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Scientists and Professionals letter Report on Carcinogens
Scientists and Professionals letter Report on Carcinogens
2026 November Newsletter!
Happy day-after-Election Day!
When we started our Vote for Climate Justice campaign last election cycle, our goal was to infuse every part of Portland’s City Council elections with climate justice. So together, with all of you, we educated voters and candidates on the issues impacting our rivers, our trees, our air, our communities, and our climate, knowing that education and stories can lead to action. We saw the fruits of that work last election, and we see it now.
Thank you. Thank you for voting. Thank you for helping your friends, family, and neighbors vote. Thank you for being a part of our Vote for Climate Justice program. Now let’s continue showing up and speaking up together, for justice and with joy, for our neighbors, our planet, and all of our futures. If you’re feeling inspired, consider supporting us with a donation to keep this successful grassroots organizing going! Rumble on the River: Post-Election Reflection & DirectionsThursday, November 12
Havurah Shalom (825 NW 18th Ave)
Doors at 5:30 PM, Panel discussion at 6:30 PM
Panelists:
- Dr. Tammy Carpenter – OR Representative-Elect in District 27
- Rep. Travis Nelson – OR Representative, District 44
- Angelo Bologna – AFSCME Local 328
- Josie Moberg – Immigration Attorney
- Matt Reed – Oregon Education Association
- Nafisah Ula – Jobs with Justice
- Moderated by: Damon Motz-Storey – Director of Policy & Communications for Portland City Councilor Candace Avalos
In September and October, the 350PDX community sent over 1000 emails to City Council, plus dozens of written comments, speaking up about a data center resolution, the transfer of Zenith Energy’s franchise to I Squared Capital, a strong Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub policy with a significant drawdown of fossil fuels, a No Immunity for Big Oil resolution, and an investment policy that excludes all fossil fuels.
- No secret deals for data centers passed!
- The Zenith Energy franchise transfer went through without additional community protections or industry accountability
- No Immunity for Big Oil resolution passed!
- Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub strong amendments passed! The final draft will come to Council November 5 and 12, we’ll let you know if further action is needed.
We still need to speak up about the City’s investment policy. The proposed policy adds in an Environmental, Social, and Governance framework for ethical investing, but does not exclude natural gas or coal. Speak up for fossil fuel divestment by sending this email, or submitting a written or verbal comment (this testimony toolkit has talking points and links).
Two Upcoming Actions at City CouncilBuilding on our momentum from the last couple months, let’s finish 2026 strong by advocating for two important issues: reducing building emissions in large buildings, and banning tear gas. These policies are both a long time coming, and this is the moment to pass them! However, they’re receiving a lot of push-back, so we need to show major community support. See these and other actions on our Take Action page.
Fight NW Natural: Pass Climate & Health Standards for Existing Buildings
Portland environmental justice and tenant rights groups have been working on a building emissions reduction policy for over 5 years, targeting buildings over 20,000 square feet, and it’s finally been introduced in the Housing & Permitting Committee. Unfortunately, NW Natural and their industry allies have been flooding City Council with negative comments, even though this policy is similar to Building Performance Standards already in place in other cities like Seattle, Denver, Boston, New York, and Washington, DC. Written comment is open through December 1 (this toolkit has talking points and links). Sign up for a testimony training on November 23 by emailing cherice@350pdx.org!
Ban Tear Gas in Portland with a “Right to Breathe Act”
Tear gas and other chemical weapons used for “crowd control” are not only damaging to human health and people’s rights to speech and assembly, but they’re also harmful to waterways, trees, birds, animals, plants, and soil. After a presentation by Portland Police last week where they tried to convince City Council they should continue to be allowed to gas us, they need to hear from the public. Learn more, submit written testimony by Thursday 11/5, and stay tuned for further opportunities to speak up.
Energy Justice Team:The Energy Justice Team works together on everything from fighting data centers, Zenith, and the CEI Hub to advocating for PCEF and transportation justice! Our next team meeting is VIRTUAL on next Tuesday, November 10 at 6 PM. Reach out to dineen@350pdx.org and cherice@350pdx.org for the link or to get plugged into the team.
The “Bipartisan American Affordability & Jobs” Bill (U.S. Senate Bill 5653) is a fast-moving threat to public advocacy, sovereign Tribal nations, and our climate and environment. It would dismantle the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and the Endangered Species Act. All of the legal and regulatory tools we’ve used over the past decade in our region to stop pipelines, energy terminals, and power plants could be erased by this bill. It’s a giveaway to Big Tech and the fossil fuel industry.
350PDX and over 60 other organizations across the Pacific Northwest sent a letter opposing the bill to US Senators and Representatives in Oregon and Washington. Use this tool to send a message to your Senators and Representatives urging them to oppose this bill, and check out this Opposition Guide for more ways to take action.
Forest Defense Team:This week the Forest Defense Team continued our campaign planning. The discussions have been detailed, exciting, fruitful, and challenging due to the current threats facing forested land. One campaign we advocating for is the continuation of funding for the Trees in the Curb Zone pilot project which has aims to create infrastructure and increase tree canopy in low-canopy neighborhoods. Additionally, the team plans to continue the ongoing push to get long-term funding for street tree maintenance.
Learn about Portland’s new Street Tree Care program from Parks & Recreation Urban Forestry staff on November 13 at 9 AM. This pilot program is the culmination of a 5-year campaign by 350PDX and partner organizations to provide proactive tree care, first called for 80 years ago. RSVP to noelle@350pdx.org
The Forest Defense Team meets on the first and third Monday of each month, alternating between virtual and in-person meetings. Our next meeting will be on November 16 from 6 – 7:30 PM. Reach out to tyler@350PDX.org for details.
Art Team:Last month, the Art Team brought our mourning mothers to the No Kings protest and passed out flyers encouraging attendees to engage with 350PDX’s upcoming actions! Additionally, we have been hard at work on a surprise project for our end of year fundraising.
The Art Team meets twice a month. We host our art builds on the second Sunday of every month and our monthly planning meetings on the last Wednesday.
- Next Art Build: November 8, 1 – 4PM
- Next Planning Meeting: Wednesday, November 25, 6 – 7:30 PM
Meetings are held in the 350PDX workshop (3639 N Mississippi Ave). RSVP to arts@350pdx.org.
Book Club:The 350PDX Book Club meets every month on the first Wednesday of the month at 6:30PM, alternating between virtual and in-person. Reach out to books@350PDX.org with any questions or to join our list, and please RSVP so we can inform you of any meeting changes.
Lots of Book Club announcements this month: our virtual meetings are BACK, we are meeting MONTHLY again, our in-person meetings are back home at the 350PDX Offices, and we’re excited to welcome our newest co-facilitator, Ian Murdock. Welcome!
Join us on Wednesday, December 2 at 6:30 PM for our next fiction in-person meeting. We’ll discuss A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger; based on traditional Lipan Apache storytelling structure, this young adult novel weaves an unforgettable tale of monsters, magic, and family. RSVP at books@350PDX.org.
Save the date for our other upcoming discussions:
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Wednesday, January 6 at 6:30 PM (free pick; Google Meet): Book to be selected in December
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Wednesday, February 3 at 6:30 PM (nonfiction; 350PDX Offices): The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street by Mike Tidwell
The Milwaukie Advocates for Climate meet monthly on the third Monday from 5:30 – 6:30 PM at Milwaukie City Hall — all are welcome! To get connected, sign up here or email MAC@350pdx.org.
Join us on Friday, November 6th at 6:30 PM for a documentary screening of “The Little Town That Could” at the Ledding Library in Milwaukie. This is an inspiring documentary of a community in New York working together to reduce emissions. It will be followed by a panel discussion with filmmakers and local climate activists.
Washington County Team:The Washington County Team invites all to our next monthly online meeting at 6:30 PM on Tuesday November 10. We are looking forward to discussing election results that could impact improving climate action policies and catching up with each other online.
Last month we enjoyed talking with Tualatin City Council member Bridget Brookes regarding a win for the Tualatin Climate Action Plan. The City recently completed work on the activation of a new micro-power turbine that will improve City building & fleet power while using cleaner energy and reducing Tualatin’s expenses. It will also capture power from the local drinking water source that’s been latent for decades. Embracing this innovation will make Tualatin more resilient in many ways.
We welcome guest presenters who would like to share their programs and local climate actions! Please reach out to us at 350washco@gmail.com if you would like to engage and educate our group on a future Tuesday evening!
We always welcome newcomers to our events and to our (mostly) monthly online meetings (6:30 PM on the second Tuesday of the month). For the link, join us here or contact us at 350washco@gmail.com.
Southwest Neighborhood Team:The 350PDX Southwest Neighborhood Team includes neighborhoods on the south and west sides of Portland. We work together to raise awareness of the climate emergency.
Our street corner demonstrations continue weekly in November every Friday. New time is 3 – 4 PM at SW Terwilliger & SW Taylor’s Ferry. Some parking is available in the Chez Jose and Anytime Fitness lot, or reach us via bus or bike.
Our monthly meetings happen on the third Monday of the month. To get involved, please contact Pat Kaczmarek at patk5@msn.com.
Before closing our newsletter, a few reminders:- Check out our Take Action page, which we update regularly. It includes actions that may not be in our newsletter.
- Join the 350PDX community Slack channel! This is a great way to stay connected on an ongoing basis. Contact to info@350pdx.org and we can add you.
- 350PDX is still searching for a wonderful, new home. Please reach out to info@350PDX.org if you have ideas for a space where we can have meetings, our arts team can create show-stopping puppets, and more!
Thank you for reading our monthly newsletter. We hope to see you soon!
With gratitude,
Cherice, Dineen, Jessica, Maeve, and Noelle
The post 2026 November Newsletter! appeared first on 350PDX: Climate Justice.
Clean power shields China from oil shock more than any other country
China’s rapidly-expanding clean energy generation and deepening electrification has made the country more resilient to energy shocks, bolstering its position ahead of the COP31 climate talks in Türkiye, where speeding up the world’s electrification is set to dominate.
The growth of China’s renewable energy capacity protected it from the economic fallout from the energy crisis triggered by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, according to analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) published on Thursday.
As oil and gas stopped flowing through the key fossil fuel trade route, leading prices to soar, China’s crude oil imports – the largest in the world – fell sharply, leading the country to start drawing down on its reserves and curbing its exports of petroleum products.
“Yet, the import reduction did not produce the economic and social disruption in China one might normally expect from a shock of this scale,” the report found.
As temporary adjustment cushioned the oil-import shock, clean power and the electrification of the transport sector buffered the economic costs.
The rise of renewable energy and nuclear power have reduced China’s fossil fuel imports bill by more than $9 billion since 2020, more than any other country, according to CREA.
“China remains exposed to imported fuels, particularly where oil is used as a chemical feedstock, but reducing fossil-fuel demand already contributes to energy security,” said Qi Qin, the report’s author.
The view from Beijing: vindicatedCREA’s analysis found the roll-out of electric vehicles (EVs) displaced 38 million tonnes of oil equivalent between March and August, equivalent to around 13% of China’s crude oil imports in the same period the previous year.
China’s ongoing reliance on coal-fired power plants also protected the country against oil and gas supply disruptions, although coal power generation remained broadly flat in the six months since the start of the Iran war, according to the report.
Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Climate home News that China’s all-of-the-above approach to energy development has provided the country with the strategic flexibility to face the oil shock.
“While China has often been criticised in previous years for moving too slowly away from coal, this year’s global energy market volatility has given Chinese policymakers a renewed sense of confidence. There is a growing sentiment in Beijing that recent events have vindicated China’s energy strategy as both prudent and pragmatic,” he said.
Can China support the electrification pledge?Despite its vast cleantech build-out and rapid electrification boosting its energy resilience, China has stopped short of endorsing an initiative by COP31 host Türkiye to increase the global share of electricity to 35% in final energy use by 2035.
Li Gao, vice minister at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, who will lead the Chinese delegation at COP31, told a press conference the electrification target was in line with Chinese policy. “We believe that increasing electrification levels will help promote a green and low-carbon energy transition and address climate change,” he said.
China’s position on the electrification initiative is one of the major questions hanging over the COP31 talks beginning in Antalya next week.
“What is clear is that China has the most to gain from accelerated electrification because of their manufacturing capabilities,” said Bruce Douglas, CEO of the Global Renewables Alliance.
