs out from under the entire American system of power projection and global predominance”. Iran proved its ability to wreak military and economic havoc on the U.S. and its allies.

Current fragile ceasefire negotiations are based on U.S. willingness to at least discuss Iranian proposals: these include the removal of U.S. military bases from the Middle East and continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, possibly including tolls continuing to be imposed on ships transiting through the marine passageway. The very fact that such issues are even on the table – they would not have been up for discussion before the war – represents a decisive advance for Iran and a huge blow to the U.S. Veteran US diplomat Richard Haass concedes that in strategic terms the US is losing the war,

This article will argue that, despite their seemingly different outcomes, the two aggressions shared certain characteristics associated with the Trump presidency: greed, narcissism, short-termism, limited ambition (in terms of regime change or even resource access), incompetence and incoherence. Not all of these characteristics are unique to this presidency but the salience and intensity of the regime’s avarice and egomania – its hustle and hubris – distinguish it from past U.S. regimes while undermining long-term U.S. imperial ambitions.

Few dispute that the attack on Iran starkly illustrated the limits of the U.S. empire (at least in its current Trumpian incarnation) but so also, in a different way, did the attack on Venezuela. Because Venezuela is more likely to be seen as a relative success for U.S. imperialism, greater space is devoted here to that intervention to argue that, contrary to initial appearances, this was a strictly limited and globally insignificant “triumph”. This is followed with a discussion of the broader pattern of greed and ego now undermining U.S. empire and of how that has worked to the benefit of China in particular. But we begin with an outline of why both mainstream and left-wing commentators typically misunderstand the nature of Trump’s presidency.

Category errors and kleptocracy The Trumpian state

Explanations for why the U.S. administration chose to wage its war on Iran include: a strategic desire to eliminate or weaken the main supposed rival to U.S. control of the Middle East and its oil, and to control or limit the supply of that oil to China especially; deference to Israel’s quest for total domination of the region (a quest that is continuing as Israel seeks to sabotage the ceasefire and continues aggressions in Palestine and Lebanon); and Trump’s wish to distract from the Epstein files and the cost of living crisis in the U.S. (though of course the war worsened that crisis).

All these factors may have played some role. However, writing in the U.S. establishment insider journal Foreign Affairs before this latest assault on Iran, a distinctive, simple and useful frame for viewing the actions of the Trump regime is proposed by Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nixon:

“Trump has… wielded U.S. foreign policy principally to increase his own wealth, bolster his status, and personally benefit a small circle of his family members, friends, and loyalists. U.S. foreign policy is now largely subordinate to the private interests of the president and his retainers.”

Cooley and Nixon criticize other scholars for committing a “category error” (assigning to something a quality it does not possess) and continuing to believe that Trump 2.0 is pursuing (even if poorly) anything resembling the U.S. national interest or that his regime is adopting a classically realist approach to foreign affairs to which his blatant corruption is merely a sideshow.

On the contrary, they argue, in a kleptocratic system like that of Trump, “corruption is the end; the point of holding and keeping office is to enrich a ruler and his inner circle. Regulation, law enforcement, public procurement, and even diplomacy all become means of self-dealing – of extracting resources, controlling streams of income, and diverting wealth to family, friends, and allies”. Cooley and Nixon urge their fellow academics to “stop obfuscating the reality of Trump’s foreign policy by calling it realism… [or] great-power competition.”

Paul Heideman makes a similar case from a different political perspective, one that is not nostalgic for prior periods of U.S. foreign policy (he references the “bloodbaths in Vietnam and Iraq”) but that also recognizes the distinctiveness of Trump’s regime. Heideman locates Trump within the longstanding trend of the Republican Party (and perhaps U.S. party politics more broadly) becoming “unmoored from the control of America’s capitalist class as a whole”. While individual capitalists and sectors exert influence, there is no longer “the kind of class-wide oversight that the foreign policy planning network was designed to provide” – to both Republican and Democrat administrations.

Dismantling the foreign policy network

This planning network, Heideman outlines, operated through corporate-sponsored think tanks that produced advisory reports for U.S. governments and supplied many of the personnel who staffed those governments’ foreign policy departments. The classic example is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, which publishes Foreign Affairs): for example, Condoleezza Rice, George W Bush’s national security advisor, was a CFR fellow while Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State under Biden, was a CFR member; there are myriad other examples. Crucially, the boards of such think tanks bring together representatives of different corporations from different economic sectors, thereby facilitating, in theory at least, the forging of a shared ruling class perspective that has been operationalized through the deployment of think tank personnel within successive administrations. The think tanks thus constitute what Alex Callinicos defines as fora in which “collective [class] actors constitute themselves and articulate their claims”.

Some such personnel (albeit fewer than under previous administrations) continued to occupy key positions under Trump 1.0, but Trump 2.0 has changed that radically: there has been, in Susan Watkins’ words, a “gutting [of] the senior levels of the National Security Council and State Department”, with critical foreign policy roles now more likely to be occupied by people drawn from the worlds of TV and real estate. A military studies professor visiting Washington in March 2026 and nostalgic for the old order has written despairingly:

“It is hard to convey the gloom that has overtaken Washington. All the structures that are vital to crisis management [read: war planning] have either been attenuated or disbanded. There is hardly anyone left on the National Security Council staff. A friend described an empty State Department where you could hear your own footsteps.”

