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The far-right AfD was the undoubted winner of the closely watched state election in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September. Still, the party fell short of an outright majority, in part thanks to a surprisingly strong performance by the Greens. The question now is, can the AfD form a government at all, and if not, what coalition of rivals could possibly agree to govern in its place?

On 6 September, voters cast their ballots in the Saxony-Anhalt widely watched and publicised state election. More than anything, the results have led to a climate of uncertainty and shown a desire for fundamental change. The outcome amounts to a political earthquake whose shockwaves extend far beyond the state’s borders.

43.8 per cent of voters opted for the “confirmed far-right”  Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) state branch (+23 percentage points). The ruling conservative party (CDU/Christian-Democratic Union) was punished; with 17.2 per cent, its share more than halved (-19.9). The liberal party (FDP/Free Democratic Party), which had previously been part of the coalition government, was ousted from the state parliament in Saxony-Anhalt, whilst the social democrats (SPD/Social Democratic Party), also part of the coalition, made a slight gain but remained at a low level (9.3/+0.9).

On the other hand, the Greens made a surprisingly significant gain, achieving their best result to date with 8.9 per cent (+3.0). They were the strongest force in terms of second votes in the Halle III constituency (33.7 per cent; lowest second-vote result: Eisleben constituency, 3.8 per cent). The Left lost ground again (8.6/-2.4), but managed to win three constituency seats outright (Halle II, III; Magdeburg II). The newly formed BSW (Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht/Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht; a party positioned towards the left economically and towards the right culturally) cleared the 5 per cent threshold.

The election results and accompanying opinion polls reveal a highly politicised, deeply divided state. Voter turnout soared to a record high of 77.8 per cent (+17.5), continuing the trend of rising participation. The previously ruling coalition of the CDU, the SPD, and the FDP has been voted out of office. In the new parliament, forming a government will prove exceedingly difficult, and the BSW is expected to play a key role in any possible coalition.

Chart: Heinrich Böll Foundation. Source: State Returning Officer of Saxony-Anhalt

The new normal?

Although just over 1.7 million people were eligible to vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the vote was closely monitored in and outside Germany. The reasons for this extraordinary attention are clear: polls indicated that the AfD would become by far the strongest force, as had already been the case in the 2024 Thuringia state election and in the 2024 local elections in Saxony-Anhalt. What was new, however, were the poll figures for the AfD and, consequently, the question of whether the AfD’s state branch – classified as “undoubtedly far-right” – would provide the Minister-President with an absolute parliamentary majority.

This possibility of a government with a far-right character, unprecedented in Germany since 1945, led to an intense media, political and societal debate about the potential consequences for democracy in the country. As a result, the election was subject to unusually extensive scrutiny. At the same time, however, the consequences of the election were discussed in an unusually broad and multifaceted manner, which at least gave voters the opportunity to reflect on the significance and consequences of their voting decisions far more deeply than usual.

However, for two reasons it would be unrealistic to view the state election as essentially an exceptional case. On the one hand, whilst the scale of targeted disinformation, fake news, and defamation – extending even to the acceptance of politically motivated threats and acts of violence from the far right – has indeed risen once again, it is no longer an exceptional case: whether through hybrid attacks and campaigns from abroad (particularly from Russia) or targeted delegitimisation from within (by AfD politicians and right-wing influencers), the aim was to influence the elections directly and to gradually undermine democracy as a whole. The authoritarian playbook for delegitimising democracy has now found its way into the German federal system.

On the other hand, from a sociological perspective, there is much to suggest that the election result, whilst differing in scale, follows the same underlying pattern as a broader societal trend. The AfD has long been a nationwide phenomenon; it is merely the structural conditions and social stabilisers that differ. This explains the variations between the federal states, particularly in times of global uncertainty (e.g. party loyalty, economic structures, collective bargaining coverage, etc.).

Social divisions

The state election in Saxony-Anhalt took place against a backdrop of general pessimism. Whilst this is not unusual in itself, this election year is also characterised by widespread dissatisfaction with the state government and persistent, deep-seated dissatisfaction with the federal government, which goes beyond the negative assessment of the “traffic light” coalition.

A large majority of citizens in Saxony-Anhalt are concerned about the state of affairs in Germany (here and below: Infratest dimap: Saxony-Anhalt ahead of the 2026 election), both regarding the future of democracy and economic development. Concerns are widespread across the population and in all political circles, yet the differences in the details highlight the division within the state. Pronounced fears of inflation and social decline are a defining feature (feeling overwhelmed by price rises: 70 per cent; standard of living under threat: 58 per cent). These concerns are, in part, entirely justified: Saxony-Anhalt has many structurally weak rural areas struggling with an ageing population, and the “Chemical Triangle” in the south of the state is also in the throes of a deep crisis, whilst other plans for new industrial settlements, such as that involving Intel, have failed.

Combined with lower net worth and a lower uptake of transition support schemes, many employees therefore fear that their own jobs – and thus their livelihoods – are at risk, whilst a large share of (future) pensioners are critical of the federal government’s reforms. The survey data clearly show that this fear of loss – partly real, partly perceived – has been exploited politically, particularly by the Right. AfD supporters, in particular, fear they will no longer be able to pay their bills (89 per cent; overall: 70 per cent) or maintain their standard of living (80 per cent; overall: 58 per cent). Supporters of the Left share these fears roughly in line with the overall average, whereas supporters of the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens do so to a far lesser extent. This shows that the divide is clearly discernible along the lines of economic fears.

Furthermore, whilst concern for democracy and the rule of law is shared across all social groups and political currents, there are significant differences in the interpretation of exactly what the threats consist of: Only AfD supporters are more likely than average to see the country’s way of life as under threat or to complain about there being too many foreigners in the country. In addition, only a majority of AfD supporters do not see Russia as a threat. In other words, the perception of these issues among AfD supporters differs fundamentally from that of other parties’ supporters (BSW, FDP: not shown). Thus, whilst the vast majority of people in the country are concerned, their reasons vary greatly and clearly follow party lines (often pitting the AfD against the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens), suggesting that right-wing narratives and interpretative frameworks exert a strong persuasive influence in receptive circles.

This is also confirmed by the splitting analysis of the Infratest dimap post-election survey: neither did AfD first-vote voters cast their second votes for other parties to any significant extent, nor did the AfD list receive a significant number of additional votes from first-vote voters of other parties. The AfD’s voter base is therefore, on the one hand, clearly cohesive, but on the other hand, as the results show, broadly anchored in society: in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is the dominant force in almost all regions, social milieus and demographic groups. It won 38 out of 41 constituencies outright; only in three urban constituencies was the Left able to secure a direct mandate. In only one constituency is the AfD not the strongest force in terms of second votes, achieving less than 20 per cent, whereas the Greens became the strongest force by second votes in that constituency (Halle III).

With the exception of civil servants and older voters, the AfD was consistently the strongest force and recorded double-digit gains, particularly among young men and voters with a lower level of formal education (except among civil servants; data here and below: Infratest dimap: Election Analysis). The party has gained across the political spectrum, but most significantly from the CDU, the group of minor parties, and above all, through the mobilisation of former non-voters.

Voting motives continue to be characterised by protest voting (in particular as a protest against the federal government), but to a far greater extent than before also by conviction in the party, its ability to address issues and its policy platform, as well as, to a significant degree, in its lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund: according to their own statements, four in ten AfD voters chose the party because of him. AfD voters were almost unanimously in favour of a state government led by their party and its lead candidate.

Map: Heinrich Böll Foundation. Source: State Returning Officer of Saxony-Anhalt. Map data: © GeoBasis-DE / LVermGeo ST dl-de/by-2-0

Dizzying coalition arithmetic

The widely differing perceptions of the situation and the clear divide between the electorate ultimately also shape perceptions of the government’s work at the federal level and, above all, at the state level. Whilst the majority of supporters of the CDU, the SPD, and even the Greens were generally satisfied with their state government, supporters of The Left, and above all the AfD, express clear dissatisfaction. The extent to which these camps have solidified is also demonstrated by the massive shift in the attribution of competence and in preferences for the Minister-President: supporters of the AfD favour “their” party on these points and reject all others across the board, and vice versa.