In 2026 alone, China’s exports of solar panels, batteries, EV and other cleantech are on track to avoid emissions equivalent to Brazil’s annual emissions.
Türkiye’s proposal doesn’t include a commitment to produce the power from clean energy, nor does it explicitly link electrification to the transition away from fossil fuels – issues on which the EU has signalled it is ready to push back.
But Chinese analysts say Beijing is unlikely to support linking a global electrification goal to commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.
Former French climate envoy Laurence Tubiana, the outgoing CEO of the European Climate Foundation, told Climate Home News that the EU and developed countries such as Brazil – which is influential within the BRICS group of large emerging economies – have a responsibility to push China to show leadership in the talks.
Driving the world’s electrificationThe electrification of the Chinese economy has outpaced that of any other major economy.
In the US and the EU, the share of electrification has stagnated just above 20%. In China, it has doubled since 2005, reaching close to 30% in 2025.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects China will remain the single largest driver of global electricity demand growth through to 2030, as it electrifies its manufacturing sector as well as growing demand for cooling and EV charging.
Over the next five years, the IEA forecasts that China will increase its electricity consumption by as much as the total electricity consumption of the EU today.
In August, the Chinese government set a target to boost the share of electricity in its final energy consumption to 35% by 2030 – five years ahead of Türkiye’s proposed goal.
From laggard to frontrunnerClean-power growth and electrification could meet all of China’s rising power demand, according to CREA. By 2030, this would mean renewable and nuclear energy could reach 54% of power generation – exceeding China’s target to generate half its electricity from non-fossil sources by the end of the decade.
Clean electricity already met all of China’s demand growth in 2025. “The challenge lies in sustaining such growth over several years,” said Qin.
From Beijing’s perspective, the global targets such as the electrification pledge “no longer appear particularly ambitious or threatening”, said Li, of the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“China, long perceived as a climate laggard, is increasingly moving ahead of countries in the Global North. A global ceiling target is increasingly only a floor for China,” he emphasised.
The post Clean power shields China from oil shock more than any other country appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP30 adaptation pledge would meet under a third of poorer nations’ needs, UN warns
International funding to help developing countries protect their communities, infrastructure and economies from climate impacts remains far below what is needed, a new United Nations report has found, leaving vulnerable nations increasingly exposed as global warming heads past 1.5C.
The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) 2026 Adaptation Gap Report estimates that developing countries will need about $305 billion a year to adapt by 2035 in today’s prices, or around $420 billion once inflation is taken into account. Yet international public adaptation finance from developed countries reached only $28.2-31.7 billion in 2024, a modest increase on the previous year.
The estimate is slightly below last year’s $310-365 billion, mainly because UNEP now relies more on countries’ own assessment of costs reported through their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs).
UN secretary-general António Guterres said the gap in adaptation finance is not measured in money alone but in the lives, livelihoods and futures that are lost in the process.
He called on developed countries to deliver “fast, simple, accessible support” to vulnerable countries, adding that development banks must also scale up their financing. “We know who is most at risk. We know what works. What is missing is the money and the political will. The choice is simple – invest in adaptation today or pay for catastrophe tomorrow,” he said.
At COP30 last year, countries agreed to at least triple adaptation finance for developing nations by 2035. Depending on whether that is measured from current flows or from the $40 billion that rich nations were meant to reach in 2025 under an earlier pledge, tripling would deliver $85-120 billion a year. Even if it is achieved, UNEP says, that would cover only 20-29% of developing countries’ needs in 2035.
The report warns the pledge may be less ambitious than it looks. The COP30 decision sets no baseline year, does not adjust for inflation and allows money that developing countries channel through multilateral development banks (MDBs) to count towards the target. Taking all of this into account, developed countries’ own contribution in 2035 could be as low as $45-66 billion a year in 2025 prices.
“The world is not ready to adapt to current climatic conditions, never mind what overshoot of 1.5°C will bring,” said Inger Andersen, UNEP executive director, calling on governments to intensify efforts to increase adaptation finance.
Global South countries step upWhile funding from rich nations flatlines, adaptation finance flowing between developing countries is growing, though it is nowhere near enough to close the gap.
What’s on the climate calendar for November 2026?
The UNEP report estimates that developing countries contributed $9.65 billion towards international public adaptation finance in 2024, more than double the $3.81 billion recorded in 2019. That is about a quarter of all international public adaptation finance.
The report does not break the figure down by country. “These are voluntary contributions that capacitated developing countries provide via their shares in the MDBs but also through direct South-South cooperation,” said Henry Neufeldt, the report’s lead author, at a press conference on Wednesday.
Fatima Denton, the report’s co-author, said it is “comforting” to see South-South learning and cooperation because countries with similar ecosystems face similar challenges.
Loss and damage mountingWithout stronger action to cut emissions and adapt, climate-related losses and damages will keep rising, the report says, overwhelming the limited resources of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), whose complex procedures also make support hard to access.
Last month, the fund’s board agreed to set aside $20 million for Nepal’s recovery from the devastating climate-driven flood it suffered in August. It is the first money the fund has allocated since its creation, but Nepali officials called the sum symbolic against estimated recovery costs of $4.8 billion. Nepal must now submit a proposal setting out how it will use the money.
The FRLD has yet to approve any projects from its first funding round, when it received nearly 180 submissions, requiring around $2.8 billion – an amount that dwarfed the around $350 million available to allocate.
Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources
Mattias Söderberg, global climate lead at DanChurchAid, said the risk of loss and damage grows when adaptation falls short, as communities become more exposed to increasingly severe climate impacts.
“When we fail to invest in adaptation today, we risk paying a much higher price tomorrow. And that price is not only measured in dollars. It is measured in lives lost, homes destroyed and futures taken away,” Söderberg added.
A failure to match climate ambitionAhead of COP31 starting on Monday in Antalya, climate campaigners are calling on rich governments to set out how to close the remaining gap and meet developing countries’ full adaptation needs.
Pooja Dave, adaptation lead at Climate Action Network International, said COP31 must agree a credible plan to deliver at least US$120 billion a year in adaptation finance well before 2035, through new and additional public, grant-based funding that reaches the communities most at risk.
“People have a right to a climate safe world and protection from climate impacts. Adaptation is not charity. It is a legal and moral obligation,” Dave said.
Mohamed Adow, director of Kenya-based climate change think tank Power Shift Africa, said COP31 must establish a clear starting point, milestones and a credible delivery plan, especially on how public finance, in the form of grants not loans, must reach those most at risk
“Communities facing floods and droughts cannot wait until 2035 to find out what this promise means,” he said.
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The great disaster divide: How the super-rich are profiting from global climate suffering
Alex Maitland, Nafkote Dabi and Pubudini Wickramaratne work on climate and inequality for Oxfam International.
Few places on Earth have escaped the deadly effects of climate breakdown in 2026. In the early half of the year, devastating floods swept through Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and other West African countries while August flash floods in Nepal, caused by a glacier collapse, affected over 80,000 people.
India endured a prolonged extreme heatwave in May, followed by the weakest monsoon in 20 years. Excess deaths from the European heatwaves are likely to have topped 50,000. And 2026 is on track to be one of the hottest years on record.
The effects of these disasters have not been caused nor felt equally. Disasters discriminate: the less you have, the more you stand to lose.
While everyday people died in heatwaves, the super-rich built snow rooms in their mansions. As families fled from wildfires, the rich were evacuated by helicopter to five-star hotels. As flash floods wiped out entire villages, luxury properties stood protected by high-end private flood defence systems.
What’s even more galling is that the same people that have done the most to drive climate chaos can pay to insulate themselves from its effects and are now finding new ways to profit from disaster.
Oxfam’s latest report “Disaster Divide” sets out exactly how climate breakdown is deepening inequality and enriching a tiny few.
Unequal emissionsBillionaires and the super-rich are destroying the planet at a wildly disproportionate rate. The richest 0.1% (roughly 8 million people) emit more carbon than the poorest 3.5 billion people, almost half of humanity.
There is perhaps no starker symbol of wasteful emissions than travel by private jet. Every two seconds, the world’s private jets pump out more carbon than someone in the poorest 50% of the world will emit in an entire year.
But the climate impacts of the super-rich go far beyond their luxury lifestyles. How they invest their fortunes helps determine which high-carbon infrastructure gets built.
About 70% of billionaire investments are in “high climate-impact sectors” such as oil, gas or chemicals. The economic damage linked to individual billionaires’ investments can run into billions of dollars. Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim’s investments, for example, caused $3.7 billion of environmental damage in 2024, and French fashion titan Bernard Arnault, owner of Louis Vuitton, was responsible for $1.7 billion in damage, our calculations show.
Emissions of the rich drive climate disastersFor the first time, Oxfam combines the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI)’s carbon inequality data with climate attribution models to link the emissions of the super-rich to extreme weather events.
The richest 1% are responsible for 20% of global warming since 1990, 100 times more per person, than someone in the poorest half of humanity.
The data also shows how the rich increase the likelihood of extreme heat occurring: a person from the richest 0.1% has contributed 125 times more than the average person to extreme heat events.
Inequality is what turns extreme weather events into disaster. In more unequal countries, disasters cause higher death tolls, inflict greater damage and affect more people.
Inequality also determines who can survive, endure and recover. A study of floods in Mumbai, India, found that lower-income households had to spend 15 times more than rich households to repair and replace damaged assets.
Billionaires escape climate consequencesClimate impacts are also deeply unequal along gender lines. A review of 130 studies found that women and girls were more affected than men and boys by climate-related health impacts in 68% of cases. Climate disasters exacerbate pre-existing gender inequality: gender-based violence increases during and after extreme weather events, with two-thirds of studies identifying increases in intimate partner or domestic violence following floods, storms or droughts.
“Coordinated backlash”: Activists say COP30 gender spat reflects wider threat
For millions of people, the consequences of climate chaos go further still: being forced to leave their homes and communities. UN Migration projects that, if the international community fails to act, as many as 1 billion people (around 10% of the world’s population) will have been displaced by 2050. The majority of those displaced will be in the Global South, but rich people are quietly joining their ranks.
Billionaires are buying islands and building fortified compounds and underground bunkers — tech billionaires are increasingly at the forefront of this trend. This is a form of climate apartheid: the super-rich use their wealth and power to escape the consequences of the crises they largely helped create.
Destroying the food systemClimate change is lowering food production and pushing food prices higher. Low-income households are more exposed to high food prices because it makes up the greatest share of their overall spending. People in low- or lower-middle-income countries spend almost three times as much of their income on food as people in high-income countries.
Some of the richest people in the world and their corporations are directly benefiting, exploiting rising food prices and uneven food production to reap large profits.
In 2024, extreme weather damaged West African cocoa harvests, resulting in prices jumping around 230% year-on-year but accruing no gains to cocoa farmers. The same year, heavy rains in Indonesia and droughts in Brazil and Vietnam contributed to a surge in coffee prices, with a 39% increase on the previous year’s average. Coffee-trading corporations, the intermediary traders of the supply chains, made huge profits as a result.
A farmer walks on his cocoa farm in Gabeadji near San Pedro, Ivory Coast, January 31, 2023. (Photo: Reuters/Ange Aboa) A farmer walks on his cocoa farm in Gabeadji near San Pedro, Ivory Coast, January 31, 2023. (Photo: Reuters/Ange Aboa) Profiting from disasterCorporations have long made massive amounts of money from wrecking the planet. Now, the wreckage itself is becoming a lucrative market. The global disaster recovery market is forecast to grow from $70 billion to $92 billion a year by 2029, driven in part by increasingly frequent climate-related extreme weather events.
Often, the very same people profiting from fuelling climate breakdown are also cashing in on disaster clean-ups. To investigate this trend, Oxfam created a sample of 217 corporations which profit from business activities that either drive climate disasters, build resilience before they hit, or work on repairing the damage. We coined it the “Destroy and Rebuild” Index.
The corporations in the “Destroy and Rebuild” Index made $1.8 billion on average in 2025, paying out more than $1 billion on average to their shareholders. Ten asset managers have investments in over 90% of these corporations, with BlackRock and Vanguard invested in 92% of the corporations in the index: the pair’s total investments in these companies exceed$1 trillion.
Coalition set sights on taxing luxury air travel to fund climate action
The lengths the super-rich go to exploit disasters doesn’t stop at cynical profiteering. Recovery efforts have also been used to push through the privatisation of public services and deregulation, reshaping communities in ways that benefit private interests rather than the people affected.