Those foreign policy think tanks that are now influential, unlike the CFR, tend to be aggressively focused ones of recent creation, such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, an Israeli lobbying body with which Secretary of State Marco Rubio is particularly associated, and the equally pro-Israeli Vandenberg Coalition that lobbied hard for attacking Iran. Much has been made of the radical conservative Heritage Foundation’s influence on Trump through its Project 2025 agenda for his presidency. That influence is indeed evident in a number of policy areas, including: centralizing power within the Executive; working against Trans rights, ‘gender ideology’, and ‘wokeness’ more generally; attacking public service media, university and judicial independence; oppression and deportation of anyone deemed undesirable; the attempted limitation of citizenship and voting rights; and shredding the civil service, especially as regards corporate regulation and workers’ rights. But its influence over foreign policy is open to debate.

Heritage did support the weeding out of the network of foreign policy “professionals” that had previously dominated in this area (a former Obama speechwriter called them the “blob”). High-ranking military officers are also being purged, with nine 4- and 5-star military personnel fired during Trump 2.0 – compared to eleven over the entire previous 160 years. Those fired include: the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Staff of the Army, the Chief of Staff of the Navy, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the Secretary of the Navy, and the leaders of intelligence agencies. One result is that decisions now get made by, as Heideman contends, a “staggeringly incompetent policy team”, with the particular ignorance and ineptitude of Trump golf buddy and ubiquitous special representative Steve Witkoff singled out by some. Witkoff has been central to deliberations concerning Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere.

Incompetence is certainly evident in the ongoing debacle of the U.S. assault on Iran, characterized as it is by: unclear and shifting goals; failure to rally, or even prepare to rally, external support; insufficient stockpiles of military assets and of the raw materials necessary to replace them; and the prior decommissioning of minesweepers. The Trump regime’s underestimation of the strength of Iranian resistance is an acute symptom of this incompetence – especially Iran’s willingness and capacity to attack Gulf states (and U.S. bases therein, as well as data centers) and to close the Strait of Hormuz, throwing the global economy into chaos and peril, not just through pushing up oil and gas prices but also through wider commodity price shocks and impacts on global supply chains. Within the region itself, thirty to forty percent of Gulf refining capacity has been damaged or destroyed and it may take up to three years to fully restore it. Experienced military leaders’ words of caution on some or all of these matters continue to be ignored or overridden.

Left misconceptions The ruling class and the state

The category error identified by Cooley and Nixon, and implied by Heideman, can also apply to left-wing writers, who tend to look to Trump as espousing, not the interests of the U.S. as a whole, but the interests of the U.S. ruling class and US imperialism. A common variant is to see Trump as a representative of an aspirant unilateral, muscular new order (in line with Heritage’s Project 2025 agenda), shedding the constraints of the old, multilateral, rules-based system (I’ve gone some way down that road myself in the past). The military assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and first lady, together with the transformation of the rump Venezuelan regime into a U.S. vassal state, might seem, at first glance, a good example of this unilateral approach in successful action but, as will be shown, this is not really the case.

What I term left-wing category errors, with particular but not exclusive reference to Venezuela, include the following:

• Brian O’Boyle stating that “Trump’s MAGA project is designed to reassert the power of a declining hegemon… to make the world “great again” for the U.S. ruling class”. Vis-à-vis the attack on Venezuela, the U.S. ruling class, O’Boyle writes, has made a “calculation that the U.S. can reassert control over an important continent [South America], capture some much needed resources and weaken the role of China in the region.” O’Boyle concludes that Trump’s programme “represents a brutal ruling class turning to ever more brutal tactics to secure their own interests.”
• Referring to continental policy more generally, Susan Watkins concurring: “In Latin America [Trump] is defending and extending the capitalist system against hold-out leftist regimes, and so advancing American economic, political and ideological interests.“
• William Camarco and Frederick Mills crediting the Trump regime with “a strategic project whose assault on Venezuela has broader geopolitical implications”.
• Logan McMillen going so far as to attribute to Trump “a coherent project of global enclosure” in relation to both Venezuela and Iran.
• Charlie Lywood attributing Trump’s (now perhaps paused) drive to take over Greenland to the U.S.’s desire, in the context of imperial rivalry with China in particular, to access rare earths (minerals vital for large swatches of industry, discussed further below) and to assure domination of new navigation routes opened up by shrinking Arctic ice.
• Guy Laron interpreting Trump’s attacks on Venezuela and Iran as strategic responses to China’s near-monopoly of rare earths, creating countervailing leverage over China by controlling its access to the discounted, sanctions-busting oil previously supplied to China by both Venezuela and Iran (though he concedes that, taken together, the two countries only accounted for 17-18 per cent of Chinese oil imports in 2025).

