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With 255,000 Ontario education workers currently in bargaining, we have a huge opportunity to win the kind of public education that students deserve — as long as we think strategically and take concrete action.

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On August 9, 2026, the Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution Julio Cordano shared an informal reference document titled “Aid to Negotiations” ahead of the anticipated resumption of negotiations for an international legally binding agreement to end plastic pollution. 

This document was a culmination of all the informal talks that happened after electing the Chair in INC 5.3 in Geneva, Switzerland in February 2026. The document is meant to “aid” the discussions in the next informal heads of delegation meeting that is set to take place in Bangkok on September 27-30, 2026. 

In his explanatory note, Cordano said that the document was informed by past texts and discussions that happened in previous INCs, but critics are quick to notice that most of the ambitious treaty elements that garnered the support of more than a hundred Member States in past discussions were missing from the recently released document. 

The Chair said that he hopes that this document will help to “begin identifying possible bridging approaches and solutions” but many are wary that the current text is bound to bridge the weakest and most watered down measures without articles pertaining to continued plastic production and chemicals in plastics.

Melissa Aguayo, Co-Coordinator for Break Free From Plastic, calls on all Member States to bring back the important provisions, terms, and key measures from previous texts that obligate States to act towards ending plastic pollution. "The text cannot be accepted as is," said Aguayo. "The process is raising serious concerns about legitimacy and trust. This document emerged from closed-door sessions that once again excluded civil society, while critical issues were kept off the formal agenda, undermining the integrity of the process."

Break Free From Plastic members respond to the Chair’s Aid to Negotiations: 

Eskedar Awgichew Ergete, Executive Director, Eco Justice Ethiopia, said: 

"The Chair’s Aid to Negotiations falls short of the justice centered ambition that governments agreed to in UNEA 5/14. A treaty that treats upstream obligations as optional, sidelines independent science, and weakens global decision making cannot end plastic pollution. It only protects the interests of those who profit from it. For African countries and frontline workers who live with the daily realities of waste colonialism, this text is not balanced; it is inequitable. We need a treaty that confronts plastic production, embeds worker centered just transition, and upholds the rights of communities most affected. Anything less is a retreat from the mandate and a failure of global responsibility."

Nyebon Faustin, Executive Director of Appui aux Initiatives Communautaires pour l’Environnement Durable (AICED), said: 

“Plastic pollution is, above all, a matter of human health and survival. Even before contaminating our ecosystems, plastic and the toxic substances associated with it affect our health—including that of unborn children—thereby compromising their development and humanity’s future. The Chair of the INC, has the power to turn the tide by setting the foundations for countries to take action towards an ambitious, legally binding global treaty based on an approach that covers the entire lifecycle of plastic, from production to end-of-life.”

Salisa Traipipitsiriwat, Senior Campaigner and Southeast Asia Plastics Project Manager at Environmental Justice Foundation, said: 

"The Chair's Aid to Negotiations does not reflect the outcome ambitious countries have worked for. Its provisions leave the pace and action against plastic pollution largely where the world already stands today, without the binding commitments that would justify negotiating a legally binding instrument. It is not possible to address plastic pollution while leaving production out of the conversation. Upstream measures to reduce plastic at the production stage must be part of any credible outcome. This is a moment for high-ambition member states to hold firm, make their voices heard, and demand a text that truly matches the urgency of this crisis."

Muriel Papin, Executive Director, No Plastic in my Sea, said: 

“This text, which was intended to facilitate future negotiations, is extremely disappointing and falls short of the ambition set out in the original mandate. It is a war of attrition, which favours the lowest common denominator, and one which the ambitious countries – despite being in the majority – are now facing.”

Fabienne McLellan, Managing Director of OceanCare, said: 

“This treaty is meant to end plastic pollution, including in the marine environment. What the Ocean needs most from this treaty–upstream measures to prevent plastic getting into the environment in the first place–is what it is least likely to get. Member States need to stand by their previous positions and refuse to settle for this low-ambition document. They must demand that their ambitious proposals be reintroduced and reflected in the text going forward.” [see interview with The Guardian]

Christina Dixon, Ocean Campaign Lead of Environmental Investigation Agency, said: 

“One year after countries rejected a weak outcome in Geneva, they are now being presented with much the same level of ambition, repackaged as progress. Key measures that could tackle the problem at its source remain diluted, deferred or dropped altogether and new proposals remain totally absent. Ultimately, the world needs a treaty that bends the curve on plastic production and pollution, not one that bends to the lowest common denominator.” [see full statement]

David Azoulay, Director of Environmental Health at the Center for International Environmental Law, said: 

“The Chair called this draft a ‘no surprises’ document, and on that count, it delivers. The text is the lowest common denominator. And it is indeed no surprise that a text developed behind closed doors, following a meeting where production, chemicals, and decision-making were kept off the formal agenda, and observers were kept out of the room, fails to reflect the science on what it will take to address the plastics crisis…” [see full statement]

 

Note to Editors: 