This clear polarisation of the two blocs against one another is by no means new and is the reason why cooperation between the AfD and the CDU would most likely be to the detriment of the latter: the election in Saxony-Anhalt clearly shows how deeply the AfD has penetrated among the middle class with a charismatic lead candidate and a positive, mood-driven campaign in times of uncertainty. Whilst the AfD has recently focused primarily on mobilising its core electorate in the west, its support in the east – particularly in this election – has already broadened considerably, meaning it has become socially normalised.

Looking ahead to the formation of the next government, this means that the difficulties in securing a majority are not merely a matter of party tactics, but are clearly rooted in policy issues and voter preferences. Everything points to an extremely difficult process of forming a government. If one assumes the model of a majority government (rather than a minority government with shifting majorities), no simple solution is in sight. With 39 seats each for the AfD on the one hand, and the CDU, the SPD, the Greens, and the Left Party on the other, there is a deadlock; 42 votes are required for an absolute majority.

The AfD reversed course immediately after the election, saying it no longer regards an absolute majority of its own as a prerequisite to governing, and that, for the time being, it only sees the need for a reliable majority. This could be achieved through a coalition or at least a firm cooperation agreement with the BSW. A CDU-led coalition against the AfD, on the other hand, would require the involvement of all the other parties in the state parliament – namely the Left , the Greens, the SPD, the CDU, and the BSW – a highly unlikely scenario. Consequently, the idea of a cross-party Minister-President, which the BSW has once again brought into the discussion, takes on a certain relevance: assuming this person were acceptable to the entire democratic spectrum, the BSW could thus play a decisive role in the election of a democratically supported Minister-President.

That said, by being prepared to abstain in the third round of voting, the BSW also has the opportunity, for the first time, to help a Minister-President from a confirmed far-right party into office. This would not be without further complications: the five abstentions would help the AfD but would not break the deadlock. To do so, at least one further vote, one more abstention, or an absence from the vote by one of the other parliamentary groups would be required.

It is now up to the BSW to decide which side to support, but a minority government cannot be entirely ruled out. Saxony-Anhalt, in particular, is one of the few federal states with long-standing experience of this form of government, which is atypical in Germany (except for the “Magdeburg Model”, an SPD minority government from 1994 to 2002). Saxony-Anhalt is characterised not only by high volatility and low party loyalty, but also by a willingness to embrace new coalition models (the “Kenya Coalition” comprising the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens, or the “Germany Coalition” comprising the CDU, the SPD and the FDP).

Chart: Heinrich Böll Foundation Source: State Returning Officer of Saxony-Anhalt

What will the Greens do now?

There was a lot at stake for the Greens in this election, as they had recently been struggling, particularly in the eastern German federal states. In Thuringia and Brandenburg, the Greens lost their parliamentary status in 2024, and this election risked repeating that. However, the outcome – surprising to some extent – turned out differently: the Greens have achieved their best-ever result in a state election in Saxony-Anhalt. The structural patterns in electoral sociology are unremarkable, and the motives for voting also match expectations: for three-quarters of their voters, the decisive reason for voting for the Greens was policy-based considerations, coupled with a unanimous rejection of an AfD government and a clear preference for a CDU-led state government.

And yet something is different. The election result is largely attributable to the debates and initiatives promoting tactical voting: the aim was to prevent the AfD from securing an absolute majority – and thus taking power – by ensuring that the Greens and the SPD retained their seats in the state parliament. Whilst the former objective was achieved, the question of who will form the government remains unanswered.

Although up until July the polls gave little indication that the Greens would return to the state parliament, they managed to capitalise on the window of opportunity presented by this election. They benefited not only from CDU swing voters, but also from the mobilisation of former non-voters. This election campaign was underpinned by disciplined communication and unusually strong support from the entire party – from the party leadership and prominent figures, as well as from many members – but also from figures such as former Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck and Baden-Württemberg’s Minister-President Cem Özdemir.

After the Saxony-Anhalt elections, Özdemir summed up the central responsibility of the Greens – and indeed of all parties – as follows: “What is required is honest and unsparing self-criticism from all democratic parties, leading to a dramatic change in the way we all conduct politics, both in form and substance. Less squabbling, fewer promises, more honest listening, and shared outcomes. Saying what is possible and saying what is not.”

This article was first published in German by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. The English version is taken from the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Brussels.

Back in June, we asked you to submit preliminary scoping comments on a particularly ill-conceived oil and gas lease sale in Utah. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) recently announced that it’s barreling ahead with this sale and is now accepting comments on the draft proposal, which would auction off some of Utah’s wildest places for fossil fuel development, including parcels in the Dirty Devil and Hatch Point regions. All told, the BLM’s Fourth Quarter Lease Sale would offer 43 parcels spanning more than 74,000 acres of public land in Utah.

The BLM is accepting public comments through Monday, September 21. Please tell the agency to keep oil and gas development out of these scenic, wild landscapes.

Hatch Point. © Ray Bloxham/SUWA

The Dirty Devil parcels are in a wild and remote region west of the Horseshoe Canyon unit of Canyonlands National Park and immediately north of the Dirty Devil Wilderness Study Area.

The Hatch Point parcels are located near the mouth of Trough Springs Canyon, south of Moab, and encompass Hatch Canyon and Kane Springs Canyon. These canyons are designated critical habitat for the threatened Mexican Spotted Owl in addition to supporting a wide array of other wildlife. The Hatch Point area also provides expansive views of the nearby Bears Ears region.

In its haste to fall into line with Trump administration priorities, the BLM prepared a draft environmental analysis that falls short of what the law requires. For example, many of the parcels—including those near Bears Ears—are in designated critical habitat for the Mexican Spotted Owl, a species listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). However, the agency failed to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about foreseeable impacts to the owl, as required by the ESA. Rather than consult now, the agency kicked the can down the road to the drilling stage when it claims that it may (but likely won’t) fulfill that requirement. This backwards approach is illegal and does nothing to ensure the owl is protected.

SUWA fully intends to hold the BLM accountable for its failure to follow the law. You can help by telling the agency to keep fossil fuel development out of Utah’s remarkable wild landscapes.

Click here to submit your comments by September 21

The post Tell BLM (Again) to Keep Fossil Fuel Development Out of Utah’s Wild Places appeared first on Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

In the wake of the recent flash flood that swept down from the Himalayas, Nepal is seeking immediate aid from a UN fund for climate loss and damage to help vulnerable families displaced by the disaster and rebuild destroyed schools and hospitals, the country’s foreign minister told Climate Home News.

“This is exactly the kind of climate-driven catastrophe the Fund was created to address,” Shisir Khanal said in an interview. He added that “stronger global solidarity and meaningful international support” are needed for countries like Nepal, which are facing increasingly severe climate-related disasters.

The floods were caused by a glacier collapsing and triggering a landslide that forced a torrent of water and debris to rush down the Bhote Koshi River valley, causing catastrophic impacts downstream. More than 1,300 people died and over 5,300 are still missing in the area.

Loss and damage fund urged to hold crisis meeting on Nepal

Khanal described the disaster as a “Himalayan tsunami”, telling Climate Home News that early assessments suggest the roads, bridges, hydropower stations, highways and settlements it wiped out could require billions of dollars to rebuild. Reconstruction estimates by the government range between $2.5 billion and $5 billion.

The minister of foreign affairs said Nepal would not be asking the UN’s new Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) “to write a single check for this total amount”, explaining that the government is finalising a post-disaster assessment “to guide our broader international donor appeals”.

Nepal disaster seen as test case for fledgling fund

In reality, if Nepal does receive rapid support from the FRLD, it is likely to be a fraction of the total bill because the fund has a cap of $20 million per project and has little more than $350 million available to hand out in its initial phase.

So far its board has not approved any projects as it is still working out how to allocate its scarce resources, nor does it have a process in place to respond to sudden climate disasters such as glacial lake outburst floods or powerful storms.

On August 31, Nepal’s government sent a direct appeal for emergency grant funding to the FRLD, emphasising that “a prompt response would… demonstrate that the fund can translate international solidarity into timely support for vulnerable countries and communities when it is most urgently needed”.

A couple of days later, eight developing-country board members – later joined by those from small island states – signed a letter, seen by Climate Home News, asking the fund’s board to hold an extraordinary meeting to respond to Nepal’s request.

