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Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.

Green Roofs Can Restore Nature in Cities

A new report from the European Commission (EC) is calling attention to a key opportunity to help cities deliver climate solutions: green rooftops and walls. They confirm that better integration of greenery can improve biodiversity, climate adaptation, stormwater management, energy efficiency, and social well-being in urban environments, all of which can make cities more livable as urban populations continue to grow. 

Green roofs, also called living roofs or eco-roofs, are not new, but in the 1980s, the technology for widespread installations became more readily available. Despite the many benefits, their integration is uneven across Europe. Regulatory challenges, skill gaps, funding shortages, and limited integration in mainstream planning and building practices can hold cities back from scaling these green spaces.

But the report offers a way forward. Targeted incentives and funding schemes, biodiversity-oriented design and monitoring requirements, and stronger planning and building regulations can help cities move in the right direction. 

Although it is an investment upfront, Steven Peck, Founder and President of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, says it’s worth it: “They’re going to be healthier places to live in the face of ongoing climate change impacts. And that’s where the money is going to be. That’s where the creativity is going to be.”

Is the MAHA Movement Becoming Disillusioned with the Trump Administration?

Supporters of Make America Healthy Again seem to be losing faith in the Trump-Vance Administration and members of the Republican Party, the New York Times reports.

Six of MAHA’s most prominent leaders have, in separate videos, announced that they are so disappointed with President Donald Trump that the party risks losing them. Many are upset by contradictory messaging or inaction that they’re seeing. This includes the recent executive order to boost domestic production of the herbicide glyphosate despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s earlier promises to ban or restrict agri-chemicals and the failure to secure enough votes for Casey Means to become Surgeon General. 

But this doesn’t mean that MAHA supporters are flipping to the Democrats. Zen Honeycutt, Founder of Moms Across America, says, “The only thing that matters is action. Not a political party.” And some, feeling that their vote is useless, may ultimately sit out of the next election in November.

But this shouldn’t keep Democrats from trying to win them over, according to Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. She has seen independent and undecided voters tip elections in close races. Congressmember Chellie Pingree sees the opening and is telling her colleagues that they’re “missing a big opportunity” if they’re not talking about pesticides and healthy food. “The reason Donald Trump ran on them, the reason he put R.F.K. in office is because people care about them,” Pingree says. “We should be all over this.”

New York Acts to Close GRAS Loophole

New York legislators recently passed the New York Food Safety and Chemical Disclosure Act, banning several food additives from products manufactured, distributed, or sold in the state. 

In March, the bill passed in the Senate with unanimous bipartisan support, and it now heads to Governor Kathy Hochul for her signature. 

The legislation will eliminate three additives—potassium bromate, propyl paraben, and Red Dye No. 3—that have been linked to cancer, hormone disruption, and reproductive toxicity from foods. Red 3 has been banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since the legislation was first introduced. The law also requires companies to disclose the safety data for all food chemicals in a publicly available database. 

According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, this progress represents “significant strides” toward closing the GRAS loophole, which currently allows companies to decide which chemicals are “generally recognized as safe” for us in food. 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to close the GRAS loophole nationally, but advocacy groups are still waiting for action at the federal level, prompting Jessica Hernandez, Environmental Working Group’s Legislative Director, to declare, “New York is stepping up where Washington has slowed down.”

Hunger Is Becoming Concentrated in Conflict-Hit Countries

The United Nations finds that of the 266 million people in 47 countries who experienced high levels of acute food insecurity, two-thirds are concentrated in just 10 countries. Conflict is the major driver of this crisis, accounting for more than half of all cases of severe hunger. 

The severity of hunger is also worsening. The number of people experiencing catastrophic hunger has increased ninefold since 2016. Young people are the most vulnerable, with 35.5 million children acutely malnourished, including nearly 10 million suffering from severe acute malnutrition, a life-threatening condition. 

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres says the new report is “a call to action to summon the political will to rapidly scale up investment in lifesaving aid, and work to end the conflicts that inflict so much suffering on so many.”

Aid organizations also warn that unless the world changes its strategies for addressing hunger, the world may become trapped in a cycle of deepening crises. FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu says that we can’t rely solely on food assistance, and must prioritize the protection of local food production that builds long-term resilience over time. 

Bolivia’s Farmers Are Protecting Their Land—And Future

The Guardian reports that cacao producers are pushing back against the gold mining industry to protect their land. 

In 2017, residents in Palos Blancos and Alto Beni, situated in the northwest region of Bolivia that are reliant on organic agriculture, noticed a mining dredge appear on the nearby Boopi River. Gold mining hadn’t touched the municipalities yet, but farmer Roberto Gutierrez says that he and his neighbors saw the environmental destruction it caused in other areas. 

Communities responded quickly, pushing back against the miners, and they left. Four years later, thanks to persistent organizing efforts, the two municipalities passed mining bans. Three years after that, in 2024, a departmental law further legitimized their stance. “We showed people that mining does more harm than good. People have realized that gold is temporary, but agriculture and conservation are for life,” Ulises Ariñez, former environment secretary for Palos Blancos, says. 

In the last five years, the price of gold has skyrocketed, driving miners into new regions. At least 10 other municipalities and Indigenous territories are exploring bans like those in Palos Blancos and Alto Beni even as the national government seeks to loosen regulations for the industry. 

Pablo Solón, an environmental activist, says that the local bans may represent their best hope to protect the Amazon. And there is reason for optimism. Just last year, four new areas in Bolivia were established to keep them free from mining. And on Peru’s side of Lake Titicaca, a court suspended mining outside authorized areas along Bolivia’s Madre de Dios River. 

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Photo courtesy of Arlington Country, Wikimedia Commons

The post Food Tank’s Weekly News Roundup: NY Acts on GRAS Loophole, Green Roofs Offer Climate Solutions, Bolivia’s Farmers Protect their Future appeared first on Food Tank.

In March, a month traditionally known for heavy mountain snows and dreary lower-elevation weather, a heat wave settled across the West, shattering temperature records from Tucson, Arizona, to Casper, Wyoming.

The heat wave’s intensity and early arrival shocked many climate scientists. “It is exceptionally difficult for the Earth system to produce temperatures this warm so early in the season,” wrote Daniel Swain, a climatologist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources who runs the Weather West blog.

Yet not only did Western locations set new March highs; many exceeded temperature records for May. And those high temperatures kept hanging on, said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at the nonprofit science center Climate Central, for nearly two weeks.

While heat waves are a natural phenomenon, this was the earliest and most widespread one ever recorded in the Southwest. And it was caused by climate change, which is making intense heat waves much more likely. Researchers say this means understanding their fallout is even more important.

Scientists are just now beginning to understand the ramifications of a devastating 2021 heat wave, when a massive heat dome brought 120-degree temperatures to the Pacific Northwest, causing widespread ecological damage. Tens of thousands of trees died. Baby birds that could not yet fly plummeted to the ground as they tried to escape the heat. Salmon and trout suffocated in small streams. Millions — perhaps even billions — of mussels and barnacles cooked.

Number of daily record highs broken in March 2026

This year’s heat wave may not have had the same immediate ecological impacts, but it comes on the heels of an already record-breaking hot, dry winter. Researchers say 2021 holds lessons about what lies ahead for both vulnerable and resilient species. Ecosystems, they warn, are likely to permanently change as some species simply can’t handle the heat.

Fully understanding the impact that events like heat waves have on long-lived tree species takes time. Research is now trickling out from places like Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, and it’s not good.

The 2021 heat wave either killed or otherwise harmed more than three-quarters of species surveyed, including by limiting their reproductive success, according to Julia Baum, a professor at the University of Victoria who co-wrote a recent paper on the long-term impacts. The hardest hit, perhaps unsurprisingly, were those unable to move to seek shade or cooler temperatures. Marine species like acorn barnacles and green rope seaweed fared the worst, as did kelp, surfgrass, and rockweed.

“The rocky shorelines they live on heated up to [122 Fahrenheit]. Think of being glued to hot concrete on the most scorching summer day: They essentially baked and died,” said Baum. “On land, wildflowers wilted and died, preventing entire populations from reproducing that year, and there was widespread leaf scorch and death in forests.”

Some species that could move modified their behavior: Ferruginous hawks reduced their flight time by about 81 percent, while wolves moved around more, perhaps seeking hunkered-down prey like mule deer and moose.

Read Next The world is getting too hot to feed itself Ayurella Horn-Muller

Meanwhile, species already adapted to hotter or more variable temperature ranges adjusted better than others.

The heat wave’s timing also mattered, said Adam Sibley, a remote sensing scientist and co-author of a 2025 paper that examined the impact on trees and forests. Plants tend to acclimate to heat throughout a season, so the triple-digit temperatures that struck in June hit harder than they would have in August.

So many tree needles died, in fact, that when Sibley drove to the Oregon coast with friends a few days after the heat wave ended, the tree canopy looked as though it had been dusted with orange snow.

New buds and needles are fragile for a number of reasons, said Christopher Still, a forest ecology professor at Oregon State University. Many contain fatty membranes that, when super-heated, will melt and cause the leaf to fall apart. Young leaves and needles also lack “heat hardening” mechanisms like specialized proteins that stabilize mature leaves and needles when it’s hot.

Many larger, more well-established trees, such as Douglas fir, lost a growing season: Their needles fell off, but grew back the following year. Other trees died, especially younger ones and species like Sitka spruce and western red cedar that require cooler, wetter temperatures.

The 2021 heat wave also rapidly dried grasses, flowers, and other fine fuels, leading to record-breaking wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, according to a 2024 paper in the journal Nature.

Read Next The West’s unprecedented winter could fuel a summer of disaster Tik Root

While the timing of this year’s heat wave surprised many climatologists, the fact that it arrived in March may have ultimately saved some Southwestern plants, said Osvaldo Sala, a professor and director of Arizona State University’s Global Drylands Center.

During the hottest period, he explained, many plants were still dormant. Desert plants tie their growing cycles to rain and moisture instead of heat or sun duration. That means that, unlike in places like Wyoming, where cherry trees started blooming in March instead of May, desert plants were still waiting for rains to come.