After Hurricane Irma devastated Barbuda in 2017, reconstruction made way for luxury residences and a golf course on land that included natural coastlines and wetlands. This restricted access to the sea for many fisherfolk and local people. In Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria’s aftermath was used to advance the privatisation of the island’s electrical grid. Since then, the grid has suffered widespread failures, including a blackout in April 2022 that left the entire country without power.
A man stands in a home where the roof was ripped apart, in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, July 5, 2024. REUTERS/Maria Alejandra Cardona A man stands in a home where the roof was ripped apart, in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, July 5, 2024. REUTERS/Maria Alejandra Cardona Make rich polluters payClimate breakdown is the result of political choices and an economic system that protects the wealth and power of polluters while leaving others to pay the price. This is neither just nor sustainable. It must change.
Governments meeting at COP31 must commit to curb the excessive emissions of the super-rich through taxes on wealth, income and carbon-intensive luxury consumption, like private jets and mega-yachts. These measures will help generate the public climate finance urgently needed for Global South countries to adapt, recover and rebuild without being pushed deeper into debt.
Governments must also draw a hard line against disaster capitalism, refusing to let corporations turn human suffering into shareholder value.
The post The great disaster divide: How the super-rich are profiting from global climate suffering appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP31 must deliver finance for Africa or there will be no implementation
Nana Antwi-Boasiako Amoah is chair of the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change. Charles Wanguhu is director of the Enzi Ijayo Africa Initiative and Africa Futures Policy Hub.
A COP held in Africa does not automatically deliver for Africa. That matters now, with COP31 in Antalya ahead and COP32 in Addis Ababa on the horizon. What counts is not where the world gathers, or what it pledges, but whether climate finance reaches African countries on terms they can use.
Without real progress on finance and implementation at Antalya, an African-hosted COP will simply inherit the same unmet promises.
Africa accounts for about 4% of global emissions, yet carries a wildly disproportionate share of the cost, losing an estimated 2%-5% of GDP each year to climate extremes, money pulled from classrooms and clinics into disaster response.
The finance meant to help it adapt arrives in a trickle. Developing countries will need an estimated $305 billion a year for adaptation alone by 2035, according to the latest UN Adaptation Gap Report. In 2024, international public adaptation finance stood at $28 billion-$32 billion, just a $1 billion increase over the previous year. That gap is the difference between plans on paper and protection on the ground.
Predictable, grant-based fundingThe problem is not only how much, but on what terms. Too much arrives as loans rather than grants, deepening a debt burden that already crowds out spending on essentials in health, education and multipliers of development like affordable and accessible energy. The cost of capital has become the real tax on African ambition. A fairer financial system is not charity. It is the precondition for delivery.
So, Africa comes to Antalya with a collective strong proposition. This is no longer a slogan: across the continent, states are building shared positions and common pavilions, learning to bargain as a bloc. We will press for finance that is predictable and grant-based, and for adaptation finance to be at least tripled, to around $120 billion a year by 2035. Even that would fall short of what the continent actually needs.
The goal this forms part of, which was agreed at the Baku COP – $300 billion a year – is a floor, not a ceiling; the real benchmark is the $1.3 trillion from all sources sketched out in the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap. And we will ask for direct access, so resources reach the institutions and communities that must use them, and for mechanisms that track whether commitments are met.
Powering green industrialisationFinance is not an end in itself. Pledges become results when finance builds economies, creates jobs and strengthens productive capacity – the grids, the processing and the skills that let African economies add value to what they produce rather than exporting it raw.
Here we should be honest with ourselves. Value addition is an energy story before it is a minerals story. There is little point in curbing raw exports if there is no reliable power to run the smelter. Credibility means pairing the call to process at home with a plan to power it.
Other enablers of a just transition become crucial. Trade, for instance, can be an enabler of a low-carbon transition by facilitating the exchange of low-carbon goods. However, it has increasingly become a hindrance, particularly for African countries.
The use of unilateral trade measures has disproportionate impacts on market access and industrial capabilities, consigning African countries to the export of raw materials. The poor sequencing of these measures and lack of flexibilities, exemptions and targeted support are likely to cause harm.
At COP31, we will push for an agenda item on trade to create a specific space as an enabler of systematic discussion on the impact of trade‑related climate measures.
Communities at the tableThis is where the design of co-operation matters as much as its scale. The proposed Just Transition Mechanism should be country-led and grant-based, so it adds capacity rather than debt. It should fund the things that make diversification real – reliable power (smarter grids and delivery networks), local processing, and the skills to run them – and it should put workers and affected communities at the table, not merely in the communiqué. Get that design right, and diversification builds new industries and jobs rather than leaving communities behind.
Antalya opens into a vacuum in global climate leadership. Africa can help fill it, not with grievance but with a credible voice on delivery and finance. An implementation COP must be judged by implementation.
The question is plain. Does the finance follow the ambition, and does it reach the economies and the people who need it? Africa will be watching the answer.
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Kenya: Kandara Community fights for land restitution and an end to corporate impunity
In Central Kenya, the Kandara Residents Association has sustained decades long struggle for land restitution with little success.
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India builds deep-sea capacity in bet on critical minerals future
At India’s ocean technology institute in Chennai, scientists have been developing a range of hi-tech mining equipment that can operate 5 or 6 kilometres underwater – from a remote-control submarine to a seabed soil tester and slurry pump.
Their task: to ensure that India is ready if deep-sea mining takes off by building the technology and knowledge about how – and where – critical minerals can be extracted from the depths of the ocean, even as dozens of nations call for a moratorium on this activity.
After a series of successful deep-water equipment tests in recent years, government officials say big strides have been made.
“(India) has made significant progress in building the scientific and technological foundations for deep-sea mining,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Earth Sciences, which oversees the institute, told Climate Home News.
Deep-sea ambitionsHighlighting the country’s ambitions, it signed a second contract last year with the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body that regulates the deep ocean floor, to explore polymetallic sulphides, which contain minerals such as copper and zinc – key ingredients in clean energy technologies such as wind turbines and storage batteries.
Besides the two polymetallic sulphide contracts, it holds an ISA exploration contract for polymetallic nodules in the Central Indian Ocean Basin. China and South Korea are the only other countries with three ISA exploration contracts directly under government control.
Greenpeace activists hold a protest demanding an end to deep-sea mining, in Prague, Czech Republic, June 1, 2023. REUTERS/David W Cerny Greenpeace activists hold a protest demanding an end to deep-sea mining, in Prague, Czech Republic, June 1, 2023. REUTERS/David W CernyYet deep-sea mining is controversial for its potential impacts on the ocean floor, a little-studied, undisturbed ecosystem that should be protected by a precautionary pause on the activity, marine scientists say.
A coalition of 46 countries is pushing for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, until enough scientific evidence shows the ecosystem impacts can be reduced.
Despite this push, ISA contract-holders are still racing to develop the technical capabilities to mine the ocean floor, betting that commercial-scale operations will eventually be permitted and prove economically viable. India, an emerging clean-tech powerhouse, does not want to fall behind competitors, government officials told Climate Home News.
Since India obtained its first ISA exploration contract more than two decades ago, extensive survey work has been undertaken in the 75,000-square-km contract area in the Central Indian Ocean Basin, which is estimated to hold hundreds of millions of tonnes of polymetallic nodule resources, according to the Indian government.
More recently, survey work has identified several potential locations in the polymetallic sulphide areas.
The seabed survey work and the deep-sea mining tools being developed in Chennai put India among only a small group of countries to have made such progress. China is another leader in mapping the ocean floor for potential mineral resources that could one day be extracted.
At a meeting in Jamaica in July, the ISA continued negotiations on rules for commercial deep-sea mining but failed to adopt the Mining Code. Delegates agreed that further work had to be carried out to resolve outstanding issues, with the ISA tasked with devising a roadmap towards hopeful adoption.
A view shows an active venting chimney at the Jan Mayen Vent Fields on the Arctic Mid-Oceanic Ridge and a lot of white microbial mats cover the chimney, at a depth of around 500 metres, in this undated handout picture. University of Bergen, Centre for Deep Sea Research/Handout via REUTERS A view shows an active venting chimney at the Jan Mayen Vent Fields on the Arctic Mid-Oceanic Ridge and a lot of white microbial mats cover the chimney, at a depth of around 500 metres, in this undated handout picture. University of Bergen, Centre for Deep Sea Research/Handout via REUTERS Technical and regulatory hurdlesEven if a regulatory framework is established, commercial development remains a distant prospect in the exploration contract areas awarded to India by the ISA, government officials and experts say.
“There is still quite a distance to be covered to convert the resource to reserves,” the ministry spokesperson said.
Pradeep Singh, an ocean governance expert at the Oceano Azul Foundation, a Portugal-based international nonprofit, described India’s deep-sea mining programme as being firmly in “an exploratory phase”.
“There is still a lot more work left to be done in order to achieve sustained extraction technology, address operational hurdles (such as shipboard processing and trans-shipment), and develop onshore refining,” Singh told Climate Home News.
“It would also appear, from publicly available information, that none of the programmes will be ready to move into the exploitation phase anytime soon,” Singh added.
Deep-sea real estateInstead, the government’s longer-term vision for India’s ISA contracts is centred on “a combination of mineral/resource security, indigenous technology development, scientific capability and eventual industrial readiness”, the ministry spokesperson said.
London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal
But for as long as deep-sea mining remains commercially unviable, Singh said securing exploratory licences may be more about “real estate and as a projection of dominance”.
“The competition at the moment – if any – is more about investing in deep-sea operational capabilities rather than mineral resource extraction itself (which is currently not competitive),” Singh said.
Threat to ocean biodiversityIn tandem with India’s deep-sea mineral survey work, years of research by government environmental scientist Dr. Rengaiyan Periasamy on Indian Ocean ridges highlight the risks that future deep-sea mining poses to ocean biodiversity.
“Our studies have led to the discovery of more than 10 new species,” Periasamy told Climate Home News from the Kochi-based Centre for Marine Living Resources & Ecology, which also operates under the Ministry of Earth Sciences.
They warn that deep-sea mining could cause habitat destruction, persistent sediment plumes and disruption of ecosystem processes throughout the water column, with potentially irreversible impacts occurring before many species and ecosystems are fully understood.
Iridogorgia and bamboo coral pictured around the Johnston Atoll Unit of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research) Iridogorgia and bamboo coral pictured around the Johnston Atoll Unit of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research)Major fisheries could also be severely impacted, according to campaigners.
“No country has conducted enough scientific research to capture the full scope of environmental impacts of deep-sea mining,” said a spokesperson for the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition, an international environmental advocacy group focused on protecting deep-ocean ecosystems.
“We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about any deep-sea environment,” the spokesperson added.
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Where is the U.S. Climate Movement? w/ Prof. Kai Bosworth
COP30 roadmap says faster use of existing tools can halt forest loss by 2030
Brazil’s COP30 presidency has unveiled a much-anticipated plan to halt forest loss around the world, saying a global target to end deforestation by 2030 remains within reach using existing national and international tools, but requires more finance behind it and everyone to go “faster and further”.
COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago told a press conference to launch the new roadmap in Brasilia that, while some countries pushed back against a global blueprint, it was developed as a way to inspire governments, business and civil society to focus on meeting commitments to protect forests.
“It’s all processes that already exist. All instruments that already exist. That’s one of the best conclusions: everyone can start acting today,” do Lago said.
The voluntary deforestation roadmap, along with another on transitioning away from fossil fuels, was promised by Brazil in the final hours of last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém after countries could not agree to include it in the formal Mutirão outcome.
Do Lago reiterated on Tuesday that the roadmap is not an official UN document, but rather a guide to implement targets already agreed three years ago at COP28 in Dubai, when countries took stock of national climate policies and agreed to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030.
Last year, global deforestation declined by 15% – the largest drop in recent years, achieved in large part thanks to Brazil’s tougher enforcement against illegal expansion of cattle-ranching – but countries remain far off track for the drop needed to achieve the COP28 target.
Former Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva, a close ally of newly re-elected President Lula da Silva and one of the main advocates of the roadmap, celebrated its launch and described it as “not a new path but a new way of walking” towards the global goal.
What’s included in the roadmap?The roadmap compiles a menu of policies to reverse deforestation and restore the world’s forests at both the national and international level, informed by more than 180 contributions from governments, civil society, the private sector and others. It focuses on ways countries can ramp up forest conservation, sustainable management and restoration, while tackling deforestation and forest degradation.