These claims rest on two assumptions: first, that there is a cohesive U.S. ruling capitalist class capable of making such calculations and agreeing on such tactics and, second, that the U.S. state serves as the agent of that class. Both assumptions are questionable.

On the issue of class cohesion, Doug Henwood (writing in 2021) has documented the growing fractures and frictions within U.S. capital, leading to what Salar Mohandesi describes as a lack of a “coherent global vision” on the part of the ruling class. In his book Rogue Elephant, Heideman documents how the U.S. ruling class only adopted a substantively common policy in the 1970s and 1980s when the labor movement was winning concessions from capital amidst falling rates of profit and a concerted fightback was seen as essential, the fightback becoming the global turn to neoliberalism. Once neoliberalism had done its job of disciplining labor and restoring or extending capital’s privileges, Heideman argues, U.S. corporations regressed to individual and sectoral lobbying.

The kleptocratic state

On the issue of who the state serves, Trump, to a greater extent than any U.S. president in the modern era, clearly pursues policies (and Cooley and Nixon are right about this) that are of direct, personal benefit to himself – primarily materially, but also in the sense of feeding a narcissistic ego (Melvin Goodman refers to his “extreme obsession with power, wealth, and self-importance”). This applies most recently to the war on Iran: there is strong circumstantial evidence that regime insiders were making stock and commodity market killings, as well as profiteering through event prediction platforms, by virtue of advance access to Trump’s market-shifting statements on the war. For example, a suspicious number of one-way bets on falling oil prices were made just before Trump claimed negotiations to end the war had been initiated, while large bets on a ceasefire were being made just before Trump announced it on April 7, 2026.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy (himself a blowhard warmonger) decries this as “mind-blowing corruption”, while economist Paul Krugman baldly states that people “close to Trump are trading based on national secrets” and that this amounts to treason. Trump is not alone in this: the Financial Times reports that a financial broker for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth sought to buy shares worth millions of dollars in armaments companies before the war commenced. The war may not have been started to facilitate such shenanigans but it was gleefully exploited for those ends. (Oil companies also made windfall gains from higher prices, a topic we will return to).

David Kirkpatrick estimates that this presidency has already been leveraged to ensure that Trump and his family have grossed over $4 billion. (There is an irony in the fact that a man whose business acumen was always a myth has finally found a sure-fire way of making vast amounts of money). That he does not always achieve his more ego-based goals (even when he thinks he has, as has proven the case in Iran) is not the point, which is that neither he nor the regime he dominates is a reliable representative of any fraction of U.S. capital beyond his own business interests and, to an extent, those of the “patronage system of oligarchs” (John Feffer’s phrase) assembled for the purposes of tribute extraction in return for governmental favors (such as rolling back regulation of AI and crypto).

One can interpret the resistance on the part of the US Supreme Court to Trump’s attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve as an attempt to re-impose some unified ruling class interests on the presidency – a central bank that is independent of democratic oversight but attentive to the needs of neoliberal financial capital serves the needs of the overall capitalist order, not just particular electoral ambitions or regime cronies at a point in time. Trump’s hostility to that independence reflects his lack of concern for the welfare and stability of the system as a whole when it conflicts with his personal agenda

Of course the actions of previous U.S. regimes were also partly driven by the corrupt motivations of key actors (Cooley and Nixon elide this history). To take just one example, Vice-President Dick Cheney, serving under President George W. Bush, spearheaded the 2003 invasion of Iraq and saw a firm in which he had substantial interests – Halliburton – profit enormously, as Jeffrey St. Clair has documented, from no-bid, billion-dollar government contracts (rife with fraud and overcharging) for the supposed reconstruction of Iraq.

But Cheney’s greed and graft can be argued to have largely overlapped with the objectives of U.S. imperialism in controlling Middle East oil and the region more generally – U.S. and other Western oil companies previously shut out of the Iraqi market were able to re-enter (they are still there, albeit non-US companies now dominate), launch major new fields and reap massive profits. This happened at a time before the U.S. itself was transformed, through the exploitation of shale oil and liquefied natural gas, into a much more significant oil and gas producer.. This does not mean the Iraq war was a simple “war for oil” – Matt Huber highlights other factors, especially the perceived and straightforward need to demonstrate US capacity for hard power projection after 9/11 – but the initiation of new oil projects was, at the very least, a bonus.

No such convergence of interests can be assumed in the case of Trump and Venezuela. This argument may seem counterintuitive: does not Trump’s seizure of Venezuela’s president and its oil mark a logical and successful (for now) strengthening of U.S. corporate profits and imperial power? It can even be seen as a counter-example to the Iran war debacle. The issue is given added force by the claim that Venezuela possesses the world’s largest untapped oil reserves, potentially making it even more strategically significant than Iraq.

It is true that there is far more continuity in U.S. foreign policy than is sometimes acknowledged (again, the insistence of Cooley and Nixon on Trump’s claimed uniqueness in this regard is misplaced), especially when it comes to brutal military interventions abroad. But whether the control of Venezuelan oil is or was of particular value to U.S. capital, even to U.S. oil companies, is moot – it is certainly of limited value in the United States’ imperial rivalry with China or anyone else.