Unfortunately, that early blooming has left the cherry trees and other flowering plants particularly susceptible to spring frosts, Still said.

The effects of this year’s heat dome have only exacerbated the winter’s record-setting heat and drought, Still added. Snowpack across much of the West was abysmal; in many places, it was the worst in recorded history. 

“The heat dome put an exclamation point on the worst winter in a century,” said Still. “It was the worst possible way to end the winter that was already worse than normal.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ramifications of record-shattering heat on the West’s ecosystems on May 2, 2026.

Headline News:

• “Start-up Produces Green Hydrogen from Just Sun and Water” • Green hydrogen could be a key to transforming our industries and energy systems, but so far it has been expensive, complex, and tied to grid infrastructure. Now photreon has developed a photoreactor panel that generates hydrogen directly from water and sunlight. [Renewable Energy Magazine]

Solar panels for generating hydrogen (KIT image)

• “SC Nuclear Plant Didn’t Maintain Key Safety Equipment For Years, Feds Say” • The VC Summer nuclear power plant north of Columbia failed for years to maintain a turbine-driven cooling pump, a key piece of safety equipment, that could help the plant continue running properly during an emergency, according to federal records and inspectors. [AOL.com]
• “Are Oil Companies Profiting From The Iran War? Experts Explain” • Some people assume oil companies have increased profits due to the Iran War, but earnings issued by some of the world’s largest oil companies in recent days presented a more complicated picture. While some had windfall profits, others reported surprising profit declines. [ABC News]
• “Africa’s Cellphone Towers Turn To Solar As Diesel Costs Surge” • Diesel, which powers the majority of Africa’s roughly 500,000 telecommunications towers, is more expensive and sometimes harder to secure in recent weeks as global fuel markets tightened following the conflict in Iran. A conversion to solar power is seen as urgent. [ABC News]
• “EPA Says Oil & Gas Operators Can Continue To Flare Past Long-Set Deadline” • The US EPA released guidance that will allow oil and gas operators to continue routine flaring, a harmful practice that unnecessarily releases dangerous pollutants into the air. Routine flaring was set to be phased out by May 7th after years of preparation. [CleanTechnica]

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

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on an ambitious agenda that won him the enthusiastic support of a broad coalition of voters. His charisma and boundless energy has helped to raise the hopes and expectations of many. The agenda itself should be applauded, and the emergence of this coalition, with its hopes and expectations, is a positive development that has helped create a growing audience for socialist politics.

Yet winning Mamdani’s agenda requires more than the election of a progressive politician—in this case a democratic socialist—to executive office. Arrayed against it are New York’s capitalist class, which includes the powerful real estate and financial interests based in New York City and the politicians who represent them. Without a countervailing force in the form of an organized popular movement capable of defending its own underlying class interests, and which is able, when necessary, to engage in targeted, disruptive action, strong and sustainable  progressive reform is not possible.

After almost four months in office, both Mamdani’s governing style and strategy and political events beyond his control—including the outcome of the budget battle currently being waged in Albany—have revealed how unlikely it is that his agenda will be realized. In fact, some of it has already been abandoned. And Mamdani’s responses have illustrated that while he wants to establish his bona fides as a trusted and efficient manager of New York City, there is much less evidence that he has any interest in building a movement to defend the interest of New York City’s diverse working class.

The means to, and meaning of, “Tax the Rich”

Mamdani’s “affordability agenda”—universal free childcare, free buses, a rent freeze for stabilized apartments, and an explosive growth in the number of affordable housing units—has mass support but carries with it a hefty price tag. New York City is legally unable to raise its own taxes without approval from the state. Candidate Mamdani’s explicit call to raise income taxes on the wealthy and on corporations in order to fund this agenda was (and remains) extremely popular, and was of course intended to put pressure on the New York State legislature and more particularly the governor. Without a revenue increase of many billions, achieving this agenda will be impossible.

Whether increased taxes on the wealthy can actually be won by the usual political means is now playing out in Albany. On April 22 the state legislature passed its sixth “budget extender” of the season after negotiations to resolve the state’s budget blew past the April 1 deadline. It’s not unusual for the budget to be late—last year it took until May 9—but this year negotiators have not yet gotten beyond bitter struggles over implementing climate goals and reforming auto insurance laws to more fiscally significant issues. Prominent among these are (separate) proposals by the state senate and state assembly to raise taxes on the wealthy and on corporations. Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul has been adamant in her opposition to such tax increases.

Every year, New York State’s governor and each of the two houses of its legislature devise separate budget proposals. The three proposals are a basis for the negotiations among the leaders of the two houses and the governor (a process formerly gendered as “three men in a room”—this year the only man among them is Assembly Speaker Democrat Carl Heastie). In recent years, it has become common for the legislature’s “one house budgets” to include a proposal to raise taxes on high earners, and some form of such increases has occasionally passed. This year, though, those proposals have taken on increased significance.

The revenue the city would receive under both senate and assembly tax proposals is somewhat less than under Mamdani’s own, but those amounts are nevertheless enough to have heartened his supporters. Governor Hochul, though, has not hesitated to repeat her strong opposition, and it’s hard to see where pressure sufficient to move her can come from. She dismisses passionate chants from crowds demanding these tax increases, unconcerned about any potential electoral weakness coming from their opposition, and is likely to remain firm as the budget negotiations drag on. (The pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes that Hochul finally announced—and Mamdani applauded—on April 15 would only raise $500 million annually, while the legislature’s proposals would raise $3 billion in city income taxes and an additional $1-2 billion in direct state funding for the city. By contrast, in a document labeled “How to Pay for the Mamdani Agenda,” the mayor-to-be offered a plan to raise $10 billion.

It was never likely that a robust form of “tax the rich” would get over the hurdles that the State’s power structure imposes. Mirroring the U.S. constitutional order as a whole, the structure of New York government is notorious for serving to insulate the powerful from democratic control. The “three men in a room” is but one problem. The business lobby has made sure to fund lavishly the re-election campaigns of Hochul and others, and has made its objections to taxation publicly known. According to Crain’s, even the proposed pied-à-terre tax on second homes in New York City, “is certain to prompt a massive fight in Albany from the real estate industry in particular and delay the already delayed state budget much further”. Like the governor herself, business leaders are predicting that businesses would leave New York if their taxes are raised. Predictably, in an April 6 letter to shareholders, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon argued that cities and businesses needed to “compete,” and blamed high local taxes for his own corporation’s shifting of some jobs to Texas.

Although it is technically possible that the legislature could pass tax legislation outside of the context of the budget process, the access of New York’s capitalist class to the halls of power, and the usual nervousness of legislators looking over their shoulders in an election year, prevent any serious consideration of such legislation which would in any case require veto-proof majorities.

The Mamdani administration has no real strategy to try to overcome these obstacles. The option of cohering a sustainable mass movement to disrupt business as usual, and grow popular participation and organization, has not been on the table. To be sure, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its sister organization, the nonprofit Our Time, have been consistent in their organizing efforts on the issue, but the tactics they have used—door-knocking and phone-banking—have done nothing to move New Yorkers beyond the atomization of individual voters calling legislators. Tactics that worked, in a particular moment, to get a democratic socialist elected are not sufficient to win a serious reform agenda.

Tactics that worked, in a particular moment, to get a democratic socialist elected are not sufficient to win a serious reform agenda.

The limitations of DSA’s strategy are apparent in the diminishing returns of its tactics. Well-planned phone-banking efforts failed to get more than about 1,700 people to ride buses to “take over” Albany on February 25, far short of what was hoped for (this at a time when millions can be mobilized to demonstrate against Trump). And having won his election, Mamdani has proven ambivalent in his support of his DSA allies’ tactics. By mid-February, the mayor made it clear that he himself would not be taking part in such “tax the rich” events. Thus, he avoided attending the Albany “takeover” and the March 29 tax-the-rich rally in the Bronx headlined by Bernie Sanders.

The mayor’s February 5 endorsement of Hochul for re-election—and the resultant demise of the campaign of her primary challenger, Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado—removed a significant source of leverage over the governor and signaled still further Mamdani’s intention to collaborate as much as possible with the powerful as an elected executive, rather than attempt to lead a popular movement against the state’s rulers and its Democratic Party machine.  NYC-DSA, for its part, distanced itself from Mamdani while indicating in a statement that the governor was not worthy of the endorsement.

Mamdani’s efforts to distance himself from his DSA allies have become apparent within the tax-the-rich movement. Winning the “affordability agenda”—or at least part of it—has remained DSA’s goal. In its messages asking members and supporters to urge their legislators to support taxing the rich, the appeal was always in the name of achieving parts of the agenda—usually, free child care. The organization pointed out, correctly, that the January agreement between Hochul and Mamdani on universal childcare was limited to funding pilot programs and the early stages of a phase-in of the program.

But Mamdani has had to retreat to using whatever new revenue he can get from the state to fill a $5.4 billion gap in the city’s budget, which he is legally required to balance. His appeal to the legislature on “Tin Cup Day”—the day in February each year on which officials from around the state make their case for state assistance—included a request for a 2 percent tax increase on high earners, but in his testimony he mentioned no other goal than that of achieving a balanced budget.

Mamdani’s strategy in action

In order to pressure Hochul to support the 2 percent increase, it may have been possible for the mayor to encourage the organization of activities beyond phone calls to legislators. He might have attempted, for example, to bring together unions, nonprofit advocacy groups, and other organizations to mobilize their members and engage in activities such as protests at her New York offices or holding marches in each of the city’s boroughs. Even at the level of electoral politics, he might have sought leverage by offering more support for insurgent democratic socialist candidates.