At the country level, it urges each government to follow a four-point plan, starting with identifying the drivers of deforestation in its territory, adjusting existing policies such as climate and biodiversity plans to address those drivers, setting targets according to available resources, and then implementing measures to reach them.
At the international level, it urges countries to co-operate on diverting trade-related incentives away from forest-destructive activities, and to strengthen prosecution of cross-border environmental crimes at the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (UNTOC). It also calls for collaboration on forest monitoring platforms and developing unified indicators for tracking progress.
The document also identifies the next UN Global Stocktake of climate policies in 2028 as a key milestone when countries will have a last chance to review forest policies before the end of the decade.
Do Lago said some countries might want the roadmap to become a contribution to the next stocktake, adding that this document is “the first contribution for that discussion”, which will start at COP31 in Antalya and continue until COP33.
COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago looks over documents at the UN mid-year climate talks in Bonn, Germany on June 11, 2026 (Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth) Finance boost neededTo achieve the 2030 global target, the roadmap also says a major scale-up of financial resources will be required. The UN estimates that $84.5 billion was channelled into forest protection in 2023, which will need to increase to more than $300 billion a year by 2030. Nearly 90% of finance going to forests comes from domestic government budgets in developing countries, rather than international aid or private-sector investment.
The roadmap suggests that, since countries are already paying to look after their forests, they can act in two main ways: diverting domestic support away from nature-damaging activities, and building demand for “verified forest outcomes” such as paying to keep forests standing or creating forest-positive subsidies.
In the case of international finance, the document identifies several initiatives seeking to channel new public and private funds towards forest protection, including paying for carbon sinks – known as REDD+ in technical jargon – as well as through the newly established Paris Agreement carbon market.
The roadmap also singles out recent efforts to shift more private finance into solutions for nature, such as the Brazil-led Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) launched last year in Belém.
“The great challenge is not new policies, but scalability and acceleration to arrive at 2030 as promised, having ramped up efforts to end deforestation and forest degradation,” COP30 CEO and veteran climate diplomat Ana Toni said at the press conference.
Timeline requires quick implementationDamian Fleming, senior director for forests at green group WWF International, said the roadmap “gets many of the fundamentals right” including on governance, regulatory and legal enforcement, community rights, finance, and the need to tackle degradation as well as deforestation.
However, he added that “the challenge now is speed” with 2030 just a few years away. “Countries need to use [the roadmap] to turbocharge action for results on the ground,” he said, urging governments to pursue deforestation-free supply chains and respect the rights of Indigenous peoples.
Anders Haug Larsen, director of international advocacy at the Rainforest Foundation Norway, highlighted the wide range of partners that can drive the anti-deforestation plan forward, adding he hoped that rainforest nations would now step up to champion it.
“Tropical forests are too important for fragmented approaches,” he said. “The roadmap can help bring together governments, Indigenous Peoples, investors and existing initiatives behind a common goal: ending deforestation and keeping forests standing.”
Natalie Unterstell, founder of the Talanoa Institute, a Brazilian climate think-tank, said the roadmap builds on Brazil’s “successful experience” of reducing deforestation, which has dropped to a record-low level, going beyond a simple focus on law enforcement but also identifying business and finance opportunities that bring positive results.
“The next step is for other governments and incoming COP presidencies to take ownership of this agenda, turn the proposed pathways into co-ordinated action, and use the 2028 Global Stocktake to assess collective progress. With only four years left, the roadmap needs a coalition of countries committed to delivering it,” she told Climate Home News.
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Brazil’s fossil fuel roadmap sketches out first global timetable
Brazil has proposed a voluntary timetable to speed up the world’s transition away from fossil fuels (TAFF), fulfilling the promise it made to draw up the first global roadmap at last year’s UN climate summit in Belém.
Through a “TAFF Mutirão”, named after the Indigenous Brazilian term for collective effort, the COP30 presidency sets out three stages for cutting the world’s reliance on oil, gas and coal up to 2033.
Countries are first encouraged to draw up national transition plans by 2028 in time to feed into the next global stocktake, the UN’s five-yearly review of progress on climate action. During the same period, Brazil’s blueprint suggests governments could take early steps such as reforming fossil fuel subsidies or stopping methane leaks at oil and gas sites.
In 2029 and 2030, Brazil sees the focus shifting to building an alternative energy system, by prioritising clean power, electric transport and heating, more efficient energy use and by rolling out the power grids and batteries that support them.
Only in the final stage, from 2031 to 2033, does the roadmap expect the main push to reduce fossil fuel production. By then, it argues, falling use of fossil fuels should allow producers to “adjust and diversify supply in step with demand”.
The roadmap acknowledges that fossil fuel demand must fall “substantially faster” to meet the 1.5C temperature goal, but warns that cutting supply too early would drive up prices and risk “losing societal support for the transition”.
Coordinated agendaPedro Brancante, a senior official at the Brazilian Foreign Ministry and one of the authors of the roadmap, said the document proposes both a global, coordinated agenda and accelerated action at the national level.
He told a webinar hosted by Climate Home News that Brazil sees the roadmap as a tool to organise the discussions around the fossil fuel phase-out and help that debate develop further without getting stuck on definitions or the different responsibilities of particular countries.
The COP30 presidency offered to draw up the roadmap in the dying hours of the Belém summit. A push by about 80 countries to start that work within the formal negotiations had been blocked by some fossil fuel-producing nations.
The 182-page document does not name any countries and it sets no deadlines for winding down fossil fuel production. But it offers countries a self-assessment tool to score themselves on how heavily they depend on fossil fuels and what capacity they have to move away from them.
Fossil fuel “archetypes”Across energy demand, supply and the wider economy, countries can place themselves in one of 12 “archetypes”, each with its own suggested first steps.
For example, countries where transport, industry and homes still run mostly on fossil fuels, and where energy demand is growing fast, are urged to meet that growth with electric and other low-emissions options rather than locking in new fossil fuel use. Major oil and gas producers with strong institutions and good renewable resources are told to manage an “orderly transition” of their production while expanding clean energy, then to redirect their infrastructure and skills toward new energy industries.
COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago told journalists on Tuesday that countries need to recognise themselves in the categories and use the frameworks as “food for thought” to plan the next steps.
COP30 CEO Ana Toni added that the presidency limited its time horizon to 2033 and did not try to think about 2050 or 2060 because “there is an urgency and these are short-term measures” that all countries can act upon now.
Lula’s election win in Brazil raises hopes for zero deforestation drive
Brazil has yet to publish its own national roadmap away from fossil fuels. At the end of last year, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked his government to draft the roadmap’s guidelines by February 2026, but officials said on Tuesday that the document is still awaiting approval from the President.
Lula, who was recently re-elected, has backed the expansion of oil and gas exploration. In August, after Petrobras struck oil off the coast near the mouth of the Amazon River, he said drilling along Brazil’s northern coast could be “a passport to the country’s future”.
“Valuable blueprint”The release of the roadmap was largely welcomed by analysts and campaigners.
Romain Ioualalen, global policy lead at Oil Change International, said Brazil has offered “a valuable blueprint” for the fossil fuel phase-out, adding that while “there is not one-size-fits-all pathway”, all countries need to plan their transition now.
But he warned that suggesting that a reduction in fossil fuel supply could wait until the 2030s would be “a grave mistake” and guarantee a “chaotic transition”.
Smoke rises from Yatagan thermal power plant near southwestern town of Yatagan in Mugla province, Turkey, February 24, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas) Smoke rises from Yatagan thermal power plant near southwestern town of Yatagan in Mugla province, Turkey, February 24, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas)Kat Paterson, programme lead for global clean power diplomacy at E3G, said the roadmap puts the fossil fuel transition at the heart of both global climate cooperation and national economic planning.
“As governments head to Antalya, the task is now for the COP31 presidency to carry Brazil’s work forward, and for countries to demonstrate their own plans to develop national roadmaps as pathways towards clean, resilient economies,” she added.
Turkey, which hosts COP31 from next Monday, and Australia, which will preside over the negotiations, have not said whether or how they will take the roadmap forward at the summit.
At the press conference in Brasilia, the Brazilian officials stressed that the roadmap represents a call for action and not a formal document that needs to be adopted in the official talks.
“We are not suggesting negotiations, we are not suggesting the creation of a new entity,” said Corrêa do Lago. “Everything is around implementation, around institutions and processes in place that already exist and have been agreed beforehand.”
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Kenya: Double standards in the agrochemical use and trade
For decades, Kenyan farmers have faced exposure to pesticides banned or restricted in their manufacturers’ home countries.
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Africa launches long-delayed energy bank to finance fossil fuel projects
After repeated delays, the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) was officially launched this week – tasked with financing oil and gas projects across the continent as global lenders retreat from such investments due to climate concerns.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at about 125 billion barrels of crude and more than 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to fund economic development.
“The creation of the Africa Energy Bank reaffirms African governments’ determination to secure their own energy future,” said a statement announcing the institution’s launch at a meeting in Abuja, adding that the bank’s founders believed oil and gas remained vital to the continent’s energy systems.
The delays to the bank’s launch had raised questions about its momentum and whether it could mobilise investment to finance major African hydrocarbons initiatives in an era of energy transition.
The initial plan for the energy bank – a joint initiative of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) and the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) – was to start operations in January 2025, but the bank’s opening was repeatedly pushed back.
Quest for investmentThe bank said it had authorised capital of $5 billion but did not disclose how much of that had been subscribed or paid in by shareholders. It vowed to focus on projects that would help strengthen productive capacity, reduce reliance on imported fuels and promote trade in energy goods across the continent.
It estimates Africa’s energy investment needs at $200 billion, and energy analysts told Climate Home News the institution could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale projects.
However, its backers said at the weekend launch that the bank would seek investment from governments, national oil companies, financial institutions and private investors across the continent to ensure that “Africa’s energy future is shaped by Africans”.
African-led approach to energy financingBackers said the bank was needed because many traditional international lenders have curtailed financing for oil and gas projects, potentially hindering a more extended and gradual energy transition advocated by many African leaders as a way to ensure economic and social development.
Chantal Naidoo, executive director at Rabia – a South Africa-based just transition think-tank – said the creation of a bank to invest in fossil fuel projects reflected the complexities of switching to clean energy for African countries – noting the high cost of financing for clean energy projects.
Africa wants adaptation finance on COP31 agenda, raising risk of a fight
At the same time, Naidoo said, the continent is expected to transition within a global system in which the rules are not applied equally – citing recent support for continued oil and gas development by the British and Norwegian governments.
“A binary choice between fossil fuels and renewables does little to address these complexities,” Naidoo said.
“Momentum lies with renewables”But many climate campaigners say the bank should prioritise renewable energy investment as Africa builds out much of its energy system for the first time, fueling growth in solar power.
Data from energy think-tank Ember, published in August, projects that the continent will install a record 17 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity in 2026 – equal to about 100,000 solar panels every day. This would mark the third consecutive year of record growth, following increases of 51% in 2025 and 25% in 2024.
African governments strengthen waste rules as solar and battery use surges
Joseph Ibrahim, Nigeria campaign director for Secure Energy Project, a global advocacy organisation working to accelerate the energy transition, said Africa receives only about 2% of global clean energy spending, leaving plenty of scope for more.
“A new African energy bank should build on that momentum, not pull scarce public money away from it,” Ibrahim said.
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Canada, EU agree deeper cooperation on energy and cleantech supply chains
Canada and the European Union’s commitment to strengthen cooperation on energy security and the energy transition lays the foundation to put clean growth and climate priorities at the heart of their alliance, according to experts.
In a seven-page joint statement agreed at the end of a two-day summit in Montreal on Friday, both sides committed to work more closely on investment in critical minerals, green grids, energy sources, battery storage and the protection of energy infrastructure.
They agreed to assess opportunities for long-term energy connectivity across the Atlantic, including through a feasibility study on liquefied gas (LNG) exports to Europe. The statement also includes a pledge to “deepen targeted industrial cooperation” on technology value chains and “address bilateral trade barriers”.
“Canada and the European Union have sent a clear and unwavering signal that closer cooperation on decarbonisation and climate resilience will be central to their new strategic alliance,” said Canadian Climate Institute president Rick Smith. “The task now is to turn talk into action.”