• More quotes from environment activists and experts are available here

• Photos of civil society from previous negotiations: INC-5 in Busan, South Korea, 2024 | INC 5.2 in Geneva, 2025 |INC 5.3 in Geneva, Switzerland, 2026

 

Press Contacts: 

• Marianella Nuñez, news@breakfreefromplastic.org 
• Eah Antonio, eah@breakfreefromplastic.org, +63 927 827 7960

 

Other Regional Press Contacts: 

• Africa: Masego Mokgwetsi, masego@breakfreefromplastic.org
• Asia: Devayani Khare,  devayani@breakfreefromplastic.org  
• Europe: Bethany Spendlove Keeley, bethany@breakfreefromplastic.org 
• Latin America: Masego Mokgwetsi, masego@breakfreefromplastic.org 

 

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About BFFP — #BreakFreeFromPlastic is a global movement envisioning a future free from plastic pollution. Since its launch in 2016, more than 2,700 organizations and 11,000 individual supporters worldwide have joined the movement to demand massive reductions in single-use plastics and push for lasting solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. BFFP member organizations and individuals share the values of environmental protection and social justice and work together through a holistic approach to bring about systemic change. This means tackling plastic pollution across the whole plastics value chain – from extraction to disposal – focusing on prevention rather than cure and providing effective solutions. www.breakfreefromplastic.org.

In rhetoric, the far right pitches itself as a defender of ordinary citizens, but its policies often serve the powerful. In Czechia, building and agricultural land reforms put forward by Andrej Babiš’s government exemplify this dynamic. Civil society and grassroots organisations are fighting back. But can they turn their opposition into organised political power?

Democratic backsliding is most typically associated with attacks on courts, media freedom, elections, or civil society. In Czechia, some of the most consequential shifts are currently arriving in a less visible way – disguised as solutions. Since returning to power in 2025, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s ANO movement, backed by the far-right SPD and Motorists parties, has been promoting a series of reforms supposedly designed to tackle pressing problems such as housing unaffordability, land speculation, and precarious food security. However, what these reforms deliver is less public oversight, less social welfare, less resilience, but more power in the hands of corporations and oligarchy.

The first proposed reform aims to introduce a preferential purchase right for farmers leasing agricultural land, ostensibly to protect food sovereignty and curb speculation. The second, nicknamed “Lex Developer” by its civil society critics, is framed as a solution to the housing crisis through faster planning and permitting procedures.

The likely beneficiaries of these reforms, however, are not struggling family farmers or households priced out of the housing market. In a country where the state has long been captured by corporate interests (and the prime minister himself is one of the country’s most influential agribusiness owners through the conglomerate Agrofert), these seemingly pragmatic responses to urgent public problems risk major societal and environmental consequences.

A Czech shock doctrine

Human societies are facing multiple, mutually reinforcing crises that scientists increasingly understand as interconnected expressions of deeper structural contradictions in capitalist socio-ecological relations. Under the dominance of the market, housing, agricultural land, and food are treated as financial assets instead of basic rights and strategic resources. The environmental and social costs of this model accumulate over time, occasionally erupting in visible moments of disruption.

Some critics argue that the term “crisis” has lost its meaning. Crisis implies a temporary condition demanding urgent political action, yet many contemporary problems are chronic and structural. They require long-term, systemic transformation rather than emergency responses. Instead, political and economic elites often choose to exploit the language of crisis, using urgency to obscure root causes, advance their own interests, and consolidate the status quo.

As Naomi Klein famously argued in The Shock Doctrine (2007), moments of heightened urgency create opportunities for accelerated decision-making, controversial policies, and exceptional interventions. Drastic measures are often shielded from democratic scrutiny by being presented as technical and pragmatic solutions. It is often through appeals to efficiency that bypassing public debate becomes justified. Critics, meanwhile, are dismissed as simultaneously unrealistic and obstructive, to the point of being held responsible for worsening the crisis.

In Czechia, these dynamics can be illustrated through housing and its entanglement with post-socialist legacies. The Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and its founder, former prime minister and president Václav Klaus, have promoted the idea that democracy is inseparable from the free market and under threat from an unelected civil society operating outside of formal politics. Public debate in Czechia has thus largely accepted that anything from rising prices to housing shortages should be attributed to state bureaucracy and activists: the former for its slow permitting procedures, the latter for delaying development and preventing the market from meeting demand.

A different pattern is followed in the case of food security. In Czechia, agricultural production is concentrated among domestic oligarchs, whose interests are closely linked to the state. High food prices and supply disruptions are therefore often blamed on external factors, such as international retail chains, European environmental policies, and geopolitical instability. What remains similar is the perception of the state and civic actors as a threat.

Both cases reveal a governing strategy which relies on real or perceived crises to shift attention away from questions of power, ownership, and alternative futures, redirecting it towards scapegoats and supposedly straightforward fixes. In this way, solutions to serious contemporary problems are devised by those who contributed to the problems in the first place, whereas weakened democratic oversight helps secure the growing influence of hegemonic actors.