Instead Mamdani resorted to a threat to raise property taxes (which the city can do without state approval), seeking to pressure the governor into an income tax hike as a lesser evil. This was a serious miscalculation. Not only did it “greatly anger” Hochul, who viewed it as a breach of his promise to tone down his tax-the-rich rhetoric, but it backfired in the eyes of many whom the mayor should have seen as allies. The city’s property taxes are notoriously regressive, and this move left middle class homeowners—overwhelmingly in favor of taxes on the rich—feeling unsupported by the mayor. Black homeowners in Queens publicly protested and spoke to their city council representative on the matter, and this seems to have been enough for Mamdani to back off of this property tax hike proposal.

These miscues—angering a powerful Democrat he hoped to keep as an ally (despite their differences on his signature campaign promise), and alienating an important electoral constituency—can be viewed as understandable errors of an inexperienced executive. But perhaps it is more instructive to consider them as natural consequences of his strategy: From early in his candidacy Mamdani has tried to combine a style of friendly negotiations between himself and powerful players with an attempt to represent the interests of working people.

Mamdani is not responsible for the city’s fiscal woes. His predecessor Eric Adams had been overestimating revenues and resorting to accounting tricks to balance the budget. Nonetheless he clearly needed a “Plan B” (perhaps better thought of as “Plan A”) and for that he first turned to the all-too-familiar playbook of seeking systematic cuts. Even before his trip to Albany he issued an executive order mandating that every city agency appoint a chief savings officer, tasked with proposing ways to slash hundreds of millions from the budget. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that under these circumstances reforms like a robust free child care program and free buses are fast receding from what is likely.

More recently, Mamdani has found himself in a battle with the city council over his proposed budget. He has resorted to the highly unusual tactic of tapping the city’s reserve fund to avoid a deficit. Council Speaker Julie Menin, a “moderate” Democrat, defended the council’s own proposal, which includes a supposed $6 billion in savings, and argued that dipping into the reserve fund will damage the city’s credit rating and spike its borrowing costs. Each side has attacked the other’s proposal as requiring cuts in essential services.

Charm the Rich

Mamdani’s strategic approach started becoming clear after he won the election primary last year. In June of 2025, he met with business leaders from the Partnership for New York City and the Association for a Better New York, assuaging their fears about “socialism” and assuring them that his administration will behave as a partner in pursuing their shared goals of a prosperous and affordable city. He also promised to consider retaining Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch (a billionaire from the business class herself), a move which he eventually made despite his stated opposition to Tisch’s collaboration with former Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul in rolling back progressive criminal justice reforms.

Mamdani’s positioning himself as a “reasonable” politician, willing to learn from experts rather than following a particular ideological program, has also extended to the electoral arena. His endorsement of Hochul followed their joint announcement of the free child care program. The governor had made it clear that affordable child care was a goal of hers as well, and many of the state’s business leaders (with an interest in having their employees able to come to work rather than attend to the kids) backed her on this, as long as state treasuries could fund it without a tax increase. Rather than emphasize the inadequacy of the partial and temporary funding Hochul was able to come up with, Mamdani chose to cheerlead alongside her. His endorsement of her re-election was an indication of his approach and desire not to have the kind of contentious relationship with the governor that former mayor Bill DeBlasio had with Andrew Cuomo.

Mamdani [has] position[ed] himself as a “reasonable” politician, willing to learn from experts rather than following a particular ideological program…

The other leaders of New York’s Democratic Party establishment—U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—were much sharper than Hochul in their opposition to Mamdani during the election. Nonetheless, Mamdani urged his fellow DSA members not to endorse one of their own—city council member Chi Ossé—to challenge Jeffries in the 2026 primary. In a close vote, the organization denied Ossé their endorsement.

Given this background, it’s not surprising that Mamdani relied on his ability to appear reasonable and friendly, and to use a strong dose of flattery, during his infamous November Oval Office visit with Donald Trump. In October, he had similarly flattered the members of the Association for a Better New York as “some of the most forward-thinking leaders within our city.” Despite his inexperience, Mamdani is a very skilled tactical politician and careful student of recent political relationships. New York City’s mayors have always had to rely on a positive relationship with Washington (as they have with Albany), and Mamdani had clearly observed Trump well enough to know that if any money was to flow from D.C. to New York, that relationship had to be nurtured early on.

If Mamdani’s intent has been to establish a good working relationship with the business community, he has probably succeeded. Crain’s New York Business issued a scorecard on the Mayor’s first one hundred days, rating him on several metrics. On business confidence in the new administration, he was given a mixed review, applauding his responsiveness and attempts to be engaging. On the other side of their ledger, the piece mentioned aspects such as the “one-sidedness” of his approach to “bad” landlords. But whether his friendliness to business leaders will enable him to implement his costly agenda is another matter.

The police and community safety

Mamdani has also been careful to ensure a positive relationship with the NYPD. Eric Adams, of course, began his career as a police officer, but before him Bill DeBlasio was famously despised by the cops for his support for reform measures meant to minimize killings by police. To avoid such a chilly relationship, Mamdani re-framed the purpose of his proposed Department of Community Safety as premised on removing burdens on the police in responding to emergencies involving mentally ill people, i.e., by having social workers among those responding. Police would thus be allowed to do “their actual jobs” while professionals trained to work with the mentally ill would have a different role to play.

But the new mayor was apparently overeager in this regard. In late January, the mother of a  22-year old mentally ill Queens man, Jabez Chakraborty, called 911 requesting an ambulance when her son, who lived with her, experienced a rageful crisis. Only the police responded, without an ambulance, and when the young man brandished a kitchen knife the cops shot him four times. Mamdani’s first public statement on the matter (which he later retracted) was that he was “grateful to the first responders who put themselves on the line each day to keep our communities safe.”

Chakraborty himself wound up in the hospital, in critical condition, handcuffed and shackled. The group Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), which advocates for South Asian immigrant workers and which had provided important support for Mamdani during the election campaign, published a statement by the family strongly critical of the NYPD and the mayor’s praise of them.

This case offered the purest possible example of a mental health emergency requiring a non-police response. Chakraborty’s mother did not report being in danger, and the entire incident took place inside their home. It potentially offered a perfect illustration of how Mamdani’s promise to adopt a “public health approach to safety” made sense. Instead it was perhaps the first indication that his plan for a Department of Community Safety was in trouble.

The proposed new department was meant to address crises involving mental health, domestic violence, the threat of gun violence, hate crimes, and outreach to the unhoused by relying on trained professionals to diffuse the crisis, rather than just summoning the police. Creating the department would have required City Council approval, and its billion dollar budget made that unlikely, more so as the city’s deficit became clearer. The mayor wound up retreating in mid-March by creating a scaled-down Office of Community Safety (not a deparment), which he can do by executive order.

A recent article in Gothamist detailed additional ways Mamdani has pulled back on some of his public safety initiatives. Although he remains on record as wanting to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG—known for its violence against peaceful protesters) and end its gang database, both moves are strongly opposed by Commissioner Tisch. In an April 8 New York Times interview, the mayor said that in cases of disagreement between him and the Commissioner, final decisions would be his. But according to Gothamist, he has recently “tempered his rhetoric” on the SRG and failed to speak up when Tisch defended the gang database. While some have defended the mayor’s approach as necessary to “build trust” with the police, long-standing activists have demanded a different approach. They rightly argue that the mayor should take his lead from those “directly impacted by the city’s failed police-based mental health response and the organizations led by and accountable to them.”

Whether these retreats are consequences of Mamdani’s retention of Tisch in particular, or simply of his concern that he avoid the kind of conflict with the NYPD that DeBlasio experienced, is not particularly important. More significant is what they reveal about a politician attempting to undertake radical changes by relying on a passive electorate. Power must be confronted in order to make these changes, and to do so requires a self-conscious movement with clear objectives, democratic mechanisms to determine strategy and tactics, and a focus on broadening its reach and increasing its popular strength. Mere political maneuvering within an undemocratic political system, established to insulate the powerful, will inevitably fall short in winning meaningful reforms, let alone the more fundamental change sought by socialists of all stripes.

Affordable housing

Mamdani entered office having made the fight for affordable housing a central policy promise. And it’s likely Mamdani will achieve one of his goals: a rent freeze for the approximately one-third of New Yorkers living in apartments covered by the city’s rent stabilization laws. He has been able to appoint members to the Rent Guidelines Board—the agency which each year determines a maximum percentage by which rents in stabilized units may legally rise—who are sympathetic to the concerns of tenants squeezed between small wage increases and more rapid inflation. Mamdani was able to overcome the plans of outgoing Mayor Adams who almost succeeded, on his way out of office, in appointing enough landlord-friendly members to ensure landlord concerns would prevail on the board for the next several years.

But the rent freeze was hardly the only proposal in Mamdani’s platform intended to increase housing affordability. The platform promised to use city funds for the construction of 200,000 new units over ten years. “[F]or decades,” it read, “New York City has relied almost entirely on changing the zoning code to entice private development—with results that can fall short of the big promises.” Most of his plan’s funding—$70 billion out of $100 billion—was to be raised by a proposed sale of municipal bonds.

Mamdani’s ultimate support of ballot measures fast-tracking and otherwise smoothing the path for developers relies on the same market-based methods of constructing for-profit housing that have failed, over those same decades, to produce very many units of housing that most New Yorkers—certainly the vast majority of working-class New Yorkers can actually afford. (Ben Rosenfield and Holden Taylor, in an article in the Marxist journal Spectre and summarized in a Tempest interview, dig into this dynamic, and its recent history, in great detail.)

The ballot measures were backed by a coalition including developers and real estate firms, who funneled millions of dollars into the campaigns. Of course, and as Rosenfield and Taylor note, whatever housing goals Mamdani may personally favor, he “will have to navigate the limitations and contradictions of the capitalist city and state.”

Another early sign of his apparent change in approach on housing came during Mamdani’s October speech to the Association for a Better New York (co-founded in 1970 by leading real estate investor and developer Lewis Rudin). Mamdani stated that business leaders had approached him with concerns about the “affordability crisis” and their inability to employ people in an “expensive New York.” “As rents soar,” Mamdani continued, “it becomes almost impossible to attract the very kind of top talent that we need to see in this city.” One can imagine that the “top talent” people that these business leaders look to attract have a very different limit on the rent they can pay from that of the median working class New Yorker.