Foundation for climate actionThe EU and Canada’s “alliance for the future” aims to deepen their partnership across investment, trade and economic security to weather geopolitical tensions and global threats, including “the existential threat of the interdependent crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean and land degradation, and pollution”.
These threats are “increasingly impossible to ignore as the impacts of extreme heat, wildfires, floods, and other disasters become more disruptive and expensive,” Smith said.
The statement reaffirms existing commitments established by the Canada-European Union Green Alliance, which both parties described as “our compass for advancing decarbonisation while also strengthening competitiveness, affordability, and economic security”.
Investment in critical mineralsDuring the summit, the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced a “new chapter” for its presence in Canada, beginning with accelerated investment in critical minerals.
“At a time when both sides of the Atlantic are working to reduce strategic dependencies, we want to turn our partnership into investment in real projects, from mining and processing to recycling,” EIB Vice-President Nicolas Beer said in a statement. “That is how we build supply chains that are not only more secure, but more competitive too.”
Joanna Kyriazis, director of policy and strategy at Clean Energy Canada, welcomed the EIB announcement as a “bright spot of the summit” and “one of the few tangible actions”.
“As the EU and Canada seek to advance a partnership anchored in ensuring mutual security and navigating an uncertain world, it is essential that electrification remains a north star… one of the greatest ways we can advance both short- and long-term affordability, competitiveness, and energy security,” she said.
Feasibility of Canadian LNG exports to the EUIn addition, the agreement calls for a joint long-term feasibility study on LNG exports to Europe, although no immediate investment was announced to support this.
A media briefing circulated by climate advocacy groups in advance of the summit had warned that a call for such a study would support Canada’s efforts to rebrand gas, a highly polluting fossil fuel, as a reliable, low-carbon energy source.
Yet, the agreement was interpreted by some observers as a Canadian concession following more than a year of rhetoric predicting a boom in Canadian gas exports to the EU and elsewhere.
“What is clear is that the EU is reducing its gas consumption drastically,” Adrian Hiel, director of the Brussels-based Electrification Alliance, told the Globe and Mail. “The long-term trend is clear and by the middle of the next decade, Europe should be out of the LNG game.”
Last year, The Energy Mix and Berlin-based Clean Energy Wire reported on mounting doubts that serious European demand for additional gas supplies would ever materialise after Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson touted LNG exports to Germany in “as little as five years”.
Rapprochement on a ‘trade irritant’In the lead-up to the summit, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that Canadian iron, steel, fertiliser and aluminium would not be exempt from carbon tariffs under the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), as it moves toward full implementation in 2034.
The CBAM is a trade tool designed to protect the continent’s domestic industries from competitors in countries with less stringent carbon controls.
Unlike other non-EU members like Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and the UK, Canada is unlikely to be exempted from the CBAM because there are no plans to link its carbon market to Europe’s.
However, at the end of the Montreal summit, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told a press conference they had made progress on finding joint solutions to the issue, which von der Leyen described as a “trade irritant”.
Canada’s EU ambassador, Jonathan Wilkinson, formerly the environment and climate minister, said Canada sees it as a problem that the CBAM “did not acknowledge Canadian producers were doing their part to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint by paying an industrial carbon price”.
He “confirmed diplomatic talks are heading in the right direction but not resolved”, CBC reported.
A longer version of this story was originally published by The Energy Mix as part of its partnership with Small Change Fund.
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The Bund, anti-Zionism and the Jewish Left
Who would have imagined a few years ago that masses of people around the world would be reading, praising, arguing over, and condemning a book about an obscure Jewish socialist organization that effectively came to an end nearly 80 years ago?1https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/all/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-the-story-of-the-jewish-bund/ A book about an uncompromisingly anti-Zionist organization? Who would have imagined such a book having rave reviews in the New York Review of Books 2Adam Hochschild, “A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth”, New York Review of Books, 28 May 2026; https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/a-dream-of-a-socialist-commonwealth-the-jewish-bund/ and The New York Times and being on the latter’s bestsellers list? 3Max Strasser, “What Does Judaism Look Like Without Zionism?” New York Times, April 6, 2026; https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/books/review/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-molly-crabapple.html
The Israeli state is carrying out a genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, and increasing apartheid laws inside Israel. Not only does the world stand by and allow this—the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia (where I live) support, arm, and encourage the Israeli government, and succumb to pressure to cancel and criminalize pro-Palestinian activity. The conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism means not just a distortion of Zionism and what it stands for, but a loss of the historical reality of antisemitism. It also results in a distortion of Jewish history, a loss of the history of the majority of European Jews of the first half of the twentieth century, who were socialists, not Zionists.
At a time like this, we need more than ever books that rediscover the other Jewish tradition, the history of radical struggle, opposition to Zionism, and socialism.
The General Jewish Labour Bund in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, generally known as the Jewish Labor Bund or just simply the Bund, was founded in 1897 in Vilna (Vilnius, now in Lithuania) in the tsarist empire. It is one of the most important but least recognized socialist organizations in Europe.
In its early years, the Bund was revolutionary. It was the first socialist group to turn away from narrow circle work to agitation among workers in the late nineteenth century. It was also the first organization in Russia to implement many of the features we see today as characteristic of the revolutionary party: an agitational paper, professional revolutionaries, and the need for the party to be rooted among workers. The Bund also took the lead in organizing systematic self-defense against pogroms, which were endemic in the tsarist empire.
Because of its resources and organizational skills, the Bund was central to organising the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1898. By the Second Congress in 1903, it had 30,000 members, compared to 8,400 total for the other affiliates. Before the 1905 Revolution in Russia, one third of the prisoners in the Siberian labor camps were Bundists, and the party played a key role in that revolution.
At the 1903 Congress, the Bund opposed Vladimir Lenin’s concept of the party. However, after the 1917 revolution, a sizable group broke away from the Bund and joined the revolutionary movement. The remaining Bund organization relocated to newly independent Poland, where it affiliated with the Second International.
But there was little scope for reformist careerism under Józef Piłsudski’s authoritarian regime, and even less during the increasingly fascist period after he died in 1935. Subservience did not save the Polish Communist Party from destruction by Joseph Stalin. With Trotskyism virtually nonexistent, many of the best working-class activists were to be found in the Bund and in the Polish Socialist Party, also a member of the Second International. As they had done previously, the Bund continued its working-class-based activities, organizing workers into trade unions and leading self-defense groups against increasing fascist antisemitism.
During World War II, the Bund also played a critical role in resistance to the Nazis, most notably during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943.
So much of this story appears to have been forgotten or relegated to footnotes. While there is a significant body of literature on the Bund, it has been treated as a niche topic, one for specialists in Jewish history.
In Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Molly Crabapple has written a work of popular history. Although the author has undertaken original archival research, the book is unapologetically non-academic. To read it is more like reading a novel, a thriller, or a family saga. It is a page-turner, with a large cast of actors and vigorously drawn characters. Events are fast-paced, and the story unfolds against a backdrop of wars, revolutions, civil unrest, and local conflicts.
Above all, this is a book about people’s personal experience. Crabapple is a visual artist, and reading this book is like watching a series of vignettes passing before your eyes. Central is her great-grandfather Sam Rothbort, who at 15 became an activist Bundist in the small town of Volkovysk (present-day Belarus). Rothbort participated in Bund-led strikes and gatherings in the forests, but eventually fled to the United States in 1904.
Crabapple never knew her great-grandfather, but she did have a wonderful source of material in a shoe box of memorabilia, handwritten memoirs, and hundreds of paintings he left behind. This treasure trove inhabits the book almost as a living entity. Throughout the book, she draws on memoirs, letters, and personal accounts of many Bundists, men and women, young and old, leaders and rank-and-file members. She shows them to us as living human beings who were active players in history.
Far from using an authorial distance and objectivity, Crabapple tries to enter the minds of her protagonists, to write subjectively. She speculates about how individuals must have felt and thought.
Here is an example from the 1905 Revolution, sparked by the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. Crabapple creatively describes the experiences of the Bundist soap box orator Anna Lipshitz:
Soon, to move between neighbourhoods, Anna would have had to weave around overturned tramcars and slip behind barricades…She would have witnessed the beatings of police officers…and likely heard the explosion of anarchist bombs. It must have thrilled her. This moment was meant to be hers…
Anna Lipshitz heard the news alongside the rest of the city. A battleship named Potemkin had just dropped anchor…It was flying a red flag.
Hoarse, bleary, her dress stiff with dried sweat, Lipshitz would have pulled herself off the floor of her safe house and joined the crowds clambering toward the port. The ship gleamed like a dream.
It is this sort of creative writing that animates this book, bringing to life the experience of revolution, war, and pogroms in a deeply effective way. We know, without it being articulated, that the dream that ends this passage is the possibility of a new world, one that inspired many participants in the revolution.
Some reviews have criticized this approach. But in my view, Crabapple’s use of this form of creative nonfiction is valid, as long as it’s clear what is actually factually based and what is imagined by the author. The book offers something sometimes lacking in historical writing, and helps the reader imagine historical events as they were lived. It gives the sense that revolutionaries and socialists are actual human beings with enthusiasms and foibles, strengths and doubts, dreams and hopes. And that they live without the benefit of hindsight and the analytical books that came after them. The personal experience approach takes us to a particular time and place, and gives the reader the feeling that they are accompanying the protagonists on this journey.
For example, when the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there were scenes of chaos. Crabapple brings these to life through realistic detail: the scramble to get news, organize meetings, make decisions, find food, locate relatives, and organize transport and visas. Their agonised debates: “All around Warsaw, rank-and-file Bundists were making similar calculations. Should they stay or run?” Crabapple does not take a position on this. She simply describes the dilemma.
The events of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 are already well-documented, but Crabapple gives us telling details. On the day it started, April 19, the Jewish Combat Organization battle squads mobilized at 2.00 am. “From balconies and windows, the fighters watched the nazis goose-step down Nalewki Street, singing a cheerful march. [Marek] Edelman had taken care to dress well that night, in a red angora sweater and two leather bandoliers, crossed like Pancho Villa. As he saw the convoy enter the ghetto, he imagined the Germans’ thoughts.”
We know quite a bit about Edelman, who is famous for his account of the Warsaw Ghetto.4Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, Bookmarks 2014 (and many other editions). But who knew he was wearing a red angora sweater at that moment? The book is enlivened on every page by similar less well-known details.
Viktor Alter, who “liked the ladies,” was nicknamed “the Cary Grant of labor.” Bernard Goldstein is well-known for strong links to the criminal underworld, but he showed a softer side while in hiding during the Uprising, when he gave a young couple privacy in his apartment. Sophia Dubovna, when young, had a crush on the family maid (Sophia came from a rich family) and had briefly dated the right-wing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky. In 1934 she gave talks about love and sex at the Bund youth group, Tsukunft (Future). As a small child, Edelman had attended protests on the shoulders of comrades, “red flag in his tiny fist.”
The accounts of pogroms and the suffering and destruction in the book show very vividly what antisemitism actually is historically. In so doing, they reveal contemporary attempts to reduce the concept of antisemitism to uncomfortable feelings in the presence of political slogans or keffiyehs as a horrifying trivialization of the historical oppression of Jews.
The wonderful politics of the Bund shine throughout the book: its internationalism, its commitment to fighting antisemitism and to self-defense, to struggle, and to the working class. While the Zionists argued that antisemitism could never be defeated and so advocated emigration, the Bund promoted remaining and fighting against their oppression. But they took it even further. Using a biblical comparison, one Bundist declared that Jews should “stay and fight there, amongst the Egyptians, until they won a freedom that encompassed even their oppressors.”
Bund leader Henryk Erlich made a similar argument. In 1937, against a backdrop of rising antisemitism and daily attacks by Polish fascists, increasing immiseration, and a clearly imminent war, Erlich urged his audience to look past their own concerns:
You must briefly step out of the confines of your Jewish misery… Look about and you will see– the Jews are not the only ones who are suffering. The overwhelming majority in the country, whether Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, or others, is suffering from the economic crisis…scarcely able to eke out a daily existence.
Shift your gaze beyond the borders of Poland toward the wide world and you will see: Seventy million people are languishing under the heavy boot of Hitlerism. Not only the 500,000 Jews – the whole German people has been transformed into a nation of slaves… Forty million Italians have been turned into a footstool for the ‘great’ Mussolini… millions of working people in other, smaller countries which have become areas of reaction are sunk in privation and bondage.
Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Federation in the interwar years, wrote in 1903 that their hardest struggle everywhere was conducted against the Bund. In return, the Bund described Zionism as “the most evil enemy of the organized Jewish proletariat.”
In 1933, Erlich wrote:
If Jewish nationalism, as a general rule, is not bloodthirsty, this is only out of necessity, not virtue; if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations.
No we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of other nations.
In an open letter in 1938, Erlich summarised how they were the party that truly fought for the Jewish people: they had organized self-defense groups in tsarist Russia and in Poland, called protest strikes against pogroms, and argued against attempts to deport Jews.
In relation to Palestine, he wrote:
If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine… Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?… Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?
Concentrating on personal experience gives Here Where We Live Is Our Country strengths. But the method also has its weaknesses. Foremost is a lack of analysis. One should not read this book expecting an evaluation of the 1905 Revolution, the Bolshevik/Menshevik split, the role of the soviets in the 1917 revolutions, the growth of Stalinism, the civil war, the coming to power of the Nazis, or the causes of World War II.
This is not the book’s objective, and these matters are very well covered elsewhere, but the lack of context is at times frustrating. While Crabapple features quotes and summaries of discussions, I wanted her book to engage more fully with the organizing principles and politics of the Bund. Consider the seminal event when the Bund sided with the Mensheviks in the famous split in 1903. Crabapple is dismissive: “Medem ruefully listened to rumors that the Iskrites had begun to fracture over the question of party membership. Should the RSDLP be a mass party of workers, as Martov envisioned? Or should it be the top-down conspiracy Lenin wanted, in which a central committee commanded and a full-time cadre obeyed? ‘Lenin had bared his teeth,’ Medem wrote.”
Crabapple goes on to describe Lenin’s “personality traits that would shape the coming century.” Quoting Medem, she concludes Lenin resembled “a crafty Russian grain dealer… When you speak to him, he looks at you with his small eyes…(and) cunning devilish smile.”
As Donny Gluckstein asks, “whether or not that characterisation was true, was Lenin right to believe a decentralised RSDLP facing the most centralised authoritarian state in the world was ‘a recipe for failure’?”5Donny Gluckstein, International Socialism Journal (forthcoming). Nathaniel Flakin also points out how the focus on Lenin’s personality prevents Crabapple from seriously grappling with the Bund’s political weaknesses and strategic mistakes.6Nathaniel Flakin, https://www.leftvoice.org/bundism-zionism-bolshevism/.
The concentration on personal experience also results in a lack of appreciation of collective experience and of competing social forces. This is particularly obvious in the account of the 1905 Revolution, in which her depiction of the turning of the tide is graphic but occurs for no apparent reason. The same happens with the growth of antisemitism in interwar Poland.
This lack of social context results in an absence that is significant. Although the Bund became the leading Jewish organisation in Poland, it was not the only outlet for Jewish radicalism: Jews were prominent in other Left organizations. There was significant Jewish membership in the Polish Communist Party and the Polish Socialist Party. The left Zionist group Poale Zion joined in self-defense groups. None of this appears in the book.
Here Where We Live Is Our Country has been rightly celebrated for its account of the Bund’s commitment to “Doykait” (“hereness”), meaning that Jews should not go elsewhere to escape discrimination but were entitled to equal rights and justice wherever they lived. Most writers seem to assume this meant that the Bund itself could be at home in any country. Yet it is abundantly clear that, although they were internationalist in spirit, the Bund’s roots were essentially in the Eastern European Yiddish-speaking working class, in particular in Poland by the 1930s.
The Bund did not, in fact, transplant well. In the United States, with its more than two million Jewish immigrants, the Bund organization was small, mostly active in raising money to send to Europe and in the welfare-oriented Workman’s Circle and focusing mainly on cultural work and the promotion of the Yiddish language. While Bundists were likely involved in the mass strikes among Jewish clothing workers in New York before World War II, among which socialists were very active, the Bund played no clear role as an organization.
Although there were individual Bundists in the United Kingdom who participated in a range of activities with other socialists, their work concentrated on collecting money for Poland and promoting Yiddish education.7Benjamin Nadel, “Bundism in England”, Jewish Socialist Group, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/subject/jewish/jsg-bundism-uk.pdf The story is similar in Australia.
This explains why the book ends when it does. The Holocaust destroyed the Bund’s roots among the Yiddish-speaking Jewish working class of Eastern Europe. As the war-torn regions of Europe slowly reorganized after 1945, the remaining Bund members tried for a time to hold on to their principled politics, particularly anti-Zionism. In two articles in 1948, the Bund leadership warned its readers that “the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish State would lead to a new catastrophe, not only for the Jews in Palestine but for the Jews all over the world” and “the country became from the very start a source of Irredentist movements, Jewish-Arab conflicts, and an open threat of war.”8“Jewish Labor Bund and the Jewish-Arab war in Palestine”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, April 1948 pp3-5; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-4.pdf. “The Jewish Labor Bund and the state of Israel”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, August-September 1948 pp 1-4; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-8-9.pdf.p
These articles generated a “veritable deluge” of condemnation from the entire Jewish press and the Jewish community as traitors. The Bund response was to argue, “We shall not be diverted by any temporary nationalist trend.”9 “We will not be bulled”, The Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin, August-September 1948 p 4; https://www.marxists.info/subject/jewish/bund-bulletin/one-8-9.pdf
Unfortunately, the trend was not temporary. With the state of Israel firmly established, and the core organization in Poland destroyed, remnant groups in other countries faced a dilemma. The historian of the post-war Bund, David Slucki, shows how the movement came to a pragmatic accommodation with Zionism.10David Slucki, “The Bund abroad in the postwar Jewish world”, Jewish Social Studies, Vol 16, No 1, 2009, pp 111-144.
Paradoxically, new international organizing principles allowed the local Bund groups to focus more on local activities, where they tended to straddle “the divide between mainstream Jewish communities and the non-Jewish socialist left.” Despite continued talk about socialism, bundists in the post–World War II era now saw “cultural continuity as their chief mission.” Thus, despite the formal opposition to Zionism, pragmatism led to an accommodation with Zionism, leading Bundists in Australia and elsewhere to send money to Israel.
The political consequences became evident following the events of October 2023. Although some members of the Australian Bund are conspicuous and principled supporters of Palestine, the organisation has forefronted defense of Israel, publishing only three very short and weak statements (and none since 2025).11https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-on-events-in-gaza; https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-enough; https://www.bundist.org/post/statement-regarding-the-ongoing-horror-in-gaza. Writers associated with the Bund have even criticized Crabapple’s book as seeking to “delegitimise Israel” and even as “hijacked by anti-Zionists.” 12Allan Preis, “The Bund Lives”, 20 July 2026 https://michaelgawenda.substack.com/p/the-bund-lives.
It is sad to see contemporary Bundists repudiating their own history.13Janey Stone, “The International Jewish Labor BUND and the State of Israel”, Verso blog, 12 March 2025 https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-international-jewish-labor-bund-and-the-state-of-israel-1?srsltid=AfmBOoqwvfG38HoXxzCSde4smFpBwKNyL929gYVG_m05MSqmf_bGmnFF But this history remains available to the rest of us. Its existence and predominance stand against the Zionist claims to represent Jews historically. The Bund’s internationalism and its position on Zionism prior to 1948 are beacons to contemporary anti-Zionists.
And it’s clear that people are responding to this beacon. Jacobin applauds what it sees as the Bund’s “growing relevance,”14Grant Morgan, “The Jewish Labor Bund Stood Against Zionism”, Jacobin 22 April 2026; https://jacobin.com/2026/04/jewish-labor-bund-crabapple-review/ noting that where “the Bund has long been regarded as a historical artifact, it’s now reasserting itself as a living tradition.” New groups are springing up under the auspices of a body called the International Jewish Labor Bund (IJLB),15Joseph Mogul, “The Bund is Back”, The Progressive Magazine, March 31, 2026, https://progressive.org/latest/the-bund-is-back-mogul-20260331/; International Jewish Labor Bund Website https://jewishbund.org/ following its declaration in 2023.16“Today We Remake the Jewish Labor Bund”, https://derbund.org/#today-we-remake-the-jewish-labor-bund There are now 11 chapters or organizing committees in the United States and six in Europe, 17https://jewishbund.org/chapters plus an online journal, Der Spekter.18https://www.derspekter.org/?shem=aimgspe (Interestingly, the remnant groups in Australia and elsewhere are not part of this movement.)
The renewed interest in the Bund, its history, and its ideas, not surprisingly, has not been welcomed by everyone. Many of the negative responses to the book are trifling. Objections to Crabapple’s Puerto Rican roots, questioning whether she really is Jewish, and her past work as a burlesque dancer have only added fuel to the fire.
Not surprisingly, Zionists have led the counter-attack. Their responses are defensive, and often abusive. Their fire is directed not at the book’s primary readership, but at a Zionist audience among whom this book (or the publicity it has generated) might raise doubts. A review in Haaretz is typical.19 Joseph Hillyard, “A Missed Opportunity to Learn From the Legacy of the Bund” Ha’aretz, September 18, 2026; https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-09-18/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-missed-opportunity-to-learn-from-the-legacy-of-the-bund/000001a0-b4db-d91d-afeb-fcdb5c980000?gift=8d084db683a8479ba5304dc323911bd1
One strategy is nit-picking very small errors: Eliezer Aryeh, for example, devotes several articles to a forensic analysis of Crabapple’s nearly 2,000 endnotes and comes up with four errors.20Eliezer Aryeh, “What the Footnotes Don’t Say: Here Where We Live Is Our Country gets the Bund right and Palestine wrong” and other articles, May 29 2026 and subsequent dates, https://eliezeraryeh.substack.com/archive?sort=new Others complain that Crabapple “oversimplifies,” is “selective,” or makes “no attempt at representing historical accuracy. Seth Mandel, a conservative anti-Trump Republican, hardly touches on the content of the book at all, but claims (without evidence and despite many of the rave reviews being written by Jews) that the prevailing opinion among Jewish writers is that Crabapple’s book “exhibited a heartfelt nostalgia for a time and place that never really existed…it is a fictional story.”21Seth Mandel, “So You Want To Be a Bundist”, Commentary 7/4/2026; https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/so-you-want-to-be-a-bundist/?shem=aimgspe
Writing in the Jewish Review of Books, Allan Arkush goes further, claiming Zionism “has by and large been rooted in humanitarianism, led by noble men and women dedicated to constructing and sustaining a Jewish state for the benefit of their own beleaguered people and, indirectly, for others.”22Allan Arkush, “An Abusable Past”, Jewish Review of Books, Fall 2026; https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/20334/an-abusable-past/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwY2xjawUixP1leHRuA2FlbQIxMABwZG9mAWJyaWQRMU9rcld4elZHTjFpV01IdjRzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeGMZdDT0dDz9ZAqrLpDKj2K2lAkxDIWrd8iO5N1lnIYFE9XL5FcUol7cmiVM_aem_hpiD7t7BnHx3PQckSppt1A The Wall Street Journal review, written by a British Trump supporter apparently with the use of AI, regurgitates standard support for Israel for a non-Jewish audience.23Dominic Green, “Here Where We Live is Our Country Review: Defiance in the Diaspora”, Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2026; https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/here-where-we-live-is-our-country-review-defiance-in-the-diaspora-4b2b2b88
This book is not an academic study. The bibliography is small. Crabapple certainly carried out extensive new archival research, resulting in fascinating personal detail about her protagonists. But the book is rightly focused on introducing the Bund to wider audiences. The need today is not for more academically rigorous studies, to be read only by a limited audience, but for the core ideas in this book—struggle, resistance, solidarity, social justice, and above all socialism—to be spread further.
Whatever its limitations, Here Where We Live is our Country is a wonderful new addition to the history of the Bund and, through this, to the broader tradition of Jewish radicalism and socialism of which it is a part. This history is a part of our collective story, and its legacy belongs to all of us. Read this book in that spirit.
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: Unknown; modified by Tempest.
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What’s on the climate calendar for November 2026?
This is a republication of November’s edition of The Climate Agenda – a subscriber-only newsletter designed to keep you informed of the key events, negotiations and announcements happening every month. If you want to receive The Climate Agenda straight to your inbox at the start of each month, sign up as a subscriber today.