The FRLD said in a statement that the devastating impacts on the ground “underscore both the urgency and scale of need and reaffirm the fundamental purpose for which the FRLD was established”.

It added that it is “committed to approaching Nepal’s request with the urgency, compassion, and careful consideration that these difficult circumstances require, while respecting the Fund’s governing instrument and established decision-making processes”. As of Wednesday, Climate Home News understands that discussions were still ongoing.

Designing infrastructure for extreme shocks

Khanal pointed to “the unprecedented scale” of the huge flood which occurred within a matter of minutes and swept away river gauges meant to provide early warning in Rasuwa and Nuwakot, near the border with Tibet.

“You cannot easily ‘plan’ against a mountain collapsing,” he said. But the lesson, he added in written responses in English, is that “our historical baseline for infrastructure engineering is no longer sufficient”.

Building resilient infrastructure means that “hydropower projects, roads and early warning systems must be designed for extreme, unpredictable climate shocks”, he said. Another key element will be plans to better understand and protect ecosystems, he added.

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The minister noted that Nepal, India and China share a common, interconnected Himalayan ecosystem and all three countries are affected by the impacts of climate change in the Himalayan mountain chain.

“Therefore, our call is for the three countries to work together to strengthen preparedness, resilience and regional cooperation,” he said.

New research from consultancy Systemiq, released on Wednesday, finds that Himalayan glaciers are losing mass 65% faster than a decade ago, and that only around 20 of the Himalaya’s estimated 40,000 glaciers are currently monitored. India alone has 56 glacial lakes rated very high risk, it warns.

The Rasuwagadhi flood destroyed a friendship bridge, a road, a hydropower substation, and swept away vehicles in Rasuwa, Nepal in July 2025. (Photo: Ambir Tolang/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect) The Rasuwagadhi flood destroyed a friendship bridge, a road, a hydropower substation, and swept away vehicles in Rasuwa, Nepal in July 2025. (Photo: Ambir Tolang/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect) Early cross-border efforts on information-sharing

Since the same region of Nepal was hit by smaller-scale but still highly destructive flooding in 2024 and 2025, China and Nepal have stepped up efforts to cooperate in tackling glacier-related risks in the region.

In August 2025, Climate Home News reported that authorities in both countries had agreed to share cross-border information about the risks of glacial lake outburst floods across the Tibetan region, in a first step that could be expanded to the national level in an effort to reduce deaths and damage. 

This May, a delegation from China’s Ministry of Water Resources and the Water Resources Department of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region held talks with Nepalese officials in charge of water and disaster management about establishing a joint disaster information mechanism.

Then in August, a team from the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment under the Chinese Academy of Sciences also visited Nepal for scientific research and exchange, sharing China’s experience in monitoring glacial lakes.

Nepal and China agree to cooperate on glacial lake flooding, as warming hikes threat

However, experts told Climate Home News that progress on putting in place concrete measures has been slow. Narendra Khanal, a professor in the department of geography at Tribhuvan University, blamed that partly on Nepal’s traditional administrative system and bureaucratic delays.

“We have to share information with them, and they have to share information with us,” he said. “In my understanding, the Chinese side is also facing difficulties in making this cooperation work.”

Mohan Bahadur Chand, a Himalayan glaciologist and assistant professor at Kathmandu University, said China has the technology and human resources to provide significant information to its neighbour downstream.

But, to make that work, “we have to build trust between the two countries”, which is currently lacking but could be developed, he said. “As scientists, we are already working with them personally. If we create a trusted environment, cooperation should not be difficult.”

Nepal lacks monitoring and warning technology

Experts said Nepal – one of the world’s least-developed countries – does not have the technology or resources to install the sophisticated monitoring and warning systems needed to protect its population from growing threats linked to accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas.

A senior meteorologist at the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, who did not want to be named, told Climate Home News that the government had not invested enough in rainfall and weather monitoring stations, especially above 3,500 metres, and therefore lacks reliable data about what is happening at high altitudes.

“The stations we have are operated by different organisations, but many of them are not functioning properly,” the official added.

Comment: The loss and damage fund needs far more finance to deliver climate justice

This year, the UN’s Green Climate Fund released initial funding for a $50-million project to address the risks from four glacial lakes in other parts of Nepal, but has come under criticism for taking seven years to approve the proposal. The fund said this was due to efforts needed to strengthen and consult on the project, as well as administrative, institutional and COVID-related delays.

Foreign minister Khanal said Nepal was calling on the international community for support to tackle global warming impacts into the future.

“This disaster should not be viewed simply as a one-time event requiring one-time assistance,” he emphasised. “We need to recognise the longer-term consequences of rising temperatures and climate change, particularly for vulnerable communities and developing countries.”

The post Foreign minister: Nepal needs “meaningful” international support to face climate threats appeared first on Climate Home News.

When people initially asked me what I loved most about my Audubon Conservation Ranching (ACR) internship, I would always answer that I loved actually exploring California: racing down dirt tracts in...

Today, the United States and Mexico signed an important Colorado River Treaty agreement known as Minute 334, extending the modern, collaborative binational relationship through 2028. This is good...

The ecological crisis is upon us. It touches everywhere on the planet. Its character is complex, manifesting in floods, fires, disease, eradication of forests and fisheries. Interacting factors worsen globally connected catastrophes.

Ian Angus’s Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism Assault on the Earth System makes an important contribution to understanding and guiding a socialist response to these compounding ecological crises.

Angus is an ecological Marxist scholar and founding member of the Global Ecosocialist Network. Metabolic Rifts connects modern science, history, and Marxism’s metabolic rift theory.

Angus says that our ecosocialist politics

must be based on a concrete scientific understanding of how our world has evolved, how it is changing today, and where those changes may take us. The way we build socialism, and the kind of socialism that can be built, will be profoundly shaped by the state of the planet we must build it on. If our programs and activity don’t have a scientific basis, all our efforts to change the world will be in vain. (5)

The book accessibly explains metabolic rift theory, the key insight of Marxist ecology. For Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and subsequent Marxists in this tradition, the Earth’s metabolism is not a metaphor but a material reality. Interacting social, biological, chemical, and geological processes make life possible.

Metabolism

Marx used the concept of metabolism in three related ways. First, there is universal metabolism, Earth’s life-support system. This refers to the biological, chemical, and geological cycles on which all life depends.

Social metabolism is the way human society relates to the rest of nature. Social orders change over time, and class society—and then capitalism marks a significant historical shift.

Finally, metabolic rift is capitalism’s tendency to disrupt Earth’s cycles. The key factor driving this disruption is the subordination of human needs to capitalism’s drive for profit and accumulation. This process breaks the metabolic connection between humans and the rest of nature. Capitalism cannot change the natural laws governing life itself.

Drawing on soil science, Marx first analyzed the rift between town and country. In England, working-class urbanization and the separation of agricultural production and people meant that the food and human wastes previously returned to the soil flowed as pollution into rivers. This process broke the nutrient cycle and undermined soil fertility.

The metabolism of the earth includes material and energy cycles operating on time frames ranging from hours to hundreds of millions of years. These include the water cycle, the carbon cycle, and the nitrogen cycle.

With the attention rightly given to global heating and disruption of the carbon cycle, which is mostly caused by fossil fuels, other disruptions, like with the nitrogen cycle, are less appreciated, although no less important. A handful of healthy soil contains hundreds of millions of microorganisms. Soils are the most species-rich habitat on Earth. Healthy soil is necessary for fertility and absorbing carbon, and for nutritious food.

Angus traces the history of soil destruction to the town-country rift, which then led to imperial struggles to secure nitrogen-rich guano deposits to restore fertility. Ultimately, there was the development of industrial production and its complex of cash crops and fossil-fuel-derived nitrogen fertilizer. Farmers grossly over-apply nitrogen fertilizer, wasting two-thirds of it, polluting water and air, and disrupting a key Earth System metabolic cycle.

Capital versus the Earth System

The main part of Angus’s book is titled “Capital versus the Earth System.” It traces the ecological revolutions, including photosynthesis and land-based organisms, through which life and the rest of the planet historically co-evolved. This evolution created the conditions for more life and, ultimately, the stable equilibrium of the Holocene epoch over the last 10,000 years. Historically, relatively small changes in temperature or oxygen levels supported large changes in the biosphere. This insight is important for understanding ecological tipping points, when incremental change exceeds a threshold and may cause major changes in the Earth System.