Venezuela and limited U.S. ambitions in Latin America The Venezuela heist

Venezuela presents an important test case for the argument that Trump does not seriously promote the interests of U.S. capital and empire. The intervention there is so commonly seen as advancing precisely those interests, whereas the aggression on Iran is already widely seen (including by many Foreign Affairs contributors) to have been a stupid and counterproductive failure, as well as a human and environmental catastrophe. In fact, far from demonstrating a rational, clear-eyed and successful resolve on the part of the U.S. ruling class and the U.S. state to shed multilateral constraints and directly achieve their core objectives, Venezuela reveals a pattern (equally evident vis-à-vis Iran) of short-term thinking, exaggerated claims, kleptocracy and the prioritization of violent photo-opportunities over substance.

In the first place John Ganz argues that Trump’s demands for U.S. companies to invest in Venezuela are unlikely to yield much return:

“Most oil companies today are not inclined toward large-scale production investments; they prefer to hoard cash and limit exposure. There are also internal tensions within the industry: the United States is now a major oil producer, and domestic producers have little incentive to finance projects that would undercut their own prices. Asking US oil interests to invest capital in Venezuela in order to depress global prices is, from their perspective, an irrational proposition.”

High oil and gas prices are good for fossil fuel companies, as was seen in 2022 as the outbreak of the war in Ukraine constricted supplies and the companies’ profits rose substantially. They also made windfall profits from the price rises engendered by the war on Iran. Why then did the share prices of those firms rise after the assault on Venezuela, the exploitation of whose largely untapped reserves might have been expected to depress prices? Most likely, Matt Huber suggests, because there was an expectation that a new (or newly disciplined) Venezuelan government would finally deliver to the companies compensation for property and investments expropriated or stymied due to past nationalizations and state restrictions.

There is certainly money to be made here, largely because the system of investor-state dispute settlement courts privileges corporate claims against governments. To take just one of many examples, oil company ConocoPhillips won nearly $9 billion in a World Bank arbitration court ruling against the Venezuelan government in 2019 (the company claims to be owed a total of $12 billion) with Trump reportedly promising that they would get much (if perhaps not all) of “their” money back.

These are non-trivial sums (and it would be surprising if Trump was not seeking a cut from any such payouts), but they do not presage large-scale investment in, and rehabilitation of, the Venezuelan oil industry. Low investment over past decades and associated infrastructural decay, partly the result of U.S. sanctions (these extend well beyond the oil sector alone), has left the industry in a sorry state. Bringing production back up to historical highs, even if it suited U.S. companies to do so, would demand at least a decade of large and steady investment, as well as overcoming the constraints posed by a shortage of essential dilutants. (If the ruinous environmental cost of all this was to be properly priced in then the bill would be even higher, but we can assume the oil industry is unconcerned with that).

Chris Morlock forecasts that:

“What’s actually lined up for Venezuela is not extraction, but asset stripping.  The firms positioned to “re-enter”Venezuela are overwhelmingly financial, not productive. Asset managers like BlackRock are positioned to absorb distressed sovereign and PDVSA [Venezuelan state oil company]-linked debt, restructure it, and turn future production into collateral streams rather than national revenue. U.S. and European oil majors are waiting not to build capacity but for production-sharing agreements, arbitration rulings, and debt-for-equity swaps that cap output and guarantee rents.”

An output cap would avert the threat of lowered prices reducing the profitability of existing production, especially in the U.S. Trump may, as Brian O’Boyle argues, want “cheap energy to bring down the costs for ordinary Americans” (though his Iran war did the opposite), but it is not what the oil industry wants and it is likely not what consumers are going to get. And it is not as if Trump cares that much for U.S. consumers: his tariffs cost the average household $1,000 last year. This is all, of course, an outrageous rip-off of Venezuelans: the US has stolen stocks of Venezuelan oil, is selling it and placing the returns in Qatari bank accounts, while telling Venezuela what it can and cannot do with its share.

But this thievery does not equate to the transformational investment and output surge Trump has bloviated about, and, from the point of view of geopolitical rivalry, it does not give the U.S. any substantial new leverage over China, which has limited dependence on Venezuelan oil – just 4 per cent of Chinese oil imports last year came from Venezuela (albeit that was 61 per cent of all Venezuelan oil). Likewise Trump’s claim that India will substitute Venezuelan for Russian energy is probably hype.

Shields, caveats and cinematic action

Cuba is severely threatened by the U.S. blocking its access to existing Venezuelan production, and by fresh US sanctions, and this constitutes another crime, but it is, sadly, of limited geopolitical significance (despite the potential political win it offers to the anti-Cuba zealots within the U.S. administration). If, as Susan Watkins suggests, “Cuba is the prize” then that only betrays the U.S. regime’s limited geopolitical ambitions. Trump’s new Shield of the Americas grouping of right-wing Latin American and Caribbean leaders, seemingly an indication of wider ambitions, got off to an inauspicious start at the inaugural summit in March 2026 when Trump told the leaders that he did not have time to learn their “damn language” while Secretary of War Hegseth proclaimed that he only spoke “American”. These leaders can swallow the insults and have no problem backing regime change in Caracas and Havana, and facilitating the gung-ho U.S. mass murder of people on fishing boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific by claiming they were targeting narco cartels, especially when they serve to bolster the authoritarian reach of regimes like that of Ecuador. But that is as far as it goes.