As for the project to build a deck over the Sunnyside rail yards which Mamdani theatrically pitched to the Developer-in-Chief in another Oval Office meeting (in February 2026), even if Trump comes through with the promised $21 billion in federal funds, the 12,000 homes it would eventually support would only become a reality several decades into the future. The housing construction itself would be separately funded.

Samuel Stein of the Community Service Society of New York, writing in Jewish Currents, runs through some of the financial limitations that a strong public housing program would face: Raising large sums on the bond market strains the city’s budget as debt comes due, and a downgrade by credit rating agencies may well increase interest payments on that debt. Paying union-scale wages on city construction projects while keeping rents low and maintaining buildings well adds further strain.

The city’s deficit—now a top concern for Mamdani—adds a new dimension to these limitations. The mayor recently broke a promise to implement a measure passed by the city council in 2023 that would expand CityFHEPS, a program providing housing vouchers intended to move homeless people from shelters into permanent housing. Eric Adams challenged the measure, and Mamdani is now continuing that challenge, saying that the city cannot afford it and battling the council—and advocates for the homeless—in court. The issue has attracted quite a bit of public attention: A recent article in Gothamist profiled several individuals fearing that they will wind up in the revolving door between homeless shelters and the streets.

Conclusions

In one sense, Mamdani himself is not to blame for the failure of his agenda. The obstacles to achieving it are not of his making. The Mayor could be criticized, though, for not pointing out to his voters how formidable these obstacles are, and thereby raising the question of what it might actually take to win. Eric Blanc and Bhaskhar Sunkara—strong Mamdani supporters very wary of (even hostile to) left critiques—warned in a December article in Jacobin against overestimating the Left’s strength based just on an electoral victory. “To push Hochul and other establishment politicians to fund reforms,” they wrote, “New York’s Left will need more popular depth and breadth. Without such a working-class movement, there’s a real danger that Zohran’s agenda will get blocked.”

As a DSA member himself (like Blanc and Sunkara), Mamdani is surely aware of this argument. He could have spoken up himself on the need to build popular power in order to prevent his agenda being blocked. But it’s clear, after his absence from tax-the-rich rallies and other events challenging New York’s Democrats, that his choice not to alienate himself from them—and from the business class—has prevented a full-throated call for a movement opposing the powerful.

Blanc and others close to him are very troubled by what they see as merely empty criticisms with no proposed solutions—attacking Mamdani (and others) from the Left, without taking responsibility for building real, lasting coalitions. But rather than taking aim at leftist critics, the socialist movement needs an open and thoroughgoing debate about how we offer a strategic alternative to what Mamdani is offering.

It is certainly not too late—especially at a time of heightened activism—for numbers of people to begin building the kind of forceful pushback that can eventually make the Mamdani agenda a reality.

The New York Times, in its “first hundred days” piece on Mamdani, didn’t hesitate to point out that “he has quickly retreated from one campaign promise after another” and that he “has little actual power to impose that ideology [democratic socialism] on city government”. But while this article has criticized Mamdani in similar respects, more important than passing judgement on the man is to point out the reality of what it will take to build and maintain the kind of power that can win what Mamdani’s voters eagerly wished for.

In a matter of weeks, it will be clear how much revenue the city can expect from Albany this year. Under any likely scenario, a tax on the wealthy sufficient to plug the budget gap and also move the needle on meaningful reforms, e.g., free buses or significant numbers of truly affordable publicly-owned apartments, will not happen. Hochul’s wildly inadequate concession in the form of a pied-à-terre tax—especially after Mamdani essentially declared victory, saying “today we’re taxing the rich”—will almost certainly be as far as she is willing to go. But in itself, this won’t necessarily lead to discouragement and lowered expectations. The outcome will depend on what conclusions people draw. It is certainly not too late—especially at a time of heightened activism—for numbers of people to begin building the kind of forceful pushback that can eventually make the Mamdani agenda a reality.

The capitalist class is powerful—New York City’s real estate and financial interests particularly so—and its political reach extensive. Without strong and growing institutions of resistance that can fight for working people’s needs, gains promised by an individual maverick politician can’t be won against such power, except in muted form. Many DSA members, as well as others on the Left who watch events closely, may find ways to come together and help build those institutions. But a different strategic vision will be required. If this happens, the momentum triggered by Mamdani’s campaign and election, rather than dissipating, will build. Otherwise, we risk the type of disillusionment with “progressive” politics, the result of which we are all too familiar with in Trump’s “America.”

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: Karamccurdy; modified by Tempest.

The post Mayor Mamdani’s program in peril?  appeared first on Tempest.

Originally published on New Politics, 29 April 2026

Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation

By Hafsa Kanjwal

Stanford University Press, 2023

This is an excellent book by historian Hafsa Kanjwal about the colonization of Kashmir that the Indian State has carried out since gaining independence from the British Empire and undergoing the tragedy of Partition. As the British overlords withdrew in August 1947, the subcontinent was split into India and Pakistan according to senseless imperial design—a tumultuous event that exploded in sectarian mass-violence, with an estimated million people killed. The Partition crisis immediately gripped the princely northern state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), too, which had been dominated for a century by the Hindu Dogra dynasty operating under indirect British rule.

Professor Kanjwal explains that, prior to the Dogra Maharaja Hari Singh’s infamous decision to accede to India rather than Pakistan in October 1947—despite the fact that J&K was majority-Muslim—his army joined forces with militants from the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and troops from another princely state to kill an estimated 250,000 Muslims in Jammu, displacing several hundred thousand more to Pakistan in the process. These oppressive policies of the maharaja sparked the first India-Pakistan War (1947–48), which established the “line of control” that currently divides Kashmir between the hostile neighbors.

Aptly defying the simplistic scholarly narrative that “see[s] colonialism as emerging only from the West to the Global South,” Professor Kanjwal in Colonizing Kashmir chronicles the “third world imperialism” that has been practiced by the Indian ruling class in this mountainous occupied territory over the past eighty years (13–14 [emphasis in original], 22). The unwilling host to up to 750,000 Indian troops who have been engaged in “massacres, human rights violations, and war crimes” for decades, Kashmir has widely been considered the world’s most-militarized region since an indigenous armed uprising began in the late 1980’s (273). To date, the Indian State continues to systematically deny millions of Kashmiris—the majority of whom are Muslim—their right to self-determination. As such, it is in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 47 (1948), which mandates a plebiscite to decide the territory’s fate: namely, whether it is to become independent, merge with Pakistan, or remain with India.

Besides the devastating effects this unresolved international crisis has on healthcare access and women’s rights in Kashmir, it has led to multiple wars between India and Pakistan since decolonization. One of these conflicts—the Kargil War (1999)—broke out after both countries had acquired nuclear weapons, thus coming dangerously close to the nuclear threshold. The threat of regional escalation to nuclear war is ever-present now, as the brief armed conflict that broke out between the neighboring countries in May 2025 after a militant attack on Hindu pilgrims in occupied Kashmir—a war that President Trump has wrongly credited himself with ending—reminds us.

In this sense, Colonizing Kashmir is a courageous challenge to “the sovereignty claims of the (post)colonial nation-state,” and to the triumphalist idea that decolonization has necessarily been a liberatory process (22). It is a call “for the creation of a historiography of states that do not exist, have not been allowed to exist, and peoples who have been denied self-determination and the right to exercise their sovereignty” (20). Beyond Kashmir and Kashmiris, these include “Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Palestine, Hong Kong, Tibet, East Turkestan, Chechnya, and Western Sahara,” indigenous peoples of the U.S., Canada, and Australia, plus “the Kurds, Papuans, and Oromo and Tigray people” (20). Likely as retaliation to its author’s principled truth-telling and apt criticisms, the Indian State outright banned the book in August 2025, mandating all its possessors to forfeit their copies!

In this review, we will examine Professor Kanjwal’s brilliant elucidation of state-building in Kashmir, before concluding by considering some of the parallels between Kashmir and Palestine.

Colonizing Kashmir

During the initial rule of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah (1947–53), the first prime minister of occupied J&K, Articles 35A and 370 were added to the Indian Constitution. These articles authorized local authorities to restrict land ownership to Kashmiris, and granted them uniquely autonomous powers, respectively. However, by ordering the ouster of Sheikh Abdullah over concerns about his loyalty and replacing him with a client regime led by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and leader of the Congress Party, showed his true interest in intensifying India’s colonization of Kashmir. It is on Bakshi’s controversial rule (1953–63), which advanced capitalist modernization, normalization of relations with India, and “emotional integration” to distract Kashmiris from their right to self-determination, that Professor Kanjwal focuses her book (9, 32, 130–1).

Despite Nehru’s proclamation of a secular-democratic political orientation (while hailing from a Kashmiri Pandit [Brahmin, or upper-caste Hindu] background), his centralist subjugation of Muslim-majority Kashmir arguably anticipated the current Hindu-fascist Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brazen 2019 abrogation of Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy. (Modi is a long-term member of the RSS, and as Chief Minister of Gujarat, he oversaw pogroms orchestrated by Hindu mobs in 2002 that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Indian Muslims.) As Professor Kanjwal notes in an article written after the sudden cancellation of Articles 35A and 370, not only does Modi’s unilateral action effectively serve to annex Kashmir, but it also “enables people from India to buy land and property in Kashmir,” thus raising fears that direct rule by New Delhi will “change the demographics of the Muslim-majority region.”

As Colonizing Kashmir elucidates, Naya (“New”) Kashmir refers to a progressive manifesto written in 1944 by leaders of Kashmir’s National Conference about the region’s post-independence future. Affiliated with the Congress Party, the National Conference was a political formation to which both Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi belonged. By contrast with the despotism of contemporary Dogra rule (and of Hindu nationalism), Naya Kashmir envisioned a voice for J&K’s Muslim majority, pluralistic respect for its religious minorities (Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and Buddhists), equality before the law, decentralized parliamentary governance, the abolition of feudalism, and cooperativism.