Holocene chart in Metabolic Rifts (108).

Angus summarizes the distinctive anti-ecologic logic of capitalism as being characterized by “generalized production of commodities: profit maximization; competition among multiple capitalist; short-termism, and unending accumulation” (115).

These are inter-related dynamics that, among other outcomes, lead to uncontrolled growth. Ecologically, this means an ever-increasing linear flow of material and energy through the system that is in direct conflict with the universal metabolism. Angus writes,

The growth imperative is not, as liberal environmentalists often argue, just a mistaken policy or a false ideology. It is a fundamental structural feature of capitalism. Uncontrolled growth is an inevitable result of the profit system, of capitalism’s inherent drive to accumulate ever more capital. (122)

The Anthropocene epoch

Angus has been an important proponent of the theory that we have entered into a new Anthropocene epoch. On this view, the Earth has transitioned from a period of temperature and ecological stability known as the Holocene and is now in the capitalist-driven and unstable period of the Anthropocene, a qualitatively new geological epoch where human activity has fundamentally reshaped the Earth.

The reference point for this thesis is the post-World War II period known at the Great Acceleration. This marks an unprecedented era of fossil fuel enabled economic growth.

The charts below show the general trends.

The Great Acceleration: Socio-Economic Trends Since 1750. Image credit: A Planetary Health Check. The Great Acceleration: Earth Systems Trends Since 1750. Image credit: A Planetary Health Check.

In an Earth Systems framework, the result of capitalist production is that key planetary boundaries for maintaining a stable biosphere are being exceeded.

The ecological crisis is much more than about global heating and the need for green energy at scale. Exceeding boundaries also risks creating new tipping points, producing even worse outcomes. In one global heating scenario, for example, after a certain point of warming, a cascade of factors could set in to produce Hot House Earth, an environment inhospitable to human society and many existing forms of life.

Rough Guide to Planetary Boundaries. Image credit: A Rough Guide to Planetary Boundaries.

Scientists share with socialists and millions of oppressed and exploited workers a sense that we need a radical break with the status quo to resolve escalating crises and deteriorating living conditions. Angus quotes from the 2018 landmark earth science article “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System. Widespread, rapid, and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold and locking in the Hothouse Earth pathway: these include changes in behavior, technology and innovation, governance, and values. (215)

Ecosocialist strategy

While revolution must be the goal of ecosocialists, this doesn’t mean we have no options for immediate political struggle.

Ecosocialists need to help elaborate necessary non-incremental and revolutionary social and ecological changes. But we must also contribute politically and practically to immediate fights for reforms.

Angus makes the case that our collective goal can’t be to govern nature, as capitalists and ecomodernists urge, but to democratically govern our dynamic interaction with the Earth. For Metabolic Rifts, a guiding goal is expanding the commons—the democratically regulated and accessible provisioning of our basic needs. Housing, education, healthcare, and food shouldn’t be commodified but freely available to all.

The original expropriation of direct producers from the land was integral to early capitalist development. Solving the general metabolic rift requires overcoming the social rift between workers and their communities from the means of livelihood.

The long process of original expropriation, of evicting peasants from the country and forcing them into cities, was a long, extremely violent, and contested process in Europe. Ian Angus’s earlier book The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism chronicles this history and points to the role of popular resistance and the need to reestablish a conception of the commons.

Other goals—from closing fossil fuel corporations and expropriating agribusiness, to banning single-use plastic and other chemicals that nature cannot absorb and recycle, to paying international ecological debts and abolishing the U.S. military empire—would be part of the revolutionary transformation to ecosoicalism.

Immediate reforms are challenging—and will not immediately affect the global crisis. But we must engage in struggles that people can learn from and that can have real-world impact. The expansion of the global commons can only come about through the mass struggle of the global working class, indigenous communities, and colonized peoples.

From halting fossil fuel infrastructure, closing data centers, taking back public water supplies, and demanding public housing and transit to the struggle for a free Palestine and end to genocide, everything has an ecological dimension.

Our challenge is to bring the broad scope of ecological breakdown and the need for democratic social and ecological renewal into all our struggles. Metabolic Rifts helps us do this.

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: Monthly Review; modified by Tempest.

The post Confronting the ecological crisis appeared first on Tempest.

Nearly 45 million acres of the nation’s most intact forests—an area larger than Oklahoma—could soon open to logging and road building under a proposal from the U.S. Forest Service. The plan...

By Zachery Suaco, Communications and Social Media Intern at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN)

I grew up knowing what climate disaster looked like before I had a word for it. My family is Filipino, and Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 was not a news story for us. It consisted of phone calls we were afraid to answer. It was waiting to hear if people we loved were okay. I was in elementary school, and I already understood that the climate was not some future problem, but rather something that had already taken things from people I knew.

That understanding is what led me into climate advocacy. It felt like the most honest thing I could do with the anger and frustration I had been carrying. And I genuinely believed that my generation, Gen Z, was different. That we had grown up with enough awareness to actually do something about it.

But what I did not expect was to look at my utility bill and find out that I was part of the problem in a way I had never considered.

Data centers, part of the physical infrastructure behind every AI tool my generation uses constantly, are one of the biggest drivers of energy demand in the DMV right now. Virginia alone has over 600 data centers, more than any other state in the country, and those data centers already consume more than a quarter of the Commonwealth’s entire electricity supply. That’s not a national statistic spread thin across the country. That’s our grid, and our overall region. And when demand that big gets added to a system, the costs cannot be absorbed quickly or painlessly.

Virginia residents have already seen their monthly bills go up $11.24 in 2026 partly because of the infrastructure being built to support that demand. And regulators had to create an entirely separate rate class just for data center customers to stop the cost-shifting from getting worse. That’s how significant the footprint has gotten.

Here’s the part that is hardest to accept. Gen Z did not build these data centers. But we are the first generation to normalize using AI for everything — from generating images to answering questions we could have Googled to having full conversations with chatbots. And that usage has a physical cost that most of us have never once thought about. Every 20 to 50 queries to a large language model uses roughly 500 milliliters of water, about the size of a standard plastic water bottle, just for cooling the servers and powering the grid that runs them. And by 2028, the onslaught of AI data centers worldwide is projected to consume over a trillion liters of water annually. That’s eleven times what all data centers used just a year ago.

We are the generation that grew up going to climate strikes. But we are also the generation that made ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer product in history. Those two things are in real tension, and I don’t think we talk about it enough.

Packed room at a Data Center Town Hall at Studio 2,3 in Richmond, VA.

I am not saying AI is irredeemably bad or that we need to stop using it. That is not a realistic or even useful approach. But I do think my generation has been sold a version of climate consciousness that is more about identity than behavior. We recycle, we carry reusable bags, we post in opposition to fossil fuel companies on platforms that run on fossil-fuel-powered infrastructure. And we have mostly gotten a pass on interrogating the digital habits that are now reshaping energy grids in our own backyard.

The good news is that there is already pushback happening. In Virginia alone, 42 community groups and more than 12,000 people have signed petitions pushing back against unchecked data center expansion. People are paying attention. The question is whether my generation is going to show up to that fight the same way we showed up to the ones that felt easier.

Growing up Filipino and watching what Haiyan did taught me that climate change does not wait for people to feel ready. It just arrives, and it arrives when we least expect it. And the least we can do is be honest about where our own consumption fits into that picture, and then actually do something about it. That’s why I’m calling on my peers to show up to local hearings and demand a pause on new energy and water-guzzling data centers. Until we have the right solutions, “build first, figure it out later” is not an option.

About the author: Zachery Suaco (he/him) is a Communications and Social Media Intern at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) for spring/summer 2026. He is a recent graduate of Towson University where he received a bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies.

Zachery’s connection to climate justice is personal, rooted in his Filipino heritage and the devastation Typhoon Haiyan brought to his family’s home country in 2013. That experience shaped his belief that climate change is not a future problem but a present one, and drives his commitment to using communications as a tool for advocacy. In his free time, Zachery enjoys music, exploring DC, and finding new ways to blend creativity with strategy.