Limited measures like forcing a Chinese port company out of the Panama Canal and restrictions on Chinese firms operating in Venezuela itself notwithstanding, the odds are long that most Latin American countries will significantly limit Chinese influence in their countries when Chinese trade and investment is crucial for even the hard right governments of Argentina and El Salvador. The so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’, a supposed update of the Monroe Doctrine that sought to block rival powers to the U.S. from enjoying influence in the Western hemisphere, is accurately described by Jared O Bell as “foreign policy as performance, driven by spectacle and attention rather than strategy or governance”. It is not, in other words, a serious imperialist project.

Is geopolitical significance rescued by the fact that seizing Venezuelan oil ensures its sale (in whatever quantities) will be denominated in dollars? Since 2018 Venezuela had been selling oil to China denominated in renminbi, thus arguably threatening the dollar’s seigniorage position in the global economy, which obliges other countries to fund the U.S. trade deficits and debt by acquiring dollars. The attack on Venezuela might be seen as an attempt to nip such threats in the bud. But, again, this makes little sense as an erratic and aggressive U.S. is only encouraging countries, including those in the EU, to hedge against the dollar and transact more business in other currencies, as well as to hold a greater proportion of their reserves in non-dollar form. Ironically, Trump’s own promotion of crypto currencies potentially further erodes dollar hegemony

The dollar, as Costas Lapavitsas shows, remains the dominant world currency but the assault on Venezuela did that dominance no favors. The war on Iran has done it even fewer favors – as Iran accepted payment in renminbi/yuan for passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the Bloomberg financial news agency first posited the rise of the petroyuan as a serious alternative to the petrodollar, while later concluding even more dramatically that “The Iran war just broke the petrodollar”.

Caveats with regard to Venezuela are, to be fair, in order. One is that critical raw materials other than oil (including rare earths, 17 metallic elements that are deployed in everything from smartphones and wind turbines to military hardware) that lie underneath Venezuelan soil are of interest to the U.S., though access to these could easily have been negotiated with the Venezuelan government without the need for military intervention.

A second caveat is that Chevron, of all the oil majors, might well boost its production and launch new ventures in Venezuela because it is the one U.S. company that still has significant capital and infrastructure already embedded in the country.

A third caveat is that the industry players may be protesting too much, exaggerating the difficulty of operating in Venezuela in order to build a stronger case for government support. The U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM) is in the process of being tapped for such support in the form of export credit guarantees that would minimize the risk for oil companies entering or re-entering Venezuela. The risk, as per the neoliberal playbook, would be transferred to the U.S. taxpayer. Still, even extensive state incentives are unlikely to prompt the companies to produce in such quantities as to undercut their prices and profit margins.

It is, in summary, difficult to see the assault on Venezuela as a truly serious attempt to open up new investment opportunities and substantively combat rivals such as China. What then did drive Trump’s actions? Greed, as Cooley and Nixon would predict, surely plays a key role. Some of the proceeds of Venezuelan oil sales will doubtless flow into Trump Inc’s pockets (funneling the revenues through Qatar hardly instils hope of transparency), and so, in all probability, will pay-offs from those corporations that succeed in collecting arbitration judgements against the Venezuelan state. Even if it were fully feasible, the development of Venezuela’s massive oil reserves is a long-term project that would be of little interest to a president obsessed with quick, large paybacks and immediate, lavish praise.

As Robert Kuttner observes, “Trump’s trademark is abrupt violent action that plays well on TV” (he probably thought that would also apply when attacking Iran). Or, in the words of John Ganz again:

“Ultimately, I think it’s worth looking at the whole episode from a propaganda standpoint. As Trump himself would likely put it, the invasion of Venezuela looked cinematic: clean, tactically impressive, and visually compelling. This is the model they seem intent on repeating – producing discrete tactical vignettes that look powerful and decisive to their audience. This is precisely what many American reactionaries fantasize about.”

Is it what members of the U.S. ruling class (however unified or fractured) fantasize about? At a personal level doubtless some of them do, but is this type of regime behavior in their interests as a class? What Trump has done in Venezuela certainly does not run contrary to their short-term interests – some (financial vulture funds, the oil majors at the margin) will make money, others (like the powerful tech barons) will be more or less unaffected. But it hardly represents a serious class project i.e., part of a concerted attempt to advance the long-term interests of U.S. capital over and against rival powers and interests. Cooley and Nixon are right to characterise Trump’s regime as kleptocratic, not strategic.