In this vein, Sheikh Abdullah actually avoided forging closer ties with Pakistan after Partition, partly out of fear that its feudal elites would block the implementation of Naya Kashmir, and he opted for continued accession to India instead. (While not necessarily committed to Naya Kashmir, the Communist Party of India and the Soviet Union appear to have shared similar views about the feudal character of Pakistan, which soon became a close U.S. Cold-War ally.) In 1950, Sheikh Abdullah’s government successfully passed reforms that redistributed lands without compensation to their former owners, in a move that empowered Kashmiri Muslim peasants while antagonizing Hindu landlords.

In their leadership style, both Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi were authoritarian: they banned opposition parties and wielded a great deal of control over press and radio coverage in and about Kashmir. Foreign journalists exaggerated Kashmiri Muslims’ support of Bakshi, in line with the local and central governments’ self-presentation as advancing secular and pluralistic politics. Tourism revolving around Kashmir’s natural beauty and supposed exoticism, the promotion of Hindu pilgrimages, the production of superficial films, large-scale infrastructure projects, economic modernization, and corruption were all utilized by Bakshi to further bind occupied Kashmir to India. Moreover, Bakshi personally directed Kashmir’s police and associated paramilitaries while clamping down on dissent.

Furthermore, Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi’s regimes mobilized an artistic vanguard to promote Kashmiri cultural nationalism and deepen ties with the Indian State. This ended up being a dialectical process that backfired to some extent, given the call’s resonance among Indian and Kashmiri leftists alike, together with its indirect encouragement of satirical and subversive commentary. For instance, Kashmiri literature entered a “decade of despair” following Sheikh Abdullah’s ouster, and several Kashmiri writers focused on “themes of corruption, greed, obsession with money, loss of moral values, and lack of loyalty” during Bakshi’s reign (210, 222).

While the vision of Naya Kashmir and the implementation of land reforms may have been progressive, they ultimately served to integrate Kashmir into India and derail fundamental questions about popular self-determination. In fact, Sheikh Abdullah conspired with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 to drop his demand for a plebiscite, in return for his being re-installed as Kashmir’s political boss.1 This fraught history set the stage for the present.

Parallels with Palestine

Tragically, the ongoing genocide carried out in Gaza by Israel and the U.S. since October 2023 may preview the fate of Kashmiri and Indian Muslims at the hands of the Hindu-fascist State. Especially following the revocation of J&K’s special status in 2019, the risk of genocide in Kashmir has been escalating, as Professor Kanjwal and Farhan Mujahid Chak have warned. Indeed, in the context of Hindu-supremacists wantonly lynching Muslims in Indian cities, many of Kashmir’s Pandits have welcomed the abrogation of Articles 35A and 370, while many Muslims have opposed it—in an alarming dynamic that ominously recalls Partition. As Azad Essa explains, the cancellation of Article 370 has been a long-term goal of the now-hegemonic Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Modi.2

In 2019, the Indian diplomat Sandeep Chakravorty blatantly called for the implementation of the “Israeli model” in Kashmir, by which he presumably meant dispossessing and ethnically cleansing Kashmiri Muslims to make way for settlement by India’s Hindu majority. Moreover, in 2021, Hindu nationalists publicly endorsed the genocide of Rohingya Muslims carried out in 2016 by the Burmese military and affiliated paramilitaries as inspirational.3

On its own, then, Hindu nationalism is toxic enough: its main theorist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) openly supported Nazism, and sought to rid post-independence India entirely of its Muslim minority.4 Yet, when India, which has long been Israel’s largest arms importer, is emboldened by the utter disregard evinced by its ally for international humanitarian law in its prosecution of genocide against Muslim-majority Palestinians (as well as its success to date in ensuring impunity for the same), the stage is set for a synergistic effect that could prepare the ground for genocide against Kashmiris—just as the unjust settlement of the Russo-Ukrainian War being pushed by the Trump and Putin regimes arguably encourages Xi Jinping to invade Taiwan.

1 Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance between India and Israel (London: Pluto, 2023), 150–1.

2 Ibid 98.

3 Ibid 141.

4 Ibid 74–83.

Groups Sound the Alarm on Massive Tar Sands Oil Pipeline, Demand Additional Opportunity for Public Comment President Trump on Thursday issued cross-border permit for Bridger pipeline before completing environmental review, consulting Tribes   For Immediate Release: May 1, 2026 CONTACTS Perry Wheeler, Earthjustice, pwheeler@earthjustice.org Stephanie Russell Kraft, Honor the Earth, press@honorearth.org Shannon James, MEIC, sjames@meic.org …

The post Press Release: Groups Sound the Alarm on Massive Tar Sands Oil Pipeline, Demand Additional Opportunity for Public Comment appeared first on Montana Environmental Information Center - MEIC.

Gualala River estuary / lagoon at sunset, April 27, 2026.
Photo courtesy of Efi Benjamin, River Bend Kayaks.

If we have ever taken a walk anywhere in our area and come back home without being able to name or describe a single tree, this article will make you think anew about the trees that surround us. Here we learn why attending to trees and their differences makes us ever aware of local resources, some ancient, others quite recent. Take note of several trees and their features, and then walk and see in new ways on our many paths and trails.

Coast Redwood

Trees are the predominant terrestrial feature of the Gualala River watershed. They account for the largest biomass in the watershed and cover a third of its nearly 300 square miles. How we think about them — their beauty, their importance to the natural systems of the planet, and their economic value — is critical to whether we find ways to protect them and ensure their continued existence, especially on a warming planet.

The Gualala River watershed, which includes all lands drained by the river and its tributaries, is blessed to have a remarkable number of native species of trees — over 30 — which make a critical contribution to the biodiversity of this area.

Friends of Gualala River (FoGR) introduced a new feature on our website in which we describe a number of native tree species. Check them out and see if you can on your next walk identify one or more of the species:

• Coast Redwood
• California Bay Laurel
• Bigleaf Maple
• Grand Fir, Lowland Fir, Stinking Fir
• Western Hemlock
• California Buckeye
• Red Alder
• White Alder

With these articles we hope to expand awareness of the individual qualities of these tree species, as well as to make them easier to find and identify. Our goal is to help the community learn about the role these trees play in the natural world around us. We include many photos with each article and highlight specific features. Note that we also include places in the watershed where each species may be seen.

Thanks to the moderating influences of the Pacific Ocean and our mid-latitude location, ours is a temperate climate which confers upon the watershed a rich mix of both conifer and hardwood species. Some of the species are generalists whose growth requirements can be met across much of the watershed (e.g., Douglas fir, tanoak, and madrone), while others grow more within specific habitats such as a riparian corridor (e.g., willow, alder, big leaf maple, Oregon ash) or a different climate zone (e.g., interior live oak, black oak, bishop pine), or a specific soil type (e.g., pygmy cypress). In our Gualala River watershed, we have both the tallest and the shortest tree species in the world. Some of the remaining old growth coast redwoods top 300 feet in height, while the pygmy cypress, a rare species that occurs only in Sonoma and Mendocino counties, may not reach more than a few feet in height.

Many of the tree species are components of forest ecosystems, but others, like the California buckeye grow in open habitats such as grasslands. Species like the coast redwood and the bay laurel are from ancient lineages, while others, like some of the oak species, are, relatively speaking, more recent arrivals.

Our native trees surround us and are easy to access and spot, if only we take the time to look and see their differences as well as their habitat preferences. These trees inspire and sustain us as they have for generations before us. As FoGR celebrates this glorious flora, we also dedicate ourselves to protecting and preserving our trees as our predominant terrestrial feature.

Magnificent Bay Tree on Tin Barn Road

California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer and California Nurses Association (CNA), will hold a press conference in Oakland, Calif. on Tuesday, May 5. Speakers from the elected leadership of CNA will outline why Steyer is registered nurses’ top choice to lead the state in progressive reform, as well as  the nurses’ “get out the vote” mobilization of its 125,000 members.

President Trump signed off on a key permit to construct the Bridger Pipeline Expansion project, often referred to as “Keystone Light” because it would pump huge volumes of Canada’s sludgy tar sands oil along a portion of the controversial canceled Keystone XL pipeline’s route.

Following is reaction from Anthony Swift, a longtime leader in the fight against the project and current Senior Strategist for Global Nature at NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council):

“No matter what you call the project, the environmental concerns that animated the fight over Keystone XL are no less acute today. Keystone Light will threaten water supplies and exacerbate climate change. This is the moment to get off the oil roller coaster, not double down on the dirtiest oil on the planet.

“The Trump administration has been lobbing gifts to Big Oil since its first day in office. This is the latest in a long, long, long list of favors that show the oil industry is getting a great return on its billion-dollar investment in the President’s campaign.”

“President Trump has repeatedly said that America does not need Canada’s oil, so we certainly don’t need Keystone Light.”

The future of the global shipping industry – and its 3% share of global emissions – will be decided in three weeks of talks in the third quarter of this year, after a decision taken in London on Friday.

At the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) headquarters this week, governments largely failed to substantively negotiate a controversial set of measures to penalise polluting ships and reward vessels running on clean fuels known as the Net-Zero Framework. The green shipping plan has been aggressively opposed by fossil fuel-producing nations, in particular by the US and Saudi Arabia.

This week, countries  delivered statements outlining their views on the measures in a session that ran from Wednesday into Thursday. Then, late on Friday afternoon, they discussed when to negotiate these measures and what proposals they should discuss.

After a lengthy debate, which the talks’ chair Harry Conway joked was confusing, governments agreed to hold a week of behind-closed-door talks from 1 September to 4 September and from 23 November to 27 November.

Following these meetings, which are intended to negotiate disagreements on the NZF and rival watered-down measures proposed by the US and its allies, there will be public talks from November 30 to December 4.