Food sovereignty as concentration

Czechia, due to its socialist legacies and neoliberal transformation, has a peculiar agricultural structure. With the collapse of state socialism, agricultural land was returned to millions of individual owners whose ancestors had lost their land due to collectivisation. After 1989, large production units and farming cooperatives created through this process were transformed into big agricultural enterprises and agroholdings. This led to land ownership becoming highly fragmented, despite farming itself being among the most concentrated and industrialised in Europe. According to a 2024 report by the Czech Ministry of Agriculture, 71.8 per cent of Czech agricultural land is leased rather than farmed by its owners, and most of that land is cultivated by large agricultural enterprises.

In this context, Andrej Babiš’s government has proposed introducing a pre-emption right for farmers leasing agricultural land. If adopted, owners wishing to sell their land would first have to offer it to the current tenants. The reform is presented by the government as a response to two widely recognised concerns: the growing financialisation of farmland and the need to strengthen Czech food sovereignty and food security in an increasingly unstable world.

At first glance, such a proposal sounds reasonable. Few people would object to protecting agricultural land from speculative investment. But the popular image of a family farmer working a modest piece of land, which agrifood enterprises and retail chains like to use in their marketing, hardly corresponds to the realities of Czech agriculture, dominated by large enterprises farming hundreds or thousands of hectares. By contrast, family and smaller private farms operate on only about 10-20 per cent of agricultural land. Therefore, the pre-emption right would grant dominant agricultural actors an opportunity to gradually purchase the land they already cultivate, and to further increase their control over agricultural resources.

71.8 per cent of Czech agricultural land is leased rather than farmed by its owners, and most of that land is cultivated by large agricultural enterprises

The gap between crisis rhetoric and the outcomes of proposed solutions is particularly visible through the government’s attempt to frame the reform as a defence of food sovereignty, a concept developed by farmers’ movements and food justice activists in defence of their communities’ access to land and ability to shape their own food systems against the control of large agricultural businesses. Research consistently shows that highly concentrated agricultural systems tend to favour a narrow range of export-oriented commodities and large-scale industrial production. In Czechia, this often means vast fields of cereal and industrial crop production (accounting for over 62 per cent of total crop production), while production of fruit, vegetables, and other labour-intensive foods is declining due to cost efficiency (for example, fruit production fell from 557,447 tons in 2000 to 123,530 tons in 2024).

Concentration of land ownership will thus inevitably undermine rather than strengthen food sovereignty, as well as more sustainable and just food systems. Our research on state food politics conducted at BOKU University in Vienna has also shown that Czech agricultural policy is primarily shaped by large agricultural enterprises and their profit-driven interests, while alternative food movements or small-scale farmers with more diverse and sustainable production have only a marginal influence.

Instead of tackling the structural problems of Czech agriculture, such as stagnating rural development, barriers faced by people who want to start their own farm, or the lack of support for more diverse forms of food production, the proposed preferential purchase right for farmers leasing agricultural land risks reinforcing the already dominant model based on the concentration of land, subsidies, and political influence by the domestic agricultural oligarchy and powerful agrifood enterprises.

Speculation as progress

If the agricultural land reform uses the language of food sovereignty to justify a further concentration of land ownership, the amendment to the Building Act recently approved by the Parliament performs a very similar trick in the urban space. In this case, the crisis language focuses on housing unaffordability. It is now an almost undisputed fact that Czechia, and Prague in particular, suffers from the worst housing crisis in the EU. Home ownership, so popular and normalised in a country where many were able to privatise their dwellings during the post-socialist transformation – creating what some scholars call a “super-homeownership” housing regime – is now increasingly out of reach.

As journalist Táňa Zabloudilová noted, young people facing housing insecurity are now increasingly being told by mainstream media that renting is the best option, and that tenancy is a widespread housing option in Western European countries. What they are being told less often is that those countries also have a strong tradition of social housing and tenants’ rights. Meanwhile, rents continue to rise in Czech cities, with average prices reaching approximately 19 euros per square metre in Prague this year. Moreover, affordable public housing is still a rarity, and the few affordable options on offer are often occupied by people with good connections and political influence, regardless of their income. For example, a recent investigation revealed that Minister for Regional Development Zuzana Mrázová of the ANO movement lived in affordable municipal housing while serving as mayor of Bílina.

Instead of building a robust social housing sector or taming housing financialisation through higher property taxes, the government recently passed an amendment to the building code, blaming expensive housing on slow construction due to long planning procedures, annoying regulations, pointless environmental reviews, and activists getting in the way – a mantra many Czechs have learned to repeat.

While accelerated construction will not deliver affordable housing and is a problem in itself, especially from the perspective of environmental and heritage protection, legal experts, planning specialists, environmental organisations, and municipal representatives also highlighted the amendment’s potential to reduce public oversight and participation, and to strengthen the position of developers and investors. The “Lex Developer” would benefit large corporate projects specifically, as permission procedures will not be sped up for small-scale projects.

As critics of the reform have pointed out, the housing crisis is a result of decades of commodification, speculative investment, the retreat of public housing, and successive governments’ unwillingness to seriously treat housing as a social right rather than a market commodity.1 While politicians promise that building more will eventually make housing affordable, a growing share of newly built homes is acquired by investors, institutional landlords, and people who already own property. Moreover, developers can slow down or halt construction when the costs of labour and materials rise, undermining the argument that faster permitting procedures can address the housing crisis.