What Trump has done in Venezuela certainly does not run contrary to their short-term interests…But it hardly represents a serious class project i.e., part of a concerted attempt to advance the long-term interests of U.S. capital over and against rival powers and interests. Greed, grievance and perversity Loot and narcissism

The reality of Trump 2.0 is that, in all probability and for the most part, there is no strategy – at least not a national one, and not a coherent class one either. Rather, there is just a scatter-gun set of actions, many reversed or abandoned, designed to immediately gratify, materially and psychologically. What we have, in the words of Farrel Corcoran, is “a massive agglomeration of rackets and scams led by a racketeer-in-chief”, who also wildly pursues ego-boosting adventures. One glaring example of the rackets in action is Trump’s decision to allow Japanese Nippon Steel take over U.S. Steel, in exchange for Trump being granted a so-called golden share, allowing him veto power over investment plans and other board decisions; to be clear, this share went to Trump personally, not to the US government.

Of course within the administration there are factions pursuing different agendas – from a return to “sensible” liberal imperialism, to a sustained focus on combatting China (see below), to full-blown fascism (which some in the leadership lean towards but hopefully lack the coherence and ambition to thoroughly implement). But the overarching theme and the bottom line are best characterized as corruption and egomania.

Trump prizes loot, fawning tributes (witness the way in which cabinet members and visiting foreign leaders have to feed what Goodman terms his “pathological narcissism” by lavishing praise upon him, his obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize, and his placing his own image and signature on newly issued currency), and the settling of personal grudges. From the point of view of the empire, the approach is almost certainly perverse; Ryan Cooper goes so far as to christen Trump the “wrecker of American empire”. Or, as Rafael Behr puts it, “Making Trump feel great is the undoing of American greatness” (though greatness is not really the right word).

Trump has unnecessarily alienated Western allies (even some on the far right, who have noted how Trump’s endorsement did Orban no favors in the Hungarian election ), themselves hypocrites who drew the line at threats to Greenland but backed the genocide in Gaza. They were still mostly prepared, initially at least, to back the U.S. attack on Iran before retreating when their help was demanded reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s push to acquire Greenland may have itself been driven by greed – long-time crony Ronald Lauder has extensive business interests there, with Bezos and Zuckerberg amongst the many others with eyes on what wealth can be extracted from the territory, as well as dreams of establishing libertarian techno-cities.

As mentioned earlier, left-wing writers tend to attribute the Greenland gambit to an imperial desire to access rare earths and other critical minerals, and to take advantage of navigation routes newly developed by diminishing Arctic ice. These are understandable goals from the point of view of U.S. imperialism, and a global race for critical raw materials is certainly ongoing, but was Trump’s petulant demand for ownership a rational means of pursuing those goals? The resources and the routes could have been secured through negotiations that would not have so alienated hitherto staunch allies, indeed in a way that could have wrung concessions from them. The negotiated option may now have been turned to, but the damage is done.

If Greenland (on top of already chaotic and unpredictable trade tariff attacks) represented an alarm bell for Western elites, as (belatedly at least) did the destabilization of the global economy brought about by the war on Iran, for many ordinary people across the world the slaughter in Gaza has become the red line issue of our age, albeit a slaughter backed by U.S. policy that Trump inherited rather than initiated. In 2023, the Financial Times quoted a senior G7 diplomat regarding Gaza: “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.” Trump’s innovation has been to turn the criminal tragedy into a grisly real estate opportunity, with the very real prospect of billions of “reconstruction” dollars being siphoned off to he and his cronies, exemplifying again his malignant penchant for graft and self-aggrandizement.

Unhinged elites

It is quite possible that Trump’s mindset is shared by some members of the ruling class itself who can no longer think beyond violent short–term gratification: to quote Doug Henwood again, much of this class seems consumed by “wanton money lust” at the expense of strategic consideration of their longer-term interests. Salar Mohandesi suggests that in previous eras, “The fractions that made up the U.S. ruling bloc did not simply wish to enrich themselves” – that they probably, on average, thought about more than immediate gratification. Paul Heideman makes the point that the briefly cohesive U.S. ruling class of the 1970s and 1980s was willing to absorb some pain (such as higher interest rates) in order to achieve their longer-term goals of rolling back gains made by workers.

Where a longer-term perspective does now exist it is one, in some important cases, in which outright lunacy has been embraced and ignorance celebrated. Peter Thiel – Silicon Valley multi-billionaire; head of military-technology behemoth and genocide-enabler Palantir (whose software was responsible for the bombing of a school in the first day of the war on Iran, causing the death of over 175 people, most of them young girls); close friend of Jeffrey Epstein; mentor to JD Vance – raves about Armageddon and the Antichrist, whom he thinks might be Greta Thunberg. Thiel protégés are running Trump’s policy towards AI, which amounts to the abolition of regulation and ethical oversight. (Thiel himself is determined to live forever and finances research into anti-ageing medicines, including the potential of transfusing young people’s blood into his veins.)

Where a longer-term perspective does now exist it is one, in some important cases, in which outright lunacy has been embraced and ignorance celebrated.