The post Your Feed Is Warming the Planet: Why Gen Z’s Next Climate Move Is Data Center Accountability appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

Ask any birder to name their favorite birdsong, and you’ll get a variety of answers, from the cheery, rich tunes of the Baltimore Oriole and American Robin to the more musical notes of a Wood...

Young voters interrupted the United States Postal Service Board of Governors closed door meeting to request the Governors reject the administration’s plan to intercede in mail-in ballot efforts. They delivered ballots in USPS official mail boxes asking the Governors to deliver ballots uninterrupted like past election years.

"Postmaster General, Board of Governors, you get to decide, will millions Americans have their ballots tossed out or do Americans still get to pick their own leaders. Can you commit to us, to the public today, that you will mail every ballot out and not cave to Donald Trump's political demands?” asked 24 year old Georgia voter Alex Ames.

"Thank you for sharing your thoughts. We are in a private meeting. We appreciate the feedback,” said Board of Governors Member and Chair Amber F. McReynolds.

"We understand it’s a meeting but this is also an emergency. Ballots have already started getting mailed out..if all these ballots get tossed out potentially young voters, potentially millions of people might not have their ballots delivered,” continued Ames. “Can you commit to not tossing out people’s ballots?”

"Thank you for sharing this feedback but this is a different subject for meeting, " responded McReynolds.

Young voters carried ballots in USPS packages with the words “Let us vote,” “we love the USPS,” and “count my ballot” attached.

"I’m worried young people’s voices won't be heard in November because their ballots won't be delivered. Trump is threatening not just our ability to mail our vote but our right to decide our future and the direction of our country,” said 24 year old voter Stella Lovelady. “Young people, like all Americans, have a right to elect our leaders and have our voices heard. I confronted the Board of Governors because they made a commitment to the country–to not just deliver our mail but to honor our values, protect our constitution and fight for what is just. I have the right to vote, to elect my leaders and I expect the Board of Governors to reject this desperate attempt by the Trump administration to steal that from the people. Speak out Governors–please, fight for me.”

Sunrise Movement, the youth climate action organization, called on the USPS Board to reject Trump’s executive order, noting nearly 47 million Americans vote by mail and calling on the USPS to focus on delivering the mail and not deciding who is eligible to receive a ballot.

"Trump is desperate. He sees the writing on the wall and has decided the only way he can win is if possibly millions of people can’t vote,” said Sunrise Movement Executive Director Aru Shiney-Ajay. “The American people won't let that happen. We’ll defeat this wannabe dictator in November like we did in 2020–with our votes, our voices and our peaceful actions.”

Sunrise Movement is currently making millions of voter contact attempts to elect progressive, climate champions to Congress like Abdhul El-Sayed, Donavan McKinney, William Lawrence and Troy Jackson. These races currently face threats of electoral sabotage from the administration.

Responding to the announcement by Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK that they plan to restrict trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and are considering further measures, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns, Erika Guevara Rosas said:

“The announcement that 12 states plan to introduce restrictions on trade with Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international humanitarian law, is a welcome, if long overdue, development that must pave the way for the adoption of further measures to bring an end to Israel’s unlawful occupation and institutionalized system of apartheid imposed against Palestinians.

“The measures announced so far, while important, fall far short of meeting the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 instructions to states ‘not to render aid or assistance’ in maintaining Israel’s unlawful occupation of the Palestinian Territory.

“Settlement creation and expansion – with state-backed settler violence now a central tool driving displacement and dispossession at unprecedented levels under the current Israeli government – are a core component of Israel’s policy and cannot be separated from its overarching system of apartheid.

“Entire Palestinian communities face the imminent risk of erasure in the West Bank amidst an ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign. Meanwhile Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip continue to battle for survival amidst Israel’s ongoing genocide.

To truly tackle the violations stemming from illegal settlements states must go further; they must target the very infrastructure that funds, sustains and supports Israel’s unlawful occupation.
Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International

“To truly tackle the violations stemming from illegal settlements states must go further; they must target the very infrastructure that funds, sustains and supports Israel’s unlawful occupation. This requires imposing measures on key entities, including Israeli government ministries, implicated in establishing, maintaining and providing material support to illegal settlements and settlement infrastructure, as well as taking effective action to prevent and halt the forcible transfer of Palestinians.

“All states must make absolutely clear that they will no longer provide political, financial and military support that contributes to Israel’s serious and systematic violations of international law.

“They must also impose targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel Katz and Orit Strock as Israeli officials directly implicated in the ethnic cleansing and forcible transfer of Palestinians in the West Bank, and in maintaining Israel’s unlawful occupation and apartheid. They must also ban the transfer of arms and security equipment that risk facilitating Israeli violations.

“For their part, EU states must now call on President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen to present them with a proposal for a comprehensive EU-wide ban on trade with settlements, and on key states to support it, including Italy and Germany. They must also take the next logical step and suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

“There is no longer any room for excuses, delays or half measures. Failure to act decisively to tackle Israel’s mass violations against Palestinians sends a dangerous signal that states are unwilling to uphold their own legal obligations. It also emboldens the Israeli authorities to continue violating international law with impunity while denying Palestinians meaningful protection.”

A federal appeals court today will again hear a lawsuit designed to restrict abortion access nationwide by banning mail and pharmacy dispensing of mifepristone, a safe and effective medication used in two-thirds of U.S. abortions as well as for miscarriage care. The hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the latest step in a legal battle in which anti-abortion politicians are seeking to make abortion harder for patients to access, even in states where abortion is protected. Today, nearly 30 percent of people who have abortions in the U.S. access care through telemedicine and pharmacy dispensing.

“Abortion opponents will stop at nothing to try to end medication abortion in every state,” said Julia Kaye, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. “Preventing people from getting their mifepristone prescription by mail and at pharmacies is just the start. But we’re not standing by as the courts and the Trump administration weigh whether to reduce access based on tired anti-abortion lies. The ACLU will use every tool we have to protect access to this safe and effective medication for people across the country.”

In May, the Fifth Circuit ruled for Louisiana, resulting in a brief disruption of telehealth access to mifepristone before the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily paused the appeals court’s decision while the litigation continues. The case is widely expected to return to the Supreme Court. Any decision from the Fifth Circuit to limit telehealth access will be on hold until then.

Legal challenges are not the only threat to patients’ ability to access mifepristone. Despite use by millions of patients, hundreds of studies, and decades of evidence proving mifepristone’s safety, including when prescribed through telemedicine, the Trump administration, after intense lobbying from abortion opponents and their allies in Congress, is conducting yet another review of mifepristone as a pretext for imposing extreme and medically unjustified restrictions on access to the medication. The administration announced the review citing one self-published report that grossly distorts mifepristone’s safety record. This report has since been widely debunked, including by more than 250 experts.

Regardless of whether restrictions on mifepristone come from the courts or from the Trump administration, ending telehealth and pharmacy access will devastate patients’ ability to get this essential medication. Without telemedicine and pharmacy access, patients using mifepristone would be forced to travel, sometimes hundreds of miles, to a health center just to pick up a pill, a requirement that leading medical authorities agree has no safety benefit.

Both the public and experts agree: the federal government should not further restrict mifepristone. A July 2026 survey found that two-thirds of U.S. adults oppose nationwide restrictions on mifepristone and medication abortion. And a wide range of experts — from emergency medicine physicians to experts in intimate partner violence to drug developers — submitted amicus briefs in the Supreme Court and in the court of appeals opposing this nationwide restriction as medically unjustified and harmful to people seeking care.

They can be easy to miss, but in the climate fight there are positive signs: Globally, clean energy investment has doubled fossil fuel investment two years in a row; despite Trump’s best efforts, solar and wind continue to dominate new power plant construction in the US; China’s emissions appear to have peaked in 2024.    

Scratch an inch deeper however, and the climate math is scarier than ever. Eight years on from the IPCC’s landmark 2018 report that warned we had twelve years to slash global emissions to avoid dangerous climate feedback loops, emissions are higher than ever.

Today, we’re beginning to live with the consequences of our failure to heed the warnings. According to modeling commissioned by the Economist, the recent European heatwave probably killed 12,000 people in three days; at least 25 people died due to heat stress in New Jersey over the holiday weekend; deadly rainfalls are currently pummeling Mumbai and much of China. 