In Czechia, the housing crisis also causes a generational divide. Many older Czechs bought homes during the post-socialist transformation or before prices spiralled out of reach. Rising property values have since given them assets that younger generations can only dream of, and for some, investing in real estate has become a substitute for a pension system they no longer trust. Young people without family wealth, stable incomes, or access to credit often have no such option and remain trapped in an increasingly expensive rental market.

Yet these inequalities rarely decide elections. Homeowners still form a majority of the electorate, and in a country with some of Europe’s lowest property taxes, many directly benefit from rising property value. This helps explain why the mainstream debate largely avoids framing the housing crisis as a political question of wealth, inequality, and redistribution, and why the narrative of a technical problem of slow permitting has far greater appeal.

A certain paradox also transpires in the way power holders abuse Czech antipathies for communism and activists. In my earlier research on urban activism, I found that people in Czechia rarely mobilise because they oppose development itself. More often, they do so because decisions are made without them, in a top-down manner. In other words, participation, transparency, and public scrutiny emerge as responses to democratic deficits, not as their cause. Promoters of the “Lex Developer”, however, often frame civil society as a source of problems and public engagement against pragmatic market solutions as ultimately antidemocratic – a remnant of communist times.

The building code reform thus epitomises a peculiar Czech version of democratic deficit in which democracy is invoked to defend markets, while citizens attempting to exercise democratic influence and protect values such as heritage and a healthy environment are dismissed as enemies of progress.

Democratic erosion does not always arrive through spectacular attacks on democratic institutions. It also advances in more inconspicuous ways: through planning amendments, property law, and other reforms which the public may perceive as too technical to warrant their attention

Organising resistance

Both the agricultural land and the housing reforms assist the further concentration of power and capital in the hands of a few, aggravating structural problems at the heart of housing unaffordability and fragile food security. They also try to silence and delegitimise the opposition, represented by activists, civil society, and smallholders of farmland. According to Gabriela Svárovská, a Green member of the Czech parliament, the government’s project is “a peculiar form of corporate communism: costs, subsidies, and risks are distributed across society as a whole, while profits, assets, and decision-making power are concentrated in the hands of a small number of corporate groups.”

Under Babiš’s far-right government, democratic infrastructures in Czechia are facing a serious threat. But the backlash against both reforms also reveals these infrastructures’ resilience and determination in increasingly hostile conditions. The “Lex Developer” has long been challenged by the association of environmental organisations Zelený kruh (“Green circle”), heritage protection organisations, local activist groups, and some municipalities. The land reform has been challenged by the Association of Private Farming of the Czech Republic, which forms the most important opposition to the large agroindustrial lobby, advocating instead for a more decentralised and sustainable agricultural model based on family farms. Other critics include smaller agroecological initiatives promoting soil care, such as the Živá půda (“Living soil”) project, promoting more equitable access to farmland, and the Nadace pro půdu (“Foundation for the land”), focused on acquiring agricultural land for smallholder, organic, and beginning farmers.

In both cases, awareness-raising has been the main tactic, and civic associations are increasingly aware that cooperation and alliances across civil society and social movements are essential when facing a powerful opponent – a state captured by corporate and oligarchic interests. The concerns of private farmers in particular have often been amplified at mass protest events organised by Milion chvilek pro demokracii (“Million moments for democracy”), a grassroots movement able to mobilise hundreds of thousands of citizens through public campaigns, demonstrations, and community organising.

Still, many on the Czech Left view these anti-government protests and the civic organisations opposing the reforms as politically toothless, understanding democracy primarily in apolitical terms, as a matter of political culture, ethics, corruption, populism, and institutional integrity. Despite focusing on a variety of critical issues, the narratives put forward by Czech civic organisations tend to be only vaguely linked to questions of social inequality and economic power. In this polarised context, many professional civic organisations and pro-democratic mobilisations are regularly framed by both Left and Right as elitist, foreign-funded, disconnected from ordinary citizens’ everyday problems, and as supporters of liberal ideologies dictated by the EU.

Meanwhile, MPs of ODS, the main opposition force, representing the neoliberal orthodoxy, voted in favour of the “Lex Developer” in the name of economic growth and market efficiency. In doing so, they exposed a contradiction at the heart of Czech liberalism: attachment to property rights and individual freedom can easily evaporate when confronted with concentrated corporate power.

The situation is dire from a democratic perspective, but it also offers an opening for a real shift in Czech politics, which increasingly suffers from the absence of a strong Left. It is also an opportunity to build a truly grassroots counter-hegemony that translates dispersed experiences of insecurity, exclusion, and ecological crisis into a shared political project capable of challenging dominant economic and political arrangements. Some of this emancipatory work is being pioneered by Re-set: The Platform for Social-Ecological Transformation, particularly through its efforts to directly confront Czech fossil oligarchy and state capture by corporate interests, and by promoting decentralised economic power and organising solidarity struggles from below.