• Oct 17, 2025 Politics US-led alliance wins a year’s delay in adoption of green shipping deal The IMO’s Net-Zero Framework will be up for approval again in October 2026, after the US and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to vote on it as planned Read more
• Apr 23, 2026 Energy Prospects for global green shipping deal boosted by US tariff ruling, analysts say While divisions remain over the international shipping’s Net Zero Framework, the US’s main threat may now have been partly neutered Read more
• Jan 23, 2026 Politics IMO head: Shipping decarbonisation “has started” despite green deal delay Arsenio Dominguez said the shipping industry’s net zero emissions goal is not in dispute although countries have stalled on adopting a framework to reach it Read more

Last October, talks intended to adopt the NZF provisionally agreed in April 2025 were derailed by the US and Saudi Arabia, who successfully persuaded a majority of countries to vote to postpone the talks by a year. 

Those talks, known as an extraordinary session, are now scheduled to resume on Friday December 4 unless governments decide otherwise in the preceding weeks. While this Friday session will be in the same building with the same participants as the rest of the week’s talks, calling it the extraordinary session is significant as it means the NZF can be voted on.

Em Fenton, senior director of climate diplomacy at Opportunity Green said that the NZF “has survived but survival is not a victory” and called for it to be adopted later this year “in a way that maintains urgency and ambition, and delivers justice and equity for countries on the frontlines of climate impacts”.

NZF’s supporters

The NZF would penalise the owners of particularly polluting ships and use the revenues to fund cleaner fuels, support affected workers and help developing countries manage the transition.

Many governments – particularly in Europe, the Pacific and some Latin American and African nations – spoke in favour of it this week.

South Africa said the fund it would create is “the key enabler of a just transition” and its removal would take away predictable revenues from African countries. Vanuatu said that “we are not here to sink the ship but to man it”.

Australia’s representative called it a “carefully balanced compromise”, as it was provisionally agreed by a large majority after years of negotiations, and warned that failing to adopt it would harm the shipping industry by failing to provide certainty.

Santa Marta summit kick-starts work on key steps for fossil fuel transition

Canada’s negotiator said that if it was weakened to appease its critics like the US and Saudi Arabia, this would disappoint those who think it is too weak already like the Pacific islands.

A large group of mainly big developing countries like Nigeria and Indonesia did not rule out supporting the framework but called for adjustments to help developing countries deal with the changes. Nigeria called for developing countries to be given more time to implement the measures, a minimum share of the fund’s revenues and discounts for ships bringing them food and energy.

According to analysis from the University of College London’s Energy Institute, the countries speaking in support of the NZF include five countries which voted with the US to postpone talks in October and a further ten countries which did not take a clear position at that time. Most governments support the NZF as the basis for further talks, the institute said.

Opposition remains

But a small group of mainly oil-producing nations said they are opposed to any financial penalties for particularly polluting ships.

They support a proposal submitted by Liberia, Argentina and Panama which has proposed weakening emission targets and ditching any funding mechanism for the framework involving “direct revenue collection and disbursement”.

Argentina argued that the NZF would harm countries which are far from their export markets and said concerns over that cannot be solved “by magic with guidelines”. They added that, as a result, the NZF itself needs to be fundamentally re-negotiated.

The UCL Energy Institute said that just 24 countries – less than a quarter of those who spoke – said they supported Argentina’s proposal.

Despite this, the US State Department issued a statement saying that the decision to hold more talks incorporating alternative proposals signalled “a total collapse in support for the original NZF proposal”.

While this week’s talks did not see the kind of US threats reported in October, their delegation did leave personalised flyers on every delegate’s desk which were described by academics, negotiators and climate campaigners as misleading.

One witness told Climate Home News that junior US delegates arrived early on Wednesday and placed flyers behind governments’ name plates warning each country of the costs they would incur if the NZF is adopted.

The figures on a selection of leaflets seen by Climate Home News ranged from $100 million for Panama to $3.5 billion for the Netherlands. “They are trying to scare countries away from supporting climate action with one-sided information”, one negotiator told Climate Home News. 

A flyer left on Pakistan’s desk, shared by a witness with Climate Home News

They added that the calculations, by the US State Department’s Office of the Chief Economist, ignore the fact that the money raised would be shared to help poorer countries’ transition as well as ignoring the economic costs of failing to address climate change.

Tristan Smith, an academic representing the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology, told the meeting that the calculations were “opaque” and flawed as they overstate the contribution of fuel cost to trade costs.

A US State Department Spokesperson said in a statement that they “firmly stand behind our estimates” which were shared “in good faith” and to “provide an additional tool to policymakers as they contemplate the true economic burden over the NZF”.

This article was updated on 5/5/2026 to include the US State Department’s statement

The post Key green shipping talks to be held in late 2026 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Thousands of Kentuckians across the state are saving money on their electric bills through rooftop solar installed by reputable local companies. But there are also companies operating here that are making big promises that don’t deliver, locking you into a costly solar installation that’s overpriced, improperly designed, unpermitted, or poorly installed.

So how do you tell the difference?

Here are some warning signs to look out for:

• “Get paid to install solar!” “No up-front cost with this special government program!” “Available only in your area!” “Limited time offer!” If an installer makes these types of promises, proceed with caution. In Kentucky, there are no state, federal, or utility programs that will pay you to install solar, or that offer financing with no up-front cost.

• Aggressive sales tactics and “instant rebates.” If someone wants you to sign up on the spot, or within a very limited window, that’s a red flag. A reputable installer won’t pressure you to make a big investment without time to fully think it over or to get quotes from another installer.

• They offer you a quote without looking at your electric bills or without first recommending or asking about past efficiency upgrades. Your installer should be familiar with your utility’s solar net metering rates and should design a system that maximizes the financial benefit to you.

• If you already have solar, watch out for “free” offers to “inspect” your array, even if they say they’re representing a company involved with your installation. They may be trying to get in the door to sell you on batteries or another costly service you don’t need. If you’re net-metered, a battery won’t save you much, if any, money on your electric bill.

Tips for Doing Your Due Diligence

A qualified, reputable solar installer will:

• Have North American Board of Certified Energy Professionals (NABCEP)-certified solar professionals on staff and/or be a NABCEP Accredited Residential PV Installation Company. This is the gold standard for solar installers. Look for installers at NABCEP.org. You can also find a list of Kentucky installers at KYSES.org.
• Provide you with staff or subcontractor qualifications. Don’t be afraid to ask for a copy of the KY Contractor License Number or Master License Number for the person pulling the electric permit.
• Do a site visit before finalizing a design and quote. While technology has made it easy to do initial solar assessments remotely, an installer should come to your home or business to do an in-person assessment before offering you a contract to sign.
• Handle permitting, inspections, utility interconnections and net metering applications. They should give you a copy of the net metering application submitted to the electric service provider if you ask for it.
• Fully explain how they calculate your estimated electric bill savings over the life of the installation. If they are incorporating electric rate increases by your utility, they should be reasonable – no more than 5% per year.
• Give you time to consider your options and get additional quotes. Although there are situations that might warrant higher or lower installation costs, for residential solar installations you should expect installed cost to be around $2,500 to $3,500 per installed kW. Larger commercial installation costs are typically $2,000-$2,400 per installed kW.
• Reputable battery installers will work with you to determine what you want to back up when the power goes out. Whole-home battery backup will be very expensive – make sure to compare it to the cost of a backup gas generator.

When in doubt, talk to an expert!

The Mountain Association provides unbiased, third party solar assessments and advice to local governments, small businesses, nonprofits and faith-based organizations in Eastern Kentucky.

Contact our Energy Team at energy@mtassociation.org or (859) 880-3904.

Download this information as a flyer: _Solar scam flyer 5.1.26 (1)Download

The post Solar Scams Back on the Rise appeared first on Mountain Association.

In mid-April, Indigenous leaders from British Columbia traveled to Ottawa to protest against the federal government’s aggressive support for fossil fuel expansion.

Mark Carney’s Liberal government is fast-tracking multiple LNG projects in British Columbia, including the recent approval of Enbridge’s $4 billion natural gas pipeline expansion.

Securing Indigenous support for fossil fuel projects has been a cornerstone strategy of Canada’s oil and gas sector in recent years, with companies promising considerable benefits on the one hand while highlighting Indigenous involvement as an aspect of corporate responsibility on the other.

Not everyone is on board however, and Indigenous communities have been some of the most vocal opponents of major Canadian energy projects, including Union of BC Indian Chiefs representative Kitisha Paul, who argued at the Ottawa protest that fossil fuel expansion is causing the “deterioration of our land, our water.” 

Kai Nagata, an energy campaigner with the B.C.-based environmental non-profit Dogwood, has spent years working with Indigenous communities on the front-lines of opposition to new oil and gas infrastructure, a role that’s included deep research into the benefit agreements offered by industry as well as the foreign investors set to cash-in from new gas pipelines and export terminals. In an extensive Q&A with DeSmog, Nagata illuminates some of the tensions around promises of Indigenous participation in new fossil fuel projects, and the ways in which these supposedly “nation building” projects are tied to the U.S. and the MAGA movement.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To what extent are Indigenous communities participating in the development of new fossil fuel infrastructure in British Columbia?

Coastal GasLink, a gas pipeline built across Northern BC, has zero percent Indigenous equity ownership. Sixty-five percent of the pipeline is owned by KKR, which is a New York private equity firm, and 35 percent remains with TC Energy Corporation.  

The LNG Canada terminal in Kitimat has zero percent Indigenous ownership, as it’s owned by Royal Dutch Shell and a consortium of Asian oil companies, some of which are state-owned.

The financing for these projects came from U.S., Canadian, Japanese and some Chinese banks. So the investors, the shareholders, the owners, and indeed many of the senior project staff and people involved in engineering and building the thing are not even Canadian, let alone Indigenous. 

The only LNG project that has Indigenous ownership right now in BC is Cedar LNG. So the Haisla Nation has a 50 percent stake in the terminal, but they’re buying the gas from Coastal GasLink, which is owned by KKR. And KKR also has a midstream infrastructure partnership with Pembina Pipelines, which is the Haisla’s partner on Cedar LNG. So they’re not outside the orbit of KKR by any means.

With Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline (PRGT) or the Ksi Lisims project, which are being advanced by this Texas company [Western LNG] with Wall Street investors, they’ve really been at pains to make it seem like this is an Indigenous-owned project. That’s how it’s been pitched by the provincial government. And that’s just not true.
 
 (Author’s note: filings with the BC Environmental assessment office show Western LNG is the primary owner and operator of the Ksi Lisims project).

Companies are riding this wave of concern over the poor treatment of Indigenous people historically in Canada and the need to make that up to them.They’re calling this ‘economic reconciliation’: here’s an opportunity for a small number of your governing elite to cash in, with hopefully some long-term benefits for the broader population on your reserve or in your nation.

Can you speak more to the kinds of agreements companies have signed with Indigenous communities?

Every deal is different, and they’re all secret. So that’s the first sign they might not stand up to scrutiny.

During the initial negotiations around the PRGT, which was back in 2014, you had band councils and hereditary chiefs signing impact benefit agreements. That was the same era as Coastal GasLink. Prior to that era of projects, the older model involved people from industry coming into Indigenous communities and saying “you people need to get out of the way now, the bulldozers are coming.”

Recognizing that that approach carried material risk for projects, the energy companies started crafting impact benefit agreements. They follow a similar template, basically an Indigenous community gets some limited financial benefits upfront. They get a promise of ongoing financial benefits, often very modest, but in return, they have clauses that are pretty draconian, like you have to prevent any of the members of your Indigenous group from speaking out against this industry or this project, and that can include on social media.

How do you get people to agree to that?

If your chief and council signs a closed-door deal with a pipeline company, it may contain clauses like your band members can’t shit talk this project on Facebook. That came out of a leaked benefit agreement that was signed with Coastal GasLink.

The chief and council weren’t sure if it was a good idea. So they put it out to a plebiscite and the community voted against it. Then they said there were ‘problems with the process’, so they took it to an in-camera vote. The council was split down the middle, so the chief himself passed the tie-breaking vote.

It actually came down to one guy—the band chief—after a democratic majority of band members rejected the deal. And the deal contained disparagement clauses. If community members disparaged the industry, the community could be held financially liable. I would characterize that as coercive. That’s not a deal anyone should sign. But when you have no leverage and when you’ve been dealing with the effects of poverty for 150 years, there’s a lot of immediate needs that these projects promise to fulfill.

Like what?

Kitselas First Nation recently signed an impact benefit agreement with Western LNG, the company developing the PRGT pipeline. They’re going to find some spaces for child care on the reserve, so that more people can go to work.

But childcare is a provincial responsibility. Except for First Nations. So you have a situation where they’re being deprived of services the non-Indigenous population receive from the provincial government, and are then forced to sign very one-sided deals with industrial projects to fund those basic social services.
 
 You create a situation where it feels like a pretty good deal if the pipeline goes through and you get a little revenue and maybe some childcare too. Obviously you’re gonna take the deal where you get something instead of nothing.

What are the risks of pursuing these projects for Indigenous partners?

There’s some really big risks around LNG right now, like what’s happening in global markets in Asia and Europe. Who carries those risks? Which investors are first in line to be paid? Which creditors are first to line if things go wrong? You might be the last in line to recoup your investment depending on the structure of the deal.

The trend is that the lawyers and the industry consultants—the people who jump from project to project around the world and arrange these big financing deals—they get paid right away. They don’t stick around to build the project. And I’m concerned by the fact that this current crop of LNG projects are all backed by Wall Street, because Wall Street doesn’t know anything about building pipelines or operating energy infrastructure.

But they do know how to ride a bubble.

They know to make money into other money, and they know how ruthlessly exploit a dying industry. Don’t forget, what we call ‘private equity’ today used to be called ‘leveraged buyouts’. And that may sound high-minded and complicated financial stuff, but really it’s just the same core business it was 40 years ago: either you turn around a troubled asset, or you fire all the workers and sell off the parts.

Vulture capitalism is a key component of private equity.

What happens when Indigenous communities resist projects, like in the case of Wet’suwet’en Hereditary chiefs and land defenders opposing the Coastal GasLink project

Pipelines in particular come with a whole playbook and a set of actors which are very practiced in operating in conflict zones and sites of recent political or environmental upheaval.

The companies that are building PRGT include Bechtel, which is a major U.S. military contractor, and one of the biggest privately-owned companies in the world. They manufacture weapons, build defense installations, and they do oil and gas work in shall we say the ‘imperial borderlands’, contested spaces. They’re deeply integrated with the U.S. security state and with U.S. foreign policy. And they have a playbook for dealing with the ‘restive local tribes’ or any other local community that might give the Americans a hard time over their globe-spanning infrastructure.

We saw an example of this with the Wetʼsuwetʼen when they contested Coastal GasLink. The company that bought the pipeline, KKR, has its own internal intelligence division, which is run by David Petraeus, who’s the former CIA director and was prior to that a top-ranking general who literally wrote the U.S. Armed Forces manual on counterinsurgency warfare.

And if you read his book, you see there’s a lot of familiar tactics that we saw adapted to Northern BC. We saw veterans of the War on Terror step in and take control of a physical space in a way that was new to people covering Canadian resource extraction projects.

You had American, British, Belgian, South African mercenaries essentially working as private security for the pipeline who were really directing the actions and collecting intelligence and evidence for the police who just got called in to do the hands-on stuff and make the arrests.

I would characterize what we witnessed there as a corporate counter-insurgency.

Do you view Indigenous participation in new fossil fuel projects part of the marketing scheme or a guarantee against another Wetʼsuwetʼen crisis?

Both the federal and provincial levels of government are doing all they can to de-risk these projects and entice these very small communities with limited fiscal capacity to invest in these multi-billion dollar projects which include loan guarantees and other kind of bespoke deals around transmission line access and that kind of thing. 

They’re bending over backwards to make these projects work because they know that [between the] combination of Indigenous ownership and the green branding around electrified LNG terminals, most people in Vancouver who see one news article will think “oh, a First Nation has decided to build a gas terminal in a place I’ve never visited. Sounds like they’re trying to protect the environment and it’s good to see native people get a stake in these projects after being on the sidelines for so long, good for them.”

In the case of the Haisla nation that has ownership over Cedar LNG, It’s up to them to determine whether these projects benefit their community, but we do need to consider how much information—and the quality of the information—the public, Indigenous or otherwise, has when making these decisions. In the small towns of Northern BC, there’s really no media scrutiny to speak of. The energy companies send their press releases to the local newspaper, the focus of which is how many jobs will be created, but there’s really no scrutiny of what the impact will be. And many of these decisions are happening behind closed doors anyways. We only find out the terms if they leak.

What was the calculus for investors in wanting to develop these projects?

Apollo Global Management invested in Western LNG and the development of the Ksi Lisims terminal back in 2018. They got in on the ground floor at a time when there were low LNG prices worldwide. There was a down cycle starting in about 2015, 2016, where we saw a huge wave of these projects get canceled because the markets weren’t there yet. The prices didn’t take off until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and that’s what kicked off the current gold rush.

Some of these people had the idea of using an emerging technology—modular floating LNG terminals—as a way to both lower the risk and lower the cost. The floating terminals are basically converted LNG bulk carriers, which can be moved around the world and hooked up wherever they’re needed. Instead of building a massive onshore terminal, the floating terminals are built in Korea and they can be hooked up in series to expand capacity.

Apollo saw the potential in that, not just the export terminals, but there are equivalent facilities that are built on ships for the import of LNG, which Apollo also invested in, in the same year. They really saw the opportunity for vertical integration in emerging markets where people need access to reliable electricity. And this is the cheap modular way to do it.

Leon Black is the former CEO who made that call and who got Apollo Global Management to be the first major Wall Street backer of the Ksi Lisims project, and it’s the only project that Western LNG has ever developed. The company was incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Texas, but it’s only ever existed to develop this project in BC.

You have talked about how the backers of the Ksi Lisims project are tied to the MAGA movement, can you tell me more about this? 

Steve Schwartzman, who runs Blackstone, (the other major investor in this project) is a top-10 donor to Trump. He’s bankrolling the MAGA movement. He’s a major advisor and donor to Trump, who is steering and financing what I would characterize as like an authoritarian political movement that is taking over institutions in the U.S. and openly wants to annex Canada for its resources.

It puts the question of Indigenous ownership in perspective, given the players. I really don’t think that they have the best interests of local people in their minds as they’re structuring these deals. They’re not here on a charitable project. The reason why they would empower the companies that they’re invested in to strike these deals with local First Nations is to give them the kind of political cover they need to get permits and authorizations and the loans.

The post How Canada’s LNG Push is Benefiting Trump and Shortchanging Indigenous People appeared first on DeSmog.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, May 1, 2026

The eight-hour workday. Voting rights. Desegregated buses and schools. Every hard-won right Californians depend on today came from people who organized, refused to accept the status quo, and fought back.

In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions made a declaration: in five years, workers across the country would strike on May 1 for an eight-hour workday.  No guarantee of success—and no central command to make it happen. The idea spread anyway, city to city, carried by ordinary workers who organized locally and walked off of the job together. At Haymarket Square in Chicago, workers paid for that defiance with their lives. The movement grew anyway. They won, and May 1 became the international workers’ celebration, May Day.

That is the spirit that drives Public Advocates. For 55 years, we have combined civil rights litigation, policy advocacy, and deep partnership with grassroots communities to challenge the laws and power structures that lock low-income communities and communities of color out of good schools, stable housing, and reliable transit. We do this because rights declared on paper mean nothing without power behind them—and power is built through sustained organizing and coordinated struggle over time. That is how we win resourced schools, renter protections, and transit systems that serve the people who need these most.

That work has never been more urgent.

California is the fourth-largest economy in the world. The people who built it—teachers, nurses, farmworkers, transit workers, essential workers of every kind—are being pushed out of it. The Tenant Protection Act, the state’s primary shield against extreme rent hikes and unjust evictions, expires in 2030. Tens of thousands of affordable homes sit approved but unfinanced. Students in under-resourced school facilities are still denied what the law guarantees. This is not a series of policy failures. It is a system working exactly as it was designed—to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few rather than spreading it to include the people who make this state run.