Last month saw the release of two major reports that highlight how we’ve gotten into this mess. Released in early June, Banking on Climate Chaos is the world’s premier annual assessment of bank financing of fossil fuels and its topline findings were stark: bank financing for fossil fuels increased sharply between 2025 and 2024. Citibank, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase: all financed more coal, oil, and gas in 2025 than the year before.

Released a couple of weeks later, Investing in Climate Chaos analyzes the world’s largest investors in fossil fuels. It revealed that even major investors that you might expect better of are failing the most fundamental of climate tests. Three of the four pension funds with the largest holdings in fossil fuels are California and New York’s public pensions.  

Reading these two reports, in the lead up to the country’s birthday celebrations, one other major takeaway jumped out to me: no other nation is as responsible for the fossil fuel expansion fueling deadly climate change as our own. Nobody else is even close. 

The numbers speak volumes: 

• US investors are responsible for 62% of all institutional investments in fossil fuel corporations.
• 8 of the world’s top 10 investors in fossil fuels are US-based.
• More than one-third of the $900+ billion commercial banks provided to fossil fuel companies last year came from just ten US megabanks. 

I suppose the fact that the United States is beating heart of fossil finance shouldn’t come as a shock. For years, as China has been making strides to becoming the world’s first electrostate, we’ve been doubling down on becoming the world’s largest petrostate.

The US first overtook Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest oil producer in 2018. By 2024, the US was producing twice as much oil as Saudi Arabia, the world’s second-largest oil producer. 

It’s hard not to look at just how much the US has become the heartland of the fossil fuel industry and the great web of finance that holds it up and conclude that, one way or another, the climate fight will largely be won or lost here, in the belly of the Big Oil beast.

The fossil fuel industry, after all, is the largest obstacle to climate action, whether at the global, national, or local level. There is no solving the climate crisis without directly taking on and figuring out a way of defeating the fossil fuel industry.

This is why, here at Stop the Money Pipeline ― even as we expand our campaigns to tackle the rise of authoritarianism ― we’re never going to take our eye off our original mission of severing the financial umbilical cord between Wall Street and Big Oil.  

And even if the reports out last month highlight how challenging that is going to be, the heat and the storms pummeling so much of the world are also a reminder of how essential it is, too. 

In Solidarity
– Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline coalition director

News & Updates from the Coalition

– BlackRock’s $42 billion problem

The New York City Comptroller, Mark Levine, has announced that the city’s pension plans are beginning a new search for asset managers to manage their massive investments – and the city will factor climate criteria into how it will assess its hiring of new asset managers. This could mean BlackRock, the world’s second-largest investor in fossil fuels, losing out on $40 billion worth of business, owing to its failure to support climate action. 

Such a move would follow hot on the heels of massive European (and possibly Asian) pensions pulling billions from BlackRock. Who knows? Maybe Larry Fink will soon start to get the message: climate action is good for business.

– No Immunity for Big Oil

After New York and Vermont passed “Make Polluters Pay” bills in 2024 which would force major oil companies to help pay for the climate damages they caused, Big Oil made pushing Congress to pass a blanket “immunity shield” its top priority. In response, Republicans have introduced federal legislation that would prevent Americans from holding Big Oil financially or legally liable for climate damages, ever again. 

Last week, 4,000+ of you sent emails to your Member of Congress demanding that they oppose legal immunity for Big Oil. If you haven’t done so yet, you can send an email to your Member of Congress here. Once you send an email, we’ll follow up with other ways for you to take action on this. 

– Got a 401(k)? Want it to support climate action, not fossil fuels?

Stand.earth has released this great step-by-step guide to help you push your employer and your retirement plan to offer pension options that support a just transition. They also released this briefing, highlighting exactly the kind of dirty fossil fuels many of our retirement plans are currently invested in.

– Holding Musk accountable

There have been many travesties under the Trump Administration, but allowing the world’s richest man to destroy USAID and kill countless children in the process is one of the deepest. That’s just one reason why the new Congress must commit to hold investigations and hearings into DOGE – we deserve to understand exactly what happened to our data, and exactly what the impacts of Musk’s actions were. 

If you haven’t signed our campaign petition to Congress yet, you can join 50,000 others and 50+ organizations and unions in signing here. Once you sign the petition, we’ll follow up with more ways to plug into this campaign.

– Making Citibank pay for its environmental racism

If the news that big banks have increased their support of fossil fuels again has got you angry, here’s one thing you can do: plug into our campaign to call on Costco to dump Citibank, and take its 13 million credit cards with them.

If you’re in Texas or Louisiana, sign this Gulf South letter to Costco. If you’re in the Seattle area, email Sarah to plug into flyering Costco HQ employees.

– Vs. Goliath

A new award-winning, four-part documentary series from Tikkun Olam Productions & Fossil Free Media, VS. GOLIATH, follows everyday people, including many friends of STMP, across the country as they stand up to the fossil fuel industry. Check out the trailer here.

Fossil Free Media is hosting virtual screenings of a VS. GOLIATH episode on the first Tuesday of each month. Each screening will be followed by a Q&A panel with activists featured in the episode, and serve as an opportunity for viewers to learn, strategize and get inspired for the fights that lie ahead.

RSVP and details for each screening:

• July 7th (TODAY!) — VS. GOLIATH: Cancer Alley 
• August 4 — VS. GOLIATH: Appalachia
• September 1 — VS. GOLIATH: Greater Chaco
• October 6 — VS. GOLIATH: Port Arthur

– Insures make record profits

Have you noticed your home insurance getting more expensive lately? If so, you’re not alone. In the face of a huge rise in climate-driven disasters, homeowners in almost every state are facing skyrocketing premiums and many cannot even get insurance any more.

But here’s the thing, as a new report from Public Citizen and Revolving Door Project reveal,  insurance companies are raking in record profits, even as they raise rates for the rest of us.

Oh and at the same time as raking in record profits and hiking rates for all of us, the insurance industry has weighed in on the side of Big Oil in a pending Supreme Court case, arguing that local and state governments shouldn’t be allowed to sue fossil fuel companies for climate damages. 

All of which is, of course, all the more reason to pass legislation like the Insure our Communities Act in New York…

– And a reminder: just how much we really are a petrostate

To close out this month’s newsletter, here’s a graphic from Statista that really hammers home just how much the US has become the world’s number one petrostate. Here’s to all of you working, in a million different ways, to change this:

The post July Newsletter: The climate fight will be won or lost here. appeared first on Stop the Money Pipeline.

People are not the only ones who are pestered by wasps during the summer and fall. At Aullwood Audubon, wasps were creating a problem for some of the farms most beloved residents.  A creative...

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who previously worked for OpenAI, has resigned from the AI industry, warning that leading AI companies are racing to create increasingly powerful AI systems without adequate safeguards. Coxon said that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI is “acting responsibly” and accused the companies of “gambling with our lives.” His resignation follows other departures of researchers from leading AI companies raising concerns about safety and the pace of AI development. Coxon specifically pointed to recent incidents involving AI systems accessing external computer systems as a warning of the risks ahead.

In response, J.B. Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, issued the following statement:

“Jacob Coxon is not the first AI researcher to leave the Big Tech industry because of AI safety concerns and he won’t be the last. Researchers with the most intimate knowledge of how this technology works and is being developed are sounding the alarms, walking away from prestigious jobs to start up evaluation organizations, and warning the public about the risks posed by corporations’ failure to guarantee AI safety.

“But calls for companies to voluntarily pause or slow down are not enough. Members of Congress routinely state their concerns about AI but have failed to pass federal safeguards or emergency measures to respond to the AI cyber security incidents that AI corporations have failed to prevent – and have covered up. Right now, the only protections the U.S. has in place are completely voluntary. There is no comprehensive federal AI regulation, no safety standards imposed on AI companies, and no agency capable of investigating serious AI incidents.

“Believe the researchers and whistleblowers who are telling us that Big Tech does not have these AI systems under control. The people building the most powerful AI systems in the world are warning us about what could go wrong. Why isn’t Congress listening?”