Current developments in Czechia offer a broader lesson for Europe and for green politics. Democratic erosion does not always arrive through spectacular attacks on democratic institutions. It also advances in more inconspicuous ways: through planning amendments, property law, and other reforms which the public may perceive as too technical to warrant their attention. The Czech government’s approach to housing and food sovereignty and security reveals a dangerous approach that does not just ignore the causes of crises but actively reproduces them, exploiting urgency to expand corporate power at the cost of democratic participation.

While we need to mobilise solutions to the multitude of crises we face today, we must also pay attention to how these crises are framed, who gets to define the solutions, and who is left out of the debate. In the face of a democratic deficit becoming institutionalised via concentrated corporate power, we must also ask how cleavages in a polarised society can be mended, particularly through finding common ground for solidarity, nurturing collective capacities for democratic participation, and rebuilding the social power needed to confront interconnected crises in just and inclusive ways.

1. For scientific publications about housing in Czechia see especially the research by the Socioeconomics of Housing department of the Czech Academy of Sciences: https://www.soc.cas.cz/cz/oddeleni/socioekonomie-bydleni
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Smartphone yang dahulu lebih banyak digunakan untuk komunikasi kini berkembang menjadi perangkat serbaguna untuk hiburan, transaksi, hingga aktivitas berbasis internet. Perubahan kebiasaan tersebut turut memengaruhi pertumbuhan slot pulsa, terutama karena akses permainan digital semakin mudah dilakukan melalui perangkat yang selalu berada di tangan pengguna.

Fenomena ini tidak berdiri sendiri. menunjukkan penetrasi internet Indonesia mencapai 80,66 persen pada 2025, dengan lebih dari 229 juta pengguna internet. Kondisi tersebut memperlihatkan betapa luasnya ekosistem digital yang dapat diakses melalui jaringan seluler.

Smartphone Mengubah Pola Akses Permainan

Salah satu pengaruh terbesar smartphone terletak pada fleksibilitas. Pengguna tidak lagi bergantung pada komputer desktop untuk membuka layanan berbasis internet. Layar yang semakin besar, koneksi data yang lebih stabil, serta performa perangkat yang meningkat membuat berbagai permainan digital dapat diakses dengan antarmuka yang lebih praktis.

Dalam konteks slot pulsa, perkembangan ini juga berkaitan dengan kebiasaan masyarakat menggunakan layanan seluler prabayar. Pulsa dan koneksi data menjadi bagian dari aktivitas digital sehari-hari, sehingga konsep pembayaran atau akses berbasis perangkat mobile terasa lebih sederhana bagi sebagian pengguna.

Namun, kemudahan teknis tidak boleh disamakan dengan jaminan keuntungan. Permainan slot tetap merupakan bentuk perjudian yang memiliki risiko kehilangan uang, sementara istilah seperti gacor, maxwin, atau persentase kemenangan tertentu tidak dapat dijadikan kepastian hasil.

Ekosistem Pembayaran Digital Ikut Mendorong Perubahan

Pertumbuhan aktivitas digital juga berjalan beriringan dengan perkembangan sistem pembayaran. Bank Indonesia mencatat volume transaksi pembayaran digital mencapai 4,66 miliar transaksi pada November 2025, tumbuh 41,12 persen secara tahunan. Pada periode yang sama, transaksi melalui aplikasi mobile tumbuh 15,91 persen, sedangkan transaksi QRIS meningkat 143,64 persen.

Angka tersebut memang tidak secara khusus menggambarkan aktivitas perjudian online. Akan tetapi, data itu menunjukkan perubahan yang lebih luas: masyarakat semakin terbiasa melakukan aktivitas ekonomi melalui smartphone. Infrastruktur digital yang cepat dan praktis kemudian menjadi salah satu fondasi penting bagi berkembangnya berbagai layanan berbasis mobile.

Bank Indonesia juga terus memperluas inovasi pembayaran melalui smartphone. Salah satunya adalah QRIS TAP, yang memungkinkan transaksi dilakukan dengan mendekatkan perangkat smartphone ke terminal pembayaran.

Pertumbuhan Tetap Perlu Dilihat Secara Kritis

Di balik kemudahan akses, terdapat persoalan yang perlu diperhatikan. Smartphone membuat permainan dapat hadir hampir setiap saat, sehingga batas antara hiburan dan aktivitas berisiko dapat menjadi semakin tipis. Notifikasi, promosi, serta akses yang cepat berpotensi mendorong seseorang bermain lebih sering tanpa perencanaan keuangan yang matang.

Karena itu, memahami pertumbuhan slot pulsa tidak cukup hanya dengan melihat kemajuan teknologi. Ada faktor perilaku pengguna, perkembangan pembayaran digital, kualitas koneksi internet, hingga kesadaran terhadap risiko perjudian yang ikut menentukan arah fenomena tersebut.

Pada akhirnya, smartphone berperan sebagai katalis penting dalam transformasi layanan digital karena menawarkan akses yang cepat, personal, dan selalu tersedia. Namun, teknologi pada dasarnya hanyalah sarana. Cara pengguna memanfaatkannya tetap menjadi faktor paling menentukan. Sikap bijak, pengendalian pengeluaran, serta pemahaman terhadap risiko harus menjadi bagian dari setiap aktivitas digital yang melibatkan uang nyata.