We know it can be different today because we have seen it. In Minnesota years of cross-racial organizing produced the 2023“Minnesota Miracle,”— a single legislative session that delivered a billion dollars in affordable housing, free school meals for every child, expanded voting rights, paid family leave, and protections for workers and immigrant communities. This past January 23, that same coalition drove a massive ICE presence out of Minneapolis through peaceful community action. It didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people built power—across race, across issues, across years—together.

That is the work of May Day. That is the work of Public Advocates.

This May Day we recommit to the California that should exist—where the people who built this economy can afford to stay here, where every child has a school worthy of their potential, and where no community’s future depends on the goodwill of those in power.

Power isn’t given. It’s built. We’re building it.

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Public Advocates Inc. is a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization that challenges the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination by strengthening community voices in public policy and achieving tangible legal victories advancing education, housing, transportation equity, and climate justice.

The post Statement: Public Advocates Stands with Workers and Communities Fighting For a Just California on May Day appeared first on Public Advocates.

Opinion by KAY MATTHEWS

Kudos to Rio Arriba County for passing Resolution 2026-057 opposing any uranium mining in the Carson National Forest and requesting a full environmental impact assessment by the Forest Service. A Canadian corporation, Gamma Resources, has filed for a permit to do exploratory drilling in the Canjilon area of the Carson. The New Mexico congressional delegation is on board with the county’s opposition: Senator Ben Ray Lujan is drafting legislation to withdraw the Chama watershed from mineral development with Senator Heinrich and Representative Leger Fernandez’s support.

Several administrative concerns give pause, however. The US Forest Service, which would ordinarily be the agency overseeing the request for a permit is currently being dismantled  by the Trump administration, with the Washington headquarters moved to Salt Lake City, home of the movement to privatize public lands, all regional offices shut down, and fifty research facilities closed. The administration had already eviserated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by allowing actions on federal lands to proceed with expedited or curtailed environmental review. Individual agencies are making the decision whether to allow public comment via scoping or draft environmental assessments (EA). Kit Carson Electric Coop released an EA on the proposed “green energy” solar array and hydrogen facility in Questa with no public input.

The other worry is that the administration will supplant the NEPA process with the FAST-41 program that allows the fast-tracking of environmental reviews for infrastructure projects, as established by Title 41 of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act. Now Trump has directed that mineral production projects be accelerated under the FAST-41 program. We don’t know how this is going to proceed regarding the Canjilon mining permit request, but Luis Peña submitted a request to the county to inspect public records regarding anything related to Gamma Resources.

Mount Taylor is also under siege. After years in the works, Laramide Resources company submitted the La Jara Mesa Mining application to New Mexico Mining and Minerals Division for the proposed uranium mine north of Mount Taylor early this year. During the initial public comment period the state agency received over 200 letters opposing the mine; in light of this strong opposition it extended the comment period and committed to holding a public hearing, but not until it receives answers to questions that will be submitted to Laramide. Because the proposed plan is on the Cibola National Forest, that agency is also responsible for a NEPA analysis, as in the proposed Canjilon uranium exploration. Unfortunately, the La Jara Mesa mine has already been listed on the FAST-41 fast-track.  This is the rationale, as stated in the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council press release: “The Permitting Council is committed to working closely with the National Energy Dominance Council and other Federal partners to advance President Trump’s bold agenda to make America energy dominant again, and use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure.”

Uranium mining in the Mount Taylor area in the 1970s led to legacy waste from the open-pit Jackpile Mine on Laguna Pueblo, a Superfund site, and the mining and milling operations at Ambrosia Lake, Kerrmac, and Homestake north of Grants. The Navajo Nation suffered extensive uranium ore extraction and in 1979 the Church Rock spill unleashed 94 million gallons of radioactive waste into the Rio Puerco. As mining booms always do, it kept miners employed during the boom, then out-of-work and contaminated after the bust. The Trump administration is doing everything in its power to enhance nuclear energy production with already compromised accountability from the mining industrial complex and the federal government.

The Navajo Nature currently has a moratorium on uranium mining. Diné activist Leona Morgan and others were out on the streets in Bernalillo a week ago protesting the Nuclear in New Mexico conference where industry and its proponents were advocating for not only uranium mining but SMRs (small modular nuclear reactors), reprocessing, enrichment facilities, and more. They’re pushing nuclear reactors as “renewable energy” and, as NM State Representative Meredith Dixon stated, “I would really like to see New Mexico as a leader in all things nuclear.” Virginia McLemore of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources called New Mexico’s supposed one billion pounds of uranium “world class deposits . . . [that are]  going to keep going until we have exploited all of it.”

The idea of drilling rigs crisscrossing the forests of Canjilon is anathema to all of us. Carson National Forest, if it proves to be the decision maker via the NEPA process, has a huge responsibility, not only to the Chama Valley but to the state of New Mexico, to protect our forests and watersheds from an industry that enables nuclear bombs, desecration of the environment, and unhealthy people.

 

 

 

 

 

In a CalMatters piece published today, Rachel Becker outlines the major obstacles facing efforts to revive the Delta Tunnel project. Even as Governor Newsom claims the state is “closer than ever” to completing it, significant hurdles remain, including a massive price tag, unclear financing plans, pending critical water rights decisions, and a lack of commitments from water agencies to fund the project.

Becker highlights the project’s long history of controversy, dating back more than half a century, and voters rejecting an earlier version in the 1980s. She notes that Delta communities continue to denounce the plan, calling it a water grab that would devastate one of the country’s largest estuaries and harm towns, wildlife, and multigenerational farms.

The article also points out that with the Delta’s current state of decline due to algal blooms, degraded water quality, and struggling fish populations, diverting water through the tunnel would only further damage the already fragile ecosystem.  

“Nobody seems to care about the people out here on the ground,” Duane Martin Jr., a third-generation cattleman in the Delta, told CalMatters, describing what he sees as the project’s irreversible impacts on the region and its communities.

Read more from CalMatters here.

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Middleton Island is the first thing the wind hits between Hawaii and Alaska. Out here in the Gulf of Alaska, tens of thousands of seabirds gather each summer, turning a remote outpost into one of the...

The scene is a familiar one: A V-shaped flock of Canada Geese flies overhead, wings flapping languidly among the wisps of clouds as their discordant honks carry across the spring or fall air. The...

Location

The Gualala River enters the Pacific Ocean approximately 110 miles north of San Francisco, California. Just past the mouth of the river lies the town of Gualala on CA Highway 1, a three-hour drive from San Francisco over narrow, twisting roads and stunning ocean and mountain views. Tourism and logging are the primary local industries.

Land area

The Gualala River watershed covers 298 square miles, and spans the Sonoma / Mendocino County line. About three-quarters of the watershed is in Sonoma County, and constitutes 14% of that county. The other 25% of the watershed makes up 2% of the much larger Mendocino County.

Population

2000 Census results show 6,971 residents in the area between Jenner and Manchester (a range of approximately 50 miles, with the Gualala River just past its halfway point).

Census information also shows that 40% of the houses are vacant (mostly vacation houses and rentals), suggesting a weekend population of approximately 11,618 full and part-time residents. These numbers do not include hotel / motel / B&B guests.

About the River

The water flow is extremely variable from summer to winter months. Local annual rainfall averages are approximately 36 inches along the coast and 72 inches inland. A large sandbar usually blocks the mouth of the river from late spring until the heavy rain runoffs of late fall.

The river’s source lies in the high coastal range watershed, and its main forks rest directly on the San Andreas fault line. The river is approximately 32 miles long and works its way through 190,000 acres of rugged countryside.

The river is a breeding ground for the threatened coho salmon and steelhead trout as well as other local fish. Ospreys, great blue herons, egrets and river otters fish in the river and its estuary.

Although the river was once internationally known for fishing, more than 100 years of logging have so damaged the habitat that the coho are now nearly extinct. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) includes the Gualala River on its Clean Water Act 303(d) list for excessive sediment and high temperatures. The EPA has published a report on Gualala River Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) for Sediment. Local volunteers and state and federal agencies are working to restore the river, but its health remains fragile.

There are currently three main threats to the river. Large scale logging operations contribute to sediment in the river and raise water temperature.

Developpment pressure for vineyard conversions would result in increased pollution from pesticides, and would have the same damaging effects as clear-cut logging, but would also clear all vegetation and would not replant trees.

A commercial plan to remove water from the river approximately one mile above the mouth was defeated in 2002 after a campaign by Friends of Gualala River would have further degraded the river, and could have been the last straw for this unique and beautiful river.

For those seeking further details on the watershed, the North Coast Watershed Assessment Program (NCWAP) has released a detailed report on the Gualala River watershed. NCWAP was a state funded effort working with local landowners, and defines its activities as gathering data “to improve watershed and fisheries conditions” on California’s north coast. [See: excerpt on vineyard conversions.]

The Institute for Fisheries Resources has also published a database of detailed information on the Gualala River watershed (called KRIS-Gualala), which includes extensive text, tables, maps and photographs.

Water Quality

Information on water quality for municipal water systems which draw from the Gualala River underflow is available from the Environmental Working Group:

• North Gualala Water Company
• The Sea Ranch Water Company

Water Quantity

Information on the quantity of water flowing in the Gualala River is available from the United States Geological Survey:

• North Fork Gualala River
• South Fork Gualala River

Local History

The original occupants of the Gualala Watershed were the Kashia Pomo Indians. They referred to the area as qhawálaoli, “water coming down place” or “where the sky (also river) meets the sea.” With the arrival of the first Russian settlers, timber harvesting became the area’s first industry.

Virgin old growth redwood was removed as early as 1862. As timber demands grew after the 1906 earthquake, more and more old growth was harvested. Logging activities slowed somewhat in the 1960s, but still continue today.