Weaving Hope in Times of Crisis: A Report of the 2nd General Assembly of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives THIS IS NOT YET PUBLIC, FOR INTERNAL REVIEW Introduction The second in-person Assembly of the Global of () took place in Bandung, Indonesia, from 12–17 April 2026, hosted at weaverGTAweaversendorsersGTAGTAalternativesGTAalternatives

This article 25 years after 9/11, how do we build a movement to stop endless wars? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, on the surface it may seem that American foreign policy has followed a course filled with continuity. A quarter century ago, the U.S. launched the “War on Terror” in response to 9/11. Today, Trump’s attacks on Iran have embroiled the country in another conflict in the Middle East.

Yet while the War on Terror gave rise to a disastrous wave of military intervention, it also produced a historic surge of antiwar activism, which played a critical role in discrediting “forever wars” across the political spectrum. Whereas the Iraq War began with 70 percent public approval, Trump’s war in Iran has been widely opposed from the beginning, with only around a third of Americans currently in support. 

Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School for Social Research, recently released the first definitive history of antiwar organizing against the War on Terror. His book is entitled “Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War.” I spoke with Varon to discuss the organizing that took place against the war in Iraq that started in 2003, the impact the movement had, and how that activism has been popularly remembered — or, too often, forgotten. 

We also discussed the prospects for antiwar organizing today, when Trump’s attacks on Iran are wildly unpopular, and yet we lack a movement that can be a mechanism for raising the political costs of interventionism. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There is a very common impression — maybe the dominant impression of antiwar activism under George W. Bush — that the movement was a failure because it did not stop the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. I think that is a distorted perception of the impact the movement did have. What is your assessment?

The first thing to say is that success and failure are relative. And indeed, certainly with regard to the invasion of Iraq, the movement failed in its overarching goal to stop the war before it started. A lot of people intuitively knew that when the bombs started falling, disaster would follow, and that reorienting American policy would be like turning around a tanker, not a tugboat. 

If you look at American military casualties, the implosion of Iraqi society, civilian casualties and so on, the calamity that people feared came to pass. I can appreciate the sense of failure many activists felt, because the stakes were so high — literally life and death.

Previous Coverage

Lessons from the movement to stop the ‘war on terror’

That said, the antiwar movement can claim accomplishments as well. It substantially delegitimated the war before it ever started, especially within the realms of global public opinion and even geopolitics. The United States went to war with just one significant military and political ally: the United Kingdom. It didn’t have the support of traditional allies in Western Europe, like France and Germany. Most of Latin America, Asia and Central Europe rejected the U.S. position. The United Nations, while not declaring the war illegal, fundamentally disapproved of it, and Secretary General Kofi Annan privately thought the war would be a grave mistake. So the actual military campaign was inhibited by both a domestic and a global movement arguing that the war was wrong-headed and likely illegal. 

In a way, the antiwar movement peaked before the Iraq War even started. On February 15, 2003, you had thousands of coordinated antiwar protests all over the world. Between 15 and 30 million people turned out to protest the war. It was the largest single day of protest in human history. For sure, many people on the streets that day were gravely disappointed that the demonstration didn’t have the intended effect of preventing the war. Some percentage maybe never came back to the antiwar movement, because they were so dispirited. But organizing the mass demonstrations built a protest infrastructure that lived on. The main antiwar coalition in the U.S. came into its own through those demonstrations.

I give enormous credit to the people who had the tenacity and stamina to keep grinding away at protest. I’m thinking of Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait and all of these smaller grassroots formations throughout the country that continued to organize.

When the war started, public opinion in the U.S. was substantially in its favor, around 70 percent right after the “shock and awe” invasion. But that was a soft 70 percent, with people in the middle rallying around the flag. They wanted the swift victory Bush promised, which would mean limited American casualties. But as the war bogged down, the antiwar position grew steadily more salient, and antiwar sentiment grew steadily bigger. 

Eventually, public opinion caught up with the antiwar movement. The most recent polling is from 2023 or so. Something like 60 percent of the American public, by that point, thought that the Iraq War was a mistake. A similar percentage thought the Afghanistan War, long considered the “good war,” was a mistake. And a whopping 58 percent of veterans of both deployments think that the wars were not worth fighting.

We’ll never know with any certainty the extent to which the war itself or the antiwar movement was the driver of shifts in public opinion. But in my book I cite observers who argue that the antiwar movement likely limited the duration and intensity of the war in Iraq, and therefore saved lives. That’s a highly general statement, but I think it’s a fair statement. Others note that it may have constrained the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration from pursuing military action in places like Iran and Syria, which had very much been on their agenda. 

In the book you write that, as the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq in 2003, “For months, the public had been schooled in the reasons for the invasion, and expectations for it. Americans were also versed, if to a lesser degree, in the case against the war. Events on the ground would determine which position was right.” 

I think that’s a very important point: In relation to the War on Terror, the movement created a counter-narrative about what the administration was doing and what actions were actually going to make us safer. And so when the war started going bad, there was already an explanation in place for why this was always a horrible idea and why there should be political consequences.

Yes, and this is important for understanding how public discourse and policy interrelate. There was a counter-narrative about the war coming from the movement. It said that Iraq doesn’t pose a clear and present danger, that there’s no proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, that lots of people are going to die, and that it may plunge the region into chaos. Over time, more and more observers could see the reality aligning with those warnings. 

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Rather than having to create arguments against the war from scratch, people who were growing increasingly critical could appeal to an existing body of antiwar criticisms and bring them into the public square in a new way. Eventually, you have the political class catching up with where the public already was — aligned, more or less, with the core positions of an antiwar movement. It’s a long and complex process by which dissenting ideas achieve a kind of hegemony and then compel shifts in policy. Even endless wars can end, when they lose legitimacy in the eyes of the nation waging them. That process begins at the grassroots.

Of course, the end of the war came too late to spare untold death and destruction. But the antiwar movement at least limited the damage, and that’s a real achievement.

One of the ways in which the antiwar movement had a swifter impact was in shifting the debate within the Democratic Party. You quickly go from having the leadership of the party voting in favor of the war in Iraq, to there being a complete revolt from the base. This results in the rise of figures such as antiwar candidate Howard Dean in 2004, and it leads to the eventual Democratic nominee John Kerry trying to position himself as an antiwar candidate — even though he’s not an entirely credible one. 

In the 2004 election, George W. Bush was an incumbent, wartime president who most analysts expected to coast to victory based on the massive surge of patriotism after 9/11. And instead this election, in no small part, became a referendum on the war and became an extremely close race. If just 60,000 votes in Ohio had gone the other way, Bush would have been ousted.

During the electoral season in 2004, much of the antiwar movement considered Bush’s defeat to be the quickest way to end the war. The war had already started to crash and burn, but ultimately not badly enough to turn the tide against Bush. Remarkably, he won the so-called “security vote.” Bush had gifted political operatives, notably Karl Rove, who had him run on culture war issues and turned out droves of evangelicals. Last, there was an enormous effort by the right to discredit John Kerry over his opposition to the Vietnam War. As it is, he was a kind of wishy-washy alternative on the war in Iraq, whom the antiwar movement only grudgingly backed. 

It ended up being a close election. Bush’s win was a huge disappointment, even a shock for progressives. Still, the antiwar movement found a way to write another chapter.

By late 2005, the failures of the Iraq War — along with the callousness of the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina — had turned George W. Bush into a premature lame duck president, hamstringing him for the rest of his second term. I would argue that antiwar activism played a big role in that. What is your take?

After the 2004 elections, a new wave of antiwar activism emerges, with powerful new advocates and constituencies.

With Cindy Sheehan, most famously, it had a grieving Gold Star mother asking, “For what noble cause did my son die?” She was really asking, for Bush and the nation to hear, why the war was being fought at all.

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For weeks in the summer of 2005, Cindy Sheehan and others set up Camp Casey — named after her son — near Bush’s ranch in Texas. Veterans, antiwar activists, celebrities, everyday people and important politicians all gravitated to it. It became ground zero, if you will, for the antiwar movement. And it got intense coverage: CNN, Anderson Cooper, Oprah Winfrey and all sorts of global media. It was the first time since the big demonstrations in 2003 that the antiwar movement drove the narrative. For millions of Americans, the suffering and folly of the war felt real in a new way. 