Ten teenagers circled around a picnic table, their eyes focused on a cloth sack softly wriggling in Zach Hutchinson’s hands. Slowly opening the bag, he pulled out a Black-capped Chickadee and...

• Bad press about the threat of e-motorbikes is threatening the broader mobility movement in general, with the fast vehicles getting lumped in with e-scooters and ordinary e-bikes. While some regulation is needed, over-regulation could put the brakes on a fast-growing mobility mode that often replaces driving. Meanwhile, the real threat — cars — gets less media attention. (The Guardian)
• The Federal Transit Administration awarded Amtrak $5.3 billion for 43 projects, including bridge and track repairs, new trains, locomotives, double-tracking in Massachusetts, North Carolina and San Diego, and a Chicago maintenance facility. (Trains)
• NPR‘s “All Things Considered” explored the U.S. DOT’s war on “DEI” bike lanes.
• Air quality in Manhattan improved slightly since congestion pricing started, and it didn’t get any worse in the outer boroughs. (New York Times)
• Oren Hadar writes about how Los Angeles caters to drivers, to the point that pedestrians have to wait a frustratingly long time for a crosswalk signal so that cars don’t have to stop. (The Future Is L.A.)
• California rideshare drivers are on the verge of forming a union. Now can they negotiate a contract? (L.A. Progressive)
• Light rail service to West Seattle has been delayed for another three years. (KIRO)
• Jarrett Walker is encouraged that a transit referendum passed in a right-leaning town like Spokane. (Human Transit)
• Doubts are growing in Charleston that the Federal Transit Administration will come through a $374 million grant for a bus rapid transit line. (Post and Courier)
• The Utah Transit Authority is expanding its microtransit service area. (KSL)
• Public comment on Utah’s new five-year transportation plan overwhelmingly favored rail over highways. (Salt Lake City Weekly)
• Pittsburgh closed a loophole in its longstanding law banning parking on sidewalks and in bike lanes. (USA Today)
• Joe Cortwright argues that the Rose Quarter Freeway widening project in Portland is turning into a fiscal black hole. (City Commentary)
• The Cincinnati Enquirer profiled a mother who’s been advocating for safer streets since losing her daughter in a hit-and-run eight years ago.
• A Daily Tar Heel column in favor of light rail also gets in a few digs at Duke.
• The Ontario Court of Appeals ruled that Premier Doug Ford can rip up Toronto bike lanes, overturning a previous ruling. (National Newswatch)
• Bus trips in Ho Chi Minh City are up 44% since 134 routes went fare-free. (Vietnam Plus)

Registered nurses and healthcare professionals at Santa Paula Hospital in Santa Paula, Calif. and Ventura County Medical Center (VCMC) in Ventura, Calif., will hold a speak out at Ventura County's Board of Supervisors hearing on Tuesday, Aug. 18, to protest changes in services and possible closure.

Policymakers Need Solar Reflective Methods Research — NOT Conspiracy Theories

 

By Quentin Scott, Federal Policy Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network

What if scientists might one day have tools that could temporarily slow down the worst immediate effects of climate change, protect millions of lives, and buy us more time to advance the clean energy transition? 

What if those tools could help slow the melting of glaciers and sea-level rise in New Orleans, Miami, and low-lying cities across the country? What if we could reduce the number of dangerous heat events like the ones we experienced this month? 

Now, what if your elected representatives were actively trying to ban research into these tools that could save lives? That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what happened this legislative session in statehouses across the country.

Seventy Bills Built on Misinformation

In 2026, lawmakers introduced 70 bills across 29 states to ban or restrict research into a suite of technologies that could potentially cool the planet on a temporary basis and buy us more time to cut carbon pollution. Let that number sink in. That’s not a fringe movement: that’s a coordinated legislative campaign, largely driven by climate-denying, conspiracy-oriented right-wing networks, to ban even the possibility of learning if such technologies are viable options to save our planet.

At hearing after hearing, testimony relied on misinformation. In Alabama, witnesses claimed that tiny particles that reflect sunlight, a form of solar radiation management scientists are researching, were giving bees Alzheimer’s. In South Carolina, a key witness linked this climate research to Bill Gates “controlling populations.” And in New Hampshire, a witness showed pictures of “chemtrails,” pushing a debunked conspiracy theory that airplanes are secretly spraying chemicals. The witness testified that “they” — whoever “they” are — “are severely spraying.” 

None of these conspiracy theories are grounded in evidence. And there is one glaring hole in their argument: no geoengineering is currently deployed at climate‑relevant scale. We’re just talking about researching this new technology — not yet deploying it. Multiple bill sponsors, when asked directly, even admitted they had no firsthand knowledge of geoengineering occurring in their states – because it’s not. It’s not happening anywhere.