White supremacist Elon Musk, after a stint wreaking havoc upon the U.S. public service, posits madcap plans to establish colonies on Mars and the moon. At a more mundane, but still startlingly ignorant, level Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist billionaire and Trump advisor, prattles idiotically about how introspection (seemingly invented by Freud) is the enemy of progress – Musk thinks empathy plays that role. Matt McManus asks: “How did people so deeply unethical, so opposed to basic human ideas that they view empathy as a social evil and introspection as a waste of time, come to wield power and influence over American society?”

That they wield such power is indeed alarming, but it is not necessarily in the best interests of empire – even imperialists can benefit from occasional empathy and introspection, at least in the sense of working out what others might be thinking and pausing for thought before taking action.

Trump is driving established guardians and defenders of empire (Foreign Affairs is their house journal) to the edge of reason with his rapacity, fecklessness and petulance. Robert Kagan, a neoconservative who has a long record of supporting US militarism, laments that “Washington’s conduct in the Iran war is accelerating global chaos and deepening America’s dangerous isolation”. Israel, however, is pleased that its reckless and genocidal drive for land-grabbing and regional hegemony is supported (spurred on by an influential Christian Zionist lobby, some of whose dingbats see Middle East war as a means of hastening the “end times” and the return of Christ). This is so long as Trump can share the credit for vicious stunts, however ill thought-through, like attacking Iran – a short bombing campaign in 2025 and the large-scale disaster of 2026.

There is, however, a potentially sharp tension here between Trump’s preening and pillaging proclivities: Trump wants to continue leeching money and toys for himself off the Gulf monarchies. But they are, with the exception of the seemingly more belligerent Saudi Arabia, unhappy with how his ego-slaking antics vis-à-vis Iran endangered their security and prosperity together with their images as safe sites for investment and tourism.They are also displeased with their past mediation efforts (in the case of Qatar and Oman) having been duplicitously used as cover for U.S. and Israeli war plans. They may have been accepting of attacks on Iran once the die was cast, but this war has been a catastrophe for them, with potentially serious long-term implications for their relationships not only with Trump but with the U.S. as a whole. They may not be the only countries that end up wondering whether hosting U.S. bases is, as advertised, a security guarantee or, rather, a dangerous liability.

Previous presidents have been stupid and suffused with greed, have even suffered mental instability or cognitive decline (Reagan springs to mind), but, to take the most recent example, Biden’s senility probably mattered little because his regime was staffed with long-term and loyal servants of empire drawn from what Heideman calls “the corporate foreign policy planning network”. Trump, who is himself showing signs of derangement (St. Clair diagnoses “hubristic madness” in reference to the Iran aggression), is surrounded by a plethora of grifters, lackeys, frat boys, religious wackos who wish to construct a theocratic state, delusional ethno-nationalists and obvious idiots. (Some of these chancers were reportedly keeping him ‘informed’ about the war on Iran through 2-minute daily videos of US strikes, omitting any mention of Iranian responses). Such people have always sought to influence governments but their path is significantly smoothed when the heart of the government itself is concerned only with greed and ego i.e., when there is little or no coherent project to advance the greater good of the ruling class.

The turn to China and the fate of empire Stable partners

Confronted with Trump’s unpredictable and erratic shakedowns and smash-and-grabs, countries increasingly look more favorably on powers that are more capable of strategic thought and action, China especially, because they are seen as more stable and reliable partners. To give just one example, China appears to have played a behind-the-scenes role in negotiating the U.S.-Iran ceasefire. There is the added bonus that China is unlikely to come out with bizarre accusations of white genocide in South Africa, the description of other countries as ‘shit holes’, and the like – trivial issues in their own right but indicative of the contrast between the U.S. and China when it comes to sensible diplomacy.

China’s emerging leadership in many areas of cutting edge technology and in the shift to renewable energy enhances its attractiveness to partner countries. For example, China makes 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and its offer to Cuba provides that country a possible lifeline in the face of the U.S. energy embargo. China has also taken a decisive lead in the electric vehicle market. In a period where the dangers of fossil fuel dependency have been starkly illustrated, the advantages of this model (and of working with it) are obvious. Chinese green technology manufacturing investments now span 54 countries and are growing exponentially. (Unfortunately, a short-term consequence of the war on Iran has been a resurgence of coal usage across Asia).

A poll, carried out by Politico in February 2026 of 2000 respondents in each of France, Germany, Canada and the UK, found majorities heavily favoring cooperation with China over the U.S. Any such poll in the Global South would undoubtedly find even larger majorities leaning towards China. An article in Foreign Affairs, written in a tone of now-typical melancholy for this pro-imperialist journal, is headlined “America Has Lost the Arab World: Wars in Gaza, Iran, and Elsewhere Have Sunk Washington’s Reputation – Maybe for Good”.