From the start, some families of 9/11 victims had opposed war, and their voices had unique power. You also had groups like Veterans for Peace working to communicate the bitter lessons of Vietnam to the American public. By 2005, they were joined by a growing mass of veterans of the Iraq War, and even active duty soldiers, reporting that American conduct had nothing to do with spreading peace and freedom and democracy. Instead, it was menacing Iraqis and turning the Iraqi people against the occupation. They had seen it themselves. 

With the activism of the military community, the antiwar movement took on a somewhat different class character. Sheehan is a kind of upper-working-class, all-American mom from small town California, and veterans typically hail from the working class. The U.S. military is a working-class institution. It is also racially a very integrated institution. So you have heartland spokespeople, speaking from a heartland perspective, denouncing a war that is chewing up their lives and falling far short of the high-minded ambitions that Bush had set for it. And I think this gives a kind of permission structure for everyday Americans, who may consider themselves conventionally patriotic, to say, “Wait a second. Who is this war helping?”

Then Hurricane Katrina hits in late August. The botched response is a massive policy failure for the Bush administration, which claimed it had things under control. The whole nation could see that was a lie. Camp Casey breaks up, with a whole contingent, led by Veterans for Peace, leaving Crawford, Texas and rushing to New Orleans. In and around the city, they distribute massive amounts of food, water and other necessities. They use satellite phones to help the Red Cross save people from rooftops. They help people get legal services and deal with insurance companies. They felt duty-bound to rally to the suffering present in America. And they absolutely made the connection of the misuse of resources to wage a foreign war that the country no longer wanted with the neglect of urgent problems at home. 

Then, in September, a pre-planned demonstration happens in Washington that very much connects conditions at home and overseas. It was in some ways the most ambitious of all the antiwar protests — three days that included lobbying, civil disobedience, art exhibits, interfaith events and on-the-ground organizing. 

By late 2005, you see a cratering of public opinion in support of the war. And the pro-war stance never again becomes the majority position. 

Soon enough, you have powerful people in Congress giving new credibility to the antiwar position. There was the famous “Murthquake,” in which John Murtha, a military veteran and initially a big supporter of the war, comes out against it. He himself said that the political class was way behind public opinion. 

And then you have the 2006 midterms, where this sentiment is translated into a major defeat for the Republicans.

Yes. The Democrats have blowout wins, functionally retaking control of both houses of Congress based on an antiwar message. After that it was really a question of when and not if the war ends, with the U.S. far short of having achieved the military and geostrategic objectives that Bush set. From 2006 on, you have the painful extrication of the United States from a quagmire of its own making. 

What I consider the most significant Congressional action after 2006 was the impaneling of the Iraq Study Group. That was a bipartisan group to diagnose what went wrong and advocate a way forward, which was ultimately some form of U.S. withdrawal. You have the eminences of the American foreign policy establishment basically calling bullshit on Bush’s signature policy. When they release their report, it’s a bestseller. It’s being sold in bookstores and airports and downloaded something like two million times. 

Reading the narrative you present in your book, and remembering all of the organizing that took place on so many different fronts, it’s startling how much of it has been utterly forgotten in the media and in the popular imagination. What do you think accounts for that?

The movement, in its own day, was woefully underreported on. I blame the legacy media and major cable outfits — almost all of the press, really — for confusing post-9/11 patriotism with an excuse to abdicate its responsibility to report on domestic dissent. For years, activists struggled to get sustained attention to their efforts.

I was part of this movement, but probably 90 percent of what I report on in my book, I had no idea was happening at the time. Part of the intent of the book is to give this big, robust, spirited, movement its due, while also understanding why knowledge about it was suppressed. 

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The larger purpose is to try to induce a broader legal, political and moral reckoning with the totality of the War on Terror. My argument is that we hear so little about the antiwar movement in part because we hear so little about the War on Terror itself. It’s as though the Iraq War never happened. It was so consequential, it was so costly in blood and treasure. But, historically speaking, it feels almost like a non-event. My college students know almost nothing about it.

I was born in 1967, and I came of age in the post-Vietnam War era. That war had a massive, lasting impact on American political life and culture. There was the “Vietnam Syndrome” that discouraged new wars. There was the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial in Washington. Every Hollywood auteur made a Vietnam War movie. It was understood that the United States had been through something big and traumatic, and that the nation needed soul-searching to examine its foreign policy, the meaning of patriotism and the appropriate uses of the military. 

The War on Terror, in its most intense phase, has not been succeeded by anything like that kind of public reflection. We badly need it. My thesis is that the War on Terror was so ugly, so confusing, so divisive, that we simply don’t know what to do with it. And when you don’t know what to do with something, the easiest thing is to ignore it. 

Of course, there are millions of people for whom forgetting isn’t a luxury: all the Iraqis who were murdered or displaced or dismembered, and all these veterans suffering from traumatic head wounds or who have missing limbs. We owe it to them to remember and learn from past mistakes.

Today, we face a unique situation in that Trump’s war in Iran is incredibly unpopular, and across political parties there is huge opposition to the U.S. getting into so-called “forever wars.” And yet, we lack any large antiwar movement that is actively raising the political cost of unpopular interventionism. 

It’s stunning. My take is that Trump doesn’t like “endless wars” for all of the obvious reasons. At the same time, he is eager to use the lethality of the American military to project his own power on the global stage. For him, stupid wars are simply wars that the United States can’t easily win. So he craves “victory.” He got very excited by the intervention in Venezuela and the initial strikes against Iran. And he thought that, with advances in military technology, we could have these quick-hit mini-victories with minimal, if not negligible, cost in American lives. 

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Where’s the resistance to the Iran war?

Right now, we’re in this weird limbo with the Iran conflict. On the one hand, it’s a war frightfully outside traditional constraints on a president, which Trump disdains. He doesn’t believe in limits set by Congress, international law, the U.N., or the opinions of allies. 

At the same time, he likely recognizes that some number of U.S. casualties would be unacceptible to Americans and would sink the war. So that lesson from Iraq, from Vietnam even, he does seem to get. My fear is that low-intensity conflicts, like in Iran, may grow routine and become background noise in American political life that never quite rile the public to demand their end. The trick for Trump is to continue waging war without prohibitive costs that would trigger widespread outrage among a disapproving but disaffected public. 

I think the midterms will be a crucial test of whether disapproving public opinion can have a real price. If the Democrats win big, we may have part of the answer.

I would love it if there were a dedicated antiwar movement addressing Iran as well as possible intervention in Cuba. Personally, I don’t think we’re going to have such a movement. Barring some dramatic escalation of the war in Iran, which is still possible, I think we’re going to have a continuation of the current circumstance where dissatisfaction with the war is one of a number of grievances with Trump — along with the public corruption, inattention to issues of affordability, vanity projects, et cetera. If Republicans get routed, public opinion experts will have to sift through the data to find out how important the war has been. 

What lessons do you draw from antiwar organizing in the years after 9/11 that you think are relevant for movements today?

I think there are strategic lessons for activists today. One is that, while a movement’s message matters, the messenger matters enormously as well. When it’s a Gold Star mother, when it’s a veteran, when it’s an ex-general, when it’s a formerly pro-war politician articulating an antiwar position, the message behaves very differently than it might otherwise. Effective movements always need to think about how to present and highlight those voices that have the greatest credibility among the broader public and political class. We may bristle at this dynamic, but historically our most successful social movements have understood that.

Another takeaway is the general power of conscientious dissent to alter political conditions. If you think of Bush declaring “Mission Accomplished,” which he did on May 1, 2003, it was a great moment of bluster. But then you look at the profound turning of the American public on the War on Terror over the two years that followed. It’s a remarkable difference. That change would have been incredibly hard to predict. 

That’s part of political life and part of life more generally. We can be thoughtful, we can be strategic, we can identify goals, but we can’t ultimately know the consequences of our actions in advance. 

America and the world would have been much better off if antiwar voices had genuinely been listened to, and not belittled and ignored. People with enormous expertise and good moral instincts captured the truth of the moment. So one needs to work really hard — against the biases of the media and government alike — to make one’s truth heard. There are rewards of stamina, even when things seem bleak. Any number of issues, from global warming, to Gaza, to the abuses of immigrants, feel incredibly bleak now. But temporary setbacks shouldn’t be a reason for resignation. History has too many examples of the rewards of holding on to hope. 

This article 25 years after 9/11, how do we build a movement to stop endless wars? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

29 September | Online

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