One Arizona sponsor acknowledged he didn’t have “specific knowledge” it was happening but said he had “testimony coming up that may lead to the conclusion that there might be some of that going on.” They won’t find anything because there isn’t anything to find. A Rhode Island sponsor described the topic as “the Wild West” and said, to his credit, that “most people, myself included, know very little about it.” And that’s exactly the problem: lawmakers are legislating based on confusion, not evidence.

Scientists, Farmers, and Agencies Push Back

Researchers, climate groups, business leaders, and even state agencies testified against these bad bills. In Maryland, I testified that the bill penalizes research and that “whatever the underlying concern, this bill doesn’t solve it.” Business groups expressed concerns that the broadly written language could capture everything from agriculture cloud seeding and snow-making at ski resorts to everyday farming equipment that emits sulfur dioxide. 

In South Dakota, the state’s Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources disagreed with sponsors’ ‘assurances’ that farmers would be exempt from the bill’s bans. This is what a legislative effort built on misinformation looks like: chaotic, technically incoherent, and disconnected from science.

What Happened When the Bills Faced Legislatures

How far did these bills actually get? Not very.

Of the 70 bills introduced, 60 are dead. One (Arizona’s HB2042) passed its legislature but was vetoed by the governor. Only one bill has been signed into law; it’s an add-on to a law Louisiana passed last year, expanding the list of prohibited chemicals. That’s it.

The volume of bill introductions and the energy behind this effort, and the picture it paints, become clear: for all the noise, these bills have almost no legs.

The pattern is consistent: bills are introduced, get a hearing, but once they run into simple questions — How do you enforce this? What counts as geoengineering? Would this affect farmers? Would this ban legitimate research? — they stall. The conspiracy theories don’t hold up to scrutiny. Neither does the policy.

Why Research Must Come Before Deployment

I’ve spent my career working on climate policy. I know how badly we need every tool in the toolbox. And solar reflective methods (SRM) research — not deployment, research — is one of those tools we cannot afford to kneecap before we even understand it.

Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) does not support SRM deployment. We do support studying whether it could work, what the risks are, who would be affected, and who would get a say. Those are responsible questions. And we need to know those answers—before other nations, private companies, and rogue billionaires make those decisions for us.

Banning SRM research does not make these technologies disappear. It only ensures that, if they are ever used, or if someone else proceeds without public oversight, we will be unprepared.

Here’s what I find especially troubling about this legislative trend: the bills that got the furthest weren’t necessarily the most scientifically coherent; they were the ones in states where the political environment made it easier to move fast and ask questions later. In some hearings, no substantive debate was held at all. A committee vote with no substantive discussion is not a policy process: it’s a vibe check.

Meanwhile, the federal government has shown more interest in restricting climate science than in building the governance frameworks we actually need. That vacuum creates space for state-level chaos like this. And it’s why groups like CCAN are pushing for transparent, publicly funded, equitably governed research. The alternative is to leave these decisions to private companies with no guardrails or to legislatures that openly admit they don’t understand the technologies they’re voting on.

The Fight is Not Over

The good news from this session is that when scientists, farmers, business groups, state agencies, and environmental advocates showed up to say “wait, have you thought this through?”, most of the bills collapsed. That matters.

The 2026 state legislative session is over in most states, which means the immediate threat from this wave is largely contained — for now.

But this threat isn’t going away. The same networks that drove this session’s bills will be back. Louisiana’s law will give advocates a new template to point to. As climate impacts worsen and SRM research receives more public attention, the political pressure around these technologies will only intensify.

The question for the climate movement isn’t whether SRM will be on the research agenda. It already is. The question is whether the people who care most about equity, transparency, and the future of the planet will be in the room when the decisions are made.

If scientists and climate advocates aren’t in the room, the room doesn’t just go away. It just gets populated with self-interested private actors and foreign governments instead. Declaring an outright ban on this research makes this outcome even more likely.

The Bottom Line

Seventy bills. Twenty-nine states. Zero new laws passed this year.

By the numbers, this legislative session was a failure for the anti-research effort. But we’re not ready to relax just yet. We know that the opposition to responsible climate research is organized, loud, and will be back next year.

CCAN will be watching. We hope you will be, too.

About the author: Quentin Scott (he/him) joined CCAN in January 2021 as part of the newly created CCAN Federal Team. He moved from Chicago specifically to build political will for groundbreaking national climate and climate justice policies. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he got a first-hand look at the two Americas and sought to bring the two Americas closer together through advocacy.

Before joining CCAN, Quentin was chief of staff for an Illinois State Representative and a legislative correspondent in the US House of Representatives, and has led numerous issue and candidate campaigns across the Midwest and East Coast. In his roles, he has stood with neighborhood groups to hold industrial polluters accountable in communities of color and looks forward to bringing that fight to the federal level.

The post 70 Bills, 29 States: Misinformation Fuels Campaign Against Climate Science appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

The silence following the Samancor’s Dikwena Chrome spill, outside Brits, Northwest Province, South Africa, is a failure of accountability.