The claim by Ross Babbage that Trump is “displaying a surprisingly deep strategic logic… [by] working to isolate Beijing and Moscow from their international partners” is risible. John Feffer is much closer to the truth when he laments that “If the Chinese had managed to install a real Manchurian Candidate [a brainwashed stooge secretly serving Chinese interests] in the White House, it couldn’t have done a better job than Donald Trump”. (supporters of Ukraine commonly prefer to depict Trump as a stooge of Russia). A disconsolate (is there any other sort now?) A CFR researcher writes that “Chinese President Xi Jinping is getting the United States he always wanted”.

The truth is that Trump seeks to serve no interests but his own… But it is also true that he is less consistently bellicose towards China than many U.S. anti-China elements would like…

The truth is that Trump seeks to serve no interests but his own, closely following Tony Soprano’s dictum on the endless hustle, though with even less of a long-term vision than a typical mafia boss. But it is also true that he is less consistently bellicose towards China than many U.S. anti-China elements would like, not least the notoriously hawkish Heritage Foundation, which illustrates the limits of that body’s over-hyped influence when it comes to foreign policy. Trump’s massively increased U.S. military budget does not address the structural weaknesses of that bloated military (a military that started running out of missiles after a few days bombing Iran).

The U.S. military’s reliance on Chinese rare earth minerals is strategically crucial. Building an F35 fighter jet demands some 400 kilograms of rare earths, a nuclear submarine 4,200 kilograms; rare earths are vital also for the manufacture of Tomahawk missiles (of the sort deployed against Iranian schoolgirls) and various other military assets.  China accounts for an estimated 60 percent of all the world’s rare earth deposits and for 90 percent of the separation and refining capacity necessary to transform them into usable product. Western companies lag far behind in this regard. While there is a concerted U.S. drive to secure access to non-Chinese rare earths and other critical raw materials—an unusually long-term project inherited and sustained by the Trump administration—the challenge of closing the gap is substantial.

Imperial rivalry?

The latest U.S. National Security Strategy (correctly described by Juan Cole as exhibiting “crackpot logic” on issues like the claimed “civilizational erasure” of Europe) does not depict China as a military rival at all, and the same is true for Russia, which welcomed the new U.S. strategy. Russia also welcomed the potential diversion of U.S. military resources from Ukraine to Iran as well as the extra $10 billion per month it (Russia) earned courtesy of oil prices jacked up by the Iran war as the U.S. lifted its sanctions on those Russian exports. The war also saw the U.S. drawing some military resources away from eastern Asia, thereby weakening the U.S.military’s stance towards China at the same time as China’s own military power is growing apace.

China is certainly seen as a rival in many respects, as the feverish chase for critical minerals and other resources demonstrates. However, even on the economic front, Trump has typically backed down on tariffs and other issues, such as allowing the sale of advanced AI components to China, in response to Chinese pushback, including China’s blocking the supply of those rare earths. China, in short, does not lend itself to the bullying, blackmail and photo-op aggression Trump has sought to wield against other countries, and a cautiously cooperative modus vivendi may now be emerging.

History cannot be reduced to the strengths and weaknesses of individual leaders, but conjunctural factors…matter within the context of underlying, structural forces and trends. That the U.S. has a fractured and partially unhinged ruling class matters.

History cannot be reduced to the strengths and weaknesses of individual leaders, but conjunctural factors (such as the state of a country’s ruling class, and the nature of its leadership) matter within the context of underlying, structural forces and trends. That the U.S. has a fractured and partially unhinged ruling class matters. Trump also matters: that is bad news for people living in the U.S. and those at the receiving end of bombs and missiles in Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere, as well as for the 45 million extra people around the world that the World Food Programme estimated were being driven into acute hunger as a result of rising energy and fertilizer costs caused by the war on Iran (and subsequent blockades).

But it is not as if Trump has taken over and transformed a hitherto peaceful and benign U.S. state apparatus, and it is likely that an alternative U.S. government (had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election, for example) would be pursuing a more consistently hostile and confrontational approach towards Russia and China. What Cooley and Nixon fear most is that the best interests of the U.S. empire are not being well served by the current kleptocracy, indeed that they are being actively undermined, not least by that relative lack of belligerence towards what they see as the main enemies based in Moscow and Beijing. That the U.S. empire is being weakened by a profoundly corrupt and narcissistic regime, and that the world is (for now at least) being spared a concerted U.S. drive to war with Russia and/or China, are sources of consolation in otherwise bleak times. The chaos, crudity and violence of the empire under Trump 2.0 has significantly contributed to the erosion of U.S. hegemony in the world and it will be difficult for subsequent administrations to reverse that.

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: Trump White House; modified by Tempest.

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We hear it all the time: “Americans just love their cars.” But the recent opening of a subway line in Los Angeles proves that Americans are even more crazy for transit — and when new stations open, they turn it into a party.

Check out this dispatch from Los Angeles by Hideaki Transit, where the opening of the new Metro D Line extension turned into nothing short of Woodstock for NUMTOTs. Complete with off-color puns, viral merch, spontaneous group chants, and even a pop-up furry convention, this raucous celebration of shared transportation should inspire leaders across the country to build party-worthy transit projects everywhere. (And yes, we promise: it’s safe for work.)