COP31 begins in one week, and we’ll have five specialist reporters on the ground in Antalya, Türkiye, bringing you every development as it happens. From the negotiations to leaders’ speeches and side events, we’ll be there to dissect what it all means for international climate policy on electrification, just transition, adaptation finance and much more.
Here’s what you need to know for November, why it matters and what to expect.
US midterm elections Tuesday 3 November – United StatesThe geopolitical highlight for the first week of November is the US midterm elections, which will show whether American voters are in any mood to forgive President Donald Trump for failing to bring down the cost of living. From an energy perspective, his pro-oil and gas stance hasn’t led to cheaper prices for consumers, pushed up by the US-instigated Iran conflict. And his diesel deal with Russia won’t yet have made a difference at the pump.
The key issue for climate and energy policy is whether the Republicans hold onto their governing trifecta. If so, then expect continued dismantling of regulations that protect the environment, as well as strong backing for fossil fuel production. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, which polls suggest is possible, it could trigger a push to restore Biden-era clean energy tax credits, and support states wanting to restart mothballed wind and solar projects.
Data centres have been a hot-wire issue, with growing community opposition to their expansion – partly due to concerns over rising utility bills as the facilities gobble power. Whether Republicans or Democrats win Congress, both are likely to make tech firms pay for the extra electricity production they need, with the latter favouring renewable sources.
Governor races are also taking place in key states for climate issues, including Democrat-run California, which has used the courts to fight Trump’s attacks on clean energy.
Read more: National climate plans now promise half the emission cuts expected by UN
Read more: The more Europe relies on the US for energy, the more it’s vulnerable to pressure by Trump
Brazilian President Lula da Silva, speaks next to the COP30 President and COP 30 CEO during the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belem, Brazil on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/COP30) Brazilian President Lula da Silva, speaks next to the COP30 President and COP 30 CEO during the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belem, Brazil on November 19, 2025. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/COP30) COP30 Deforestation and Fossil Fuel Transition Roadmaps Tuesday 3 November – BrazilBrazil is set to unveil two global roadmaps: one for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the other for ending deforestation.
The COP30 presidency promised them in the dying hours of the Belém summit last November as a last-minute fix to break a political impasse. Since then, it has been consulting with countries, experts and campaigners around the world to gather ideas and sketch out the elements to include in these blueprints.
Don’t expect the roadmaps to offer any new global targets or give direct instructions on what countries must do, either to cut fossil fuel production and consumption or better protect forests. Rather, Brazil has said the documents will identify barriers and priority actions, highlight existing mechanisms and present a range of options that can be adapted to different national contexts.
It remains unclear what will happen with the reports once they are delivered on Tuesday. At the Bonn talks last June, a group of European and small island nations called for the roadmaps to be brought into the official negotiations, warning that a one-off report won’t cut it. But such efforts would undoubtedly face stiff opposition from fossil fuel-producing nations that objected to drafting the energy transition roadmap within the formal UN process last year.
Read more: European, island states seek clear future for global roadmap to cut fossil fuels
Read more: COP30 roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to draft domestic plans
Read more: What we need to see in the roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels
Leaders will visit a Green Climate Fund-backed coastal resilience project in Tuvalu during the Pre-COP31 meeting in the Pacific. (Photo courtesy of the Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31) Leaders will visit a Green Climate Fund-backed coastal resilience project in Tuvalu during the Pre-COP31 meeting in the Pacific. (Photo courtesy of the Australia-Pacific Partnership for COP31) UNEP Adaptation Gap Report Wednesday 4 November – Nairobi, KenyaThe UN Environment Programme (UNEP) will publish its annual assessment of how well the world is planning, implementing and – crucially – financing measures to cope with worsening climate impacts.
Past editions have made for grim reading. Last year’s report warned of a widening gap between what developing countries need for adaptation and what they can access. It estimated they will need $310–365 billion a year by 2035, which is 12 to 14 times current international flows. The report also found that a goal of doubling international public adaptation finance by 2025 was likely to have been missed.
This year’s edition will be closely watched with adaptation expected to be a big-ticket item at COP31. Governments are likely to discuss the specifics of a commitment to triple adaptation finance for developing nations by 2035, agreed at COP30 last year – particularly what the baseline for that pledge is. Negotiators will be debating how to track progress against the 59 indicators of the Global Goal on Adaptation.
Read more: Editor’s Desk: Nepal’s disaster has laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap
Read more: Bonn climate talks end in “gridlock” on adaptation and emissions-cutting
Read more: New data shows rich nations likely missed 2025 goal to double adaptation finance
Photo: IRENA@COP31 Photo: IRENA@COP31 COP31 Climate Conference Monday 9 November – Friday 20 November – Antalya, TürkiyeThe climate community’s attention turns this month to Antalya for the annual UN climate summit. From the outset, COP31 will have an unprecedented, and potentially explosive, set-up: Türkiye is COP president overseeing the non-negotiated Action Agenda, while Australia runs the negotiations.
Billed, once again, as an “implementation COP”, the talks come amid a global energy crisis largely sparked by the actions of the US government, which is not expected to show up on the Turkish Riviera. It is also the first COP in the era of climate overshoot, coming just weeks after the UN officially confirmed the 1.5C warming limit will be breached and set out a narrow pathway to bring temperatures back down to the most ambitious Paris goal.
Unlike most recent COPs, the formal negotiations lack a clear headline item. Countries are due to establish and define the scope of the Just Transition Mechanism agreed in Belém last year, including its rules, governance and possible funding arrangements. On adaptation, vulnerable countries want a clearer path to delivering last year’s pledge to triple finance by 2035 and to putting the new progress indicators to work on the ground.
Governments are also likely to clash over next steps on the transition away from fossil fuels, and especially over whether the mitigation work programme – the forum dedicated to emission-cutting measures – has any future beyond this year.
Notable events to look out for in Antalya:
Opening session (9 November): The summit kicks off with the customary first-morning plenary. After the usual pageantry from the host nation, negotiating blocs and individual countries will deliver statements setting out their stall for the next two weeks. Watch out for a potential fight over the summit’s agenda – perhaps on issues relating to finance and trade following submissions requesting additional items – also a COP tradition.
Electrification (10 November): On Energy Day, the Turkish presidency is expected to formally launch its flagship electrification pledge, revealing which countries have signed up. Signatories will voluntarily commit to raising electricity’s share of global final energy consumption to 35% by 2035, though the current text does not require that power to come from clean sources. There is also a question mark over whether and how this can be included in the political cover decision the COP co-hosts have said they will aim to produce.
Leaders Summit (11-12 November): Heads of state and governments will jet into town for the traditional high-level segment in the middle of the first week, where world leaders typically talk up their climate record, air their grievances and call for more action.
Relatively few powerful leaders are on the list this time. Brazil’s Lula is set for another star turn this year, fresh from his surprise election win in October. The UK’s Andy Burnham, Spain’s Pedro Sanchez and China’s vice-premier Ding Xuexiang are expected, alongside Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Australia’s Anthony Albanese. In addition, African and small island nations will feature prominently.
Our COP31 Briefing newsletter will offer a more in-depth preview of the talks later this week.
Read more: Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Read more: COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment
Read more: From Belém to Antalya – gains, gaps and challenges for a new Just Transition Mechanism
International Maritime Organization (IMO) Shipping Talks Monday 23 November – Friday 4 December – London, United KingdomOne year on from explosive talks in which Trump’s officials teamed up with Saudi Arabia to delay a deal to make the shipping industry greener, governments will gather on the banks of the Thames for another attempt to reach agreement.
The Net Zero Framework, provisionally agreed in October 2025, includes a series of emissions reduction targets for the owners of large ships along with penalties for not meeting them, rewards for doing so and measures to make the maritime transition fair.
The framework is likely to be either tweaked or radically rewritten so that it’s more acceptable to the US and Saudis. Brazil and Japan have submitted compromise proposals. Analysts find those will move shipping further away from being able to meet its climate goals.
There will be closed-door talks between November 23-27 and a second week of talks open to accredited media from November 30 to December 4. Agreement on a proposal, perhaps decided through a vote, is expected after long and technical negotiations. The shipping industry’s 3% share of the world’s emissions is at stake.
Read more: London talks raise hopes for green shipping deal
The post What’s on the climate calendar for November 2026? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms?
This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Tomorrow’s midterm elections are widely viewed as a referendum on Trump’s second presidency. Prior studies have found strong associations between protest and U.S. election outcomes, including the 2010 and 2018 midterm elections. Protests can influence popular opinion on policy issues, boost turnout among eligible voters, and shape how candidates set policy priorities.
At the Crowd Counting Consortium, or CCC, we have tallied an extraordinary number of protests since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. The majority of protests in Trump’s second term so far have named democracy or the presidency itself as a primary claim — think the nationwide Hands Off and No Kings protests in 2025 and 2026.
But among protests focused on more specific policy domains, one key theme stands out. The administration’s anti-immigration policies and expansive, violent crackdown on immigrants have generated active, grassroots support networks in neighborhoods across the country and fueled a wave of protests in support of immigrants’ rights. During Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and St. Paul, protests took place in over 30 percent of counties containing 80 percent of the nation’s population. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history. A significant proportion of these protests occurred in counties that Trump won in 2024.
Trends in immigration-related protests since January 20, 2017Of course, the current wave of protest builds on a longer-term foundation of pro-immigrant demonstrations. Since the CCC started collecting data on protest in the United States in 2017, we’ve seen that protests against the federal government’s immigration policies have been a constant feature of the protest landscape across all three presidential administrations — Trump 1, Biden and Trump 2 (see Table 1).
Table 1: Immigration protest events as a share of all left/liberal protests
Little more than a week after Trump’s first inauguration in January 2017, numerous protests took place around the country in response to his Jan. 27 signing of Executive Order 13769, sometimes called the “Muslim Ban,” which restricted citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. On Jan. 28 and 29, mass protests occurred in and around airports, where immigrant rights groups and community members assembled to ensure the safe arrival of citizens of those countries who were in transit when the executive order went into effect. Protests against the executive order continued in February 2017 under the slogan “No Ban No Wall.” The Trump administration ultimately revised the executive order to a narrower version that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld as lawful; multiple protests followed on June 26, 2018.
But the biggest jumps in protest participation came on coordinated, nationwide days of action related to the administration’s immigration policies. The first, on June 30, 2018, was a national day of action declaring that “Families Belong Together.” These protests demanded an end to the administration’s “child separation policy” — the practice of separating migrant children from parents and caretakers upon arrival at the U.S.-Mexico border — which was in effect under the Obama administration but escalated under Trump. This protest campaign was highly effective: The pressure placed on the administration led the White House to end the policy through an executive order, though loopholes remained.
#newsletter-block_97e0c2853594db9da80dfd6b8dce8fd9 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_97e0c2853594db9da80dfd6b8dce8fd9 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our NewsletterOn Jan. 19, 2019, the third annual Women’s March on Washington represented an additional increase in coordinated nationwide protests in which immigrants’ rights were a core issue. And July 12, 2019 saw the Lights for Liberty day of action, which attempted to pressure elected officials (particularly in the newly Democratic Congress) to close detention centers and adopt more humane immigration policies. Ultimately, congressional Democrats introduced legislation in 2021 to reunite immigrant children with their families. In sum, the first Trump administration saw an impressive range of protests on behalf of immigrants’ rights, some of which had powerful impacts.
Overall, the Biden administration saw a decline in such protests, with about 60 percent fewer than during the first Trump administration (seven percent to 11 percent as a share of overall left/liberal protests, respectively). Notable days of action during the Biden administration included continued protests calling for closure of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention centers, as well as protests against ongoing family detention and separation practices, and protests against asylum restrictions during a major surge in deportations in 2024.
During the second Trump administration, such protests have seen a breathtaking rise.
Figure 1 provides a comparative view of the number of immigration-related protests under the second Trump administration, compared to the first. The y-axis, showing the cumulative number of immigration-related protests since Trump’s two inaugurations, demonstrates the massive scale and steady climb of protests during his second term so far.
Figure 1: Counts of pro-immigrant protest events during Trump’s first and second terms
Figure 2 shows the frequency of such events on a monthly basis. There have been more protests in support of immigrants in seven of the months since January 2025 than in any of the 48 months of Trump’s first term. In 10 of the first 17 months of the current term, protests against Trump’s immigration policies made up over 20 percent of total protests. Few other protest claims have animated the public with such enduring salience over time.
Figure 2: Pro-immigrant protests in the U.S., January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026
Figure 2 also shows clear increases in the number of immigration-related protests during nationwide anti-Trump protests. Spikes in activity occurred on April 19, 2025 during the Hands Off protests; on October 18, 2025, when many No Kings protests adopted opposition to ICE and Trump’s mass deportation agenda as a central claim; and on March 28, 2026, when the third No Kings protests again made immigration a primary claim. Our tallies have also documented 170 repeater events (protests that are scheduled to take place daily, weekly or monthly) that specifically mention immigrant rights or opposition to ICE in their stated claims.
In Illinois and Minnesota, protests started local and went nationalTrump’s immigration policies have produced particularly intense local mobilizations in areas that saw escalated ICE deployments, which then diffused to solidarity protests nationwide. For example, from early September to mid-November 2025, ICE launched Operation Midway Blitz targeting immigrants in Chicago. During that period, the CCC documented 3,491 protest events in opposition to Trump’s immigration policies, starting in Chicago and spreading across the country during the No Kings mobilization on Oct. 18, 2025, which named immigration as a central issue.
Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, also provoked powerful opposition locally and beyond, with over 4,400 protests taking place between Dec. 2, 2025 and Jan. 31, 2026. Significant numbers of protests responded to specific, publicized government abuses, such as aggressive law enforcement actions against immigrants, the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and the detention of a 5-year-old child of a Colombian immigrant. Three waves of action stood out: the ICE Out For Good weekend of action on Jan. 10-11; the Day of Truth & Freedom on Jan. 23, which was concentrated in Minnesota; and the National Shutdown and ICE Out of Everywhere actions, which mainly spanned Jan. 30-31, with some events lasting into Feb. 1.
Figure 3 shows the number of counties that saw pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, after Operation Midway began in Chicago and Operation Metro Surge began in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Overall, these two states saw higher-than-average numbers of counties featuring protests, including among counties far afield from the major cities in which ICE focused its deployments.
Figure 3. Pro-immigrant protests in Illinois and Minnesota during and after ICE operations in Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul
Nationwide, the total volume of protest produced during early 2026 is extraordinary.
January 2026 alone featured the fourth-most protest events recorded in all 10 years of CCC data, owing to the massive number of protests in Minnesota and around the country in opposition to Operation Metro Surge and its impacts, and to Trump’s immigration agenda in general.
And the events in Minnesota seem to have been a flashpoint. Anti-ICE protests continued in February and March 2026, and anti-ICE claims were central to the nationwide No Kings mobilization on March 28. March 2026 may have been the month with the highest number of pro-immigrant protests in U.S. history (see Table 2).
Table 2: Top 10 months by total protest events, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026
Protests opposing Trump’s immigration policies were reported in 933 counties during Operation Metro Surge, between Dec. 2, 2025 and Feb. 1, 2026 — about 30 percent of all counties in the U.S. These counties were densely populated: Together, they contain more than 80 percent of the U.S. population (see Figure 4). From March 2026 through May 2026, the CCC continued to record thousands of events protesting ICE, with hundreds of distinct civic organizations and hundreds of thousands of people participating.
Figure 4: U.S. immigration protests following ICE deployments to Minneapolis
Nor are protests against ICE operations an exclusively liberal phenomenon. Instead, there has been a stark increase over time in the number of pro-immigrant protests in counties that Trump won in 2024 by at least a 5-point margin (see Figure 5). Among the pro-immigrant protests that occurred in March 2026, about 40 percent of them occurred in such counties.
Figure 5: Pro-immigrant protests in counties Trump won by >5 Points in the 2024 Presidential Election, January 20, 2017 – May 31, 2026
Across the country, a broad range of constituencies using a variety of means have expressed opposition to Trump’s immigration policy. Demonstrations have just been one method. Those activating on behalf of and in support of immigrants include people forming human chains to protect immigrant workers; neighborhoods organizing support networks for affected immigrant families; students engaging in walkouts from schools and protests at college career fairs; people engaging in hunger strikes in support of international and undocumented students; knitters engaging in “craftivism”; people holding encampments outside of ICE facilities or noise demonstrations outside of hotels in which ICE agents were housed; consumers engaging in boycotts and sell-backs at Target and Home Depot; clergy engaging in civil disobedience; communities holding vigils for slain immigrants or those killed while advocating for them; community members building raised beds across thoroughfares to prevent ICE vehicles from accessing facilities, and more. Institutions and employers have raised their voices: Local businesses and business associations have called for the end of ICE operations in their towns, ranchers and farmers have decried treatment of their immigrant employees, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has condemned mistreatment of immigrants as well.
Counter-protest was minimalTrump’s immigration policies have supporters in the country, particularly among Republicans. But few people have rallied or marched in defense of them. Right-leaning protests made up fewer than two percent of all immigration-related protests during the first 14 months of the first Trump administration, and less than 0.7 percent of immigration-related protests during the same stretch of his second administration.
The frequency of pro-immigrant protests during Trump’s second term has eclipsed that of anti-immigration protests by 145 to 1. The vast majority of anti-immigration protests have been counter-protests occurring at demonstrations in support of immigrants and their rights.
However, right-leaning protests have been increasingly characterized by anti-immigrant claims over the past three presidencies. Whereas anti-immigrant protests constituted 1.68 percent of all right-learning protests during Trump’s first term, that proportion has increased sevenfold so far during his second, to 12.43 percent.
Table 3: Anti-immigration protest events as a share of all right/conservative protests
A powerful and growing pro-immigrant constituencyToday’s mass protests in support of immigrants’ rights build on a durable pattern of pro-immigrant and anti-ICE protest in the U.S. To wit, the CCC has documented a prayer protest outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that has been held every Friday for the past 20 years.
But the recent increase in pro-immigrant protests and their intensity is notable. The breadth and volume of pro-immigrant protests show that committed activists and organizations have succeeded in rallying huge numbers in favor of justice and dignity for immigrants, indicating a durable underlying infrastructure. In this essay, we focused on street protest as one indicator in the overall picture. But community mobilization on behalf of immigrants has meant far more than demonstrations. Mutual aid and neighborly support, observing and documenting ICE operations, litigation, support to immigrants in detention, and direct appeals to public officials have all been central to America’s response to Trump’s immigration policies. The growth of pro-immigrant protests reflects a (potentially growing) constituency willing to take risks to defend a multicultural vision of America, potentially widening its appeal.
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DonateIn short, we see capable organizers and the mass public pushing hard for humane treatment of immigrants for the foreseeable future. Neither political party has figured out how to address immigration in a way that resolves the need for safe and secure borders and the need to treat everyone on U.S. soil with dignity, decency and due process. But the impacts of Trump’s policies on immigrants, their families and their broader communities provide a galvanizing issue for Americans who otherwise agree on little else. For example, some conservative faith communities and various progressive groups increasingly find themselves on the same side when it comes to immigration.
Policymakers often resist turning to activists, civil society organizations and community groups for policy solutions. But the persistence of multi-sectoral immigration activism, as seen through protest alone, also reflects a powerful and growing constituency in favor of just and humane approaches to immigration. Protests reflect and shape the existing moral consensus but also can reorient constituencies in favor of a new consensus. We hope the members of the next Congress pay attention.
This article Will historic protests against ICE shape the midterms? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.
Has the Green Party been Captured by the Left?
Adrian Ramsay, Green MP and former co-leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, has told the BBC, that the party is at a crossroads, on what kind of party it is to be. He cited the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion adopted at the party’s recent autumn conference, as a break with the traditional philosophy of environmental focus.
Ramsay said "One option is to sort of dig in more down this approach, not only in relation to this motion, but I think that there's a risk it brings with it - a quite divisive, a quite internally focused approach to politics."
Ramsay said this is "perhaps seen from small groups of people on the hard left of politics who go around different parties trying to influence how those parties are run."
As reported by The Guardian, Ramsay went on to say, “There is also a small number of people who have joined, perhaps from the very hard left of politics, who might be more at home in the SWP or with George Galloway or with Your Party. [They] not only want to adopt some very hardline positions on certain issues, but have a very different culture to how they go about it.” Those members were seeking to “seeking to change the direction of the party.”
What is taking place here, is that this is part of an ongoing attempt by the establishment of the party to regain control after Zack Polanski was elected as leader of the party last year. Ramsay, along with Ellie Chowns, another Green MP, stood against Polanski for the leadership, and were endorsed by former leader and former Green MP, Caroline Lucas.
Polanski won with 84% of the vote, a crushing defeat for the party establishment who didn’t want him to become leader, and they were worried about losing their influence in the party. They bided their time and waited for an opportunity to strike back.
The party’s membership shot up from about 60,000 to 230,000 which made it difficult to complain about things not going well, so they needed a cause. Something that would appeal to more traditional type of member and would lead to the newer, suspect members to leave to leave the party.
The ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion passed at autumn conference became the trigger. I think the establishment thought there was a chance it would pass, and started preparing. When the motion did pass, they went into action. What made this an even better vehicle for the fight back was that the Holborn and St Pancras Parliamentary byelection would take place a few days later, where Polanski was the Green party candidate.
On mainstream media, even before the vote was declared, although Lucas probably knew that Labour would retain what is a very safe seat, launched into a speech about how the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion had cost the party winning the seat. There is no evidence for this, but once she said it, it became a news story in itself for mainstream media. So, the campaign had begun. Ramsay’s latest media intervention is just the campaign moving along.
Mainstream media reports that 18,000 people have left the Green party since Zionism motion was passed. I don’t know if this true, but I have seen a few members saying on social media they have left over the motion, but I’ve also seen some say they left over the pro-nuclear policy passed at the same conference. I’ve also seen some say they have joined the party because of the Zionism motion.
The whole thing has the uncomfortable feeling that this is another right-wing coup, similar to what happened in the Labour party when Jeremy Corbyn was leader. Spread smears about antisemitism, demand expulsions of members on spurious grounds for being antisemitic and creating an atmosphere where the newer members will leave the party.
I’m proud to be a Green Lefty or ecosocialist, as we say, and have been a member of the Green party for over twenty years. Our numbers were fairly small, but now many left-wing people see the Green party as the most viable party to deliver any kind of socialism and anti-neoliberalism.
This minority establishment should stop waging this divisive civil war and realise that the party has moved on. Ecological justice cannot be separated from social justice, because the effective cause of both of our ills is the same, capitalism. If we don’t want to challenge this system, the party will remain on the margins of politics and so be completely irrelevant.
More E-Bikes on National Park Trails Is a Bad Idea
The Trump administration is trying to allow more electric bikes onto national park trails, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). New rules being finalized by the National Park Service (NPS) weaken the environmental reviews required under a successful PEER lawsuit brought during the first Trump term challenging an attempt to allow e-bikes wherever pedal bikes are allowed to travel.
Today marks the end of the public comment period for these proposed new rules. In its public comments, PEER raises concerns that the rules expanding e-bike access to park trails:
- lack any provisions to monitor or prevent injuries and conflicts with other trail users, such as hikers and horseback riders;
- do not address disturbing wildlife or the danger of wildfires caused by overheated e-bike batteries; and
- dramatically reduce public involvement in decisions to expand e-bike access.
“This is yet another example of the Trump administration’s deep aversion to considering consequences before acting,” stated PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, noting that the primary rationale for the rules are executive orders promoting deregulation and reducing environmental reviews. “Safeguards against abuse from e-bikes will depend upon shrinking cadres of park law enforcement rangers trying to cope with ever-growing demands on their time.”
One major issue PEER raises is e-bike access to park wildlands. While e-bikes and other mechanized transportation are not allowed inside congressionally designated wilderness, there are 26 million acres of park backcountry lacking such protection. Several “flagship” parks such as Yellowstone, Glacier, Big Bend, and Grand Canyon, for example, do not have any designated wilderness and are “protected” only by NPS policies that can be waived or changed. The proposed NPS rules open doors for park managers to allow e-bike access to backcountry trails.
“Our concern is that e-bikes could be allowed in the most remote, wild places within the national park system,” added Whitehouse, pointing out that PEER has no objection to e-bike access on paved roads or trails in parks’ developed front-country. “It will become harder to appreciate the wonder of nature above the constant whir of e-bike motors.”
Another complication is that the new NPS rules would not preempt the growing number of state laws governing e-bike equipment and use. As a result, future e-bike restrictions may vary widely from park to park.
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