Guest author: Hassen Lorgat, CSOs Tailings Working Group

Just days before the commemoration of the tragic anniversary of Marikana — where 34 mineworkers lost their lives at the hands of the state — South Africa has been struck by another industrial disaster. On the evening of August 13, 2026, the Samancor Dikwena Chrome Tailings Facility near Brits in North West Province failed. Preliminary reports suggest a structural breach sent a slurry of mud-like material flowing across an access road near Eland Mine’s Maroelabult shaft.

The irony of this timing is devastating. On August 16, 2012, this nation mourned the loss of life due to state violence. Today, we are forced to question whether we have learned anything about protecting life in the intervening 14 years. This latest incident also arrives just a month before the anniversary of the Jagersfontein tailings disaster (September 11, 2022), which resulted in five deaths, the destruction of close to 160 homes, and the loss of domestic animals, including more than 850 farm animals and livestock.

These are not isolated events; they are a systemic failure of oversight.

To date, Samancor Chrome has offered little quality information. While management via social media messages claims to have launched a preliminary investigation, their websites remain devoid of official statements. In the vacuum created by their silence, social media has filled the void with rumour and fear.

Social media videos reveal the devastation of the failure.

This silence is not merely a public relations misstep; it is a violation of their own stated values. Samancor Chrome boasts of a DNA built on “Zero Harm” and “Caring for People.” Yet, when lives and communities are at risk, a lack of communication is the antithesis of care. They profess “Integrity” and “Accountability,” urging employees to “always do the right thing.” Silence in the face of a potential environmental and humanitarian crisis is the opposite of that commitment. If the company truly values “Collaboration,” it must treat affected communities, regulators, and employees as stakeholders to be informed, not threats to be managed.

However, our frustration cannot rest solely on the mine owners. The government regulators must step up. The Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) and the Department of Mineral Resources and Petroleum (DMRP) have a constitutional obligation to protect the environment and the people. Where are they?

Under Chapter 12 of the National Water Act of 1998, tailings facilities meeting safety risk criteria (such as wall height and storage capacity) must be registered and managed under strict engineering standards. The last updated dams register (July 2025) does not include this tailings facility as a registered facility, which must be remedied.

We, as the Civil Society Tailings Working Group, demand urgent action:

1. Immediate Scene Management: Secure the site to prevent further harm to communities and first responders.
2. Independent Investigation: Establish a public, independent inquiry into the structural integrity of the Dikwena facility, with a clear timeline for reporting.
3. Investigate now or the soonest possible: Release the latest safety audits and dam stability records for this facility to be made public.
4. The Samancor group, remedy their failure to register their tailings facility as demanded by law.

Tailings disasters are a certainty, not a possibility. It is not a question of if they will happen, but when. Over the last few months, we have seen the warning signs globally. In Zambia (Chambishi, March 2025), a breach poisoned the drinking water of 500,000 people. In the DRC and Indonesia, similar failures have destroyed aquatic life and urban areas. These events prove that climate change (bringing extreme rainfall) and aging infrastructure are a deadly combination.

We cannot continue to treat these disasters as isolated incidents as we have demanded: Safety First, a set of 17 guidelines endorsed by 164 scientists, frontline community groups, Tribal governments, and civil society organizations from 32 countries, calls for better engineering and conscious public policy and people’s involvement. 

South Africa has a history of mining tragedies that have defined our national consciousness. The victims of Marikana were killed by bullets; the victims of Dikwena may yet be killed by mud, heavy metals, and the bureaucratic silence that follows.

We have learnt from Brumadinho to Jagersfontein that early leadership when a disaster happens saves lives and provides a clearer analysis of the causes of the disaster as we search for remedies. These remedies must include the people most likely to be impacted by such disasters. 

The time has come for the government, Samancor Chrome CEO Desmond McManus, the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, and the Department of Water and Sanitation to step up. They must act. The people of Brits deserve more—they need support, solace, and the truth. 

The post Another Tailings Disaster in South Africa: Where is the Leadership? appeared first on Earthworks.

From boating out to Popasquash Island for Common Terns to banding sessions at the Green Mountain Audubon Center to early-morning survey sessions throughout the Champlain Valley, my summer became a...

All around Cook Inlet, young shorebirds are strengthening their wings. They’re the survivors, the chicks who made it to fledging. As they prepare for the next big challenge—their first...

09-10 * 13:00 - FT meeting (Bea)

08-21 * 13:00 - Radical Democracy Meeting (Bea)

More than two dozen Texas families are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their challenge to a state law that requires public schools to post a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. The request, filed today, urges the court to protect students’ and parents’ religious freedom by blocking Texas Senate Bill 10, ensuring that families — not politicians — have the right to decide what role religion plays in their lives.

The Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Baha'i, Unitarian Universalist, and nonreligious families challenging the Texas law attend 22 school districts across the state and are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP serving as pro bono counsel. Today’s petition seeks review of lower court rulings in two separate but similar cases: Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District and Cribbs Ringer v. Comal Independent School District.

Under S.B. 10, Texas public schools must permanently display a state-mandated version of the Ten Commandments, drawn from the Protestant King James Bible, in a “conspicuous” place in each classroom, from kindergarten through 12th grade. The families challenging S.B. 10 object to the law because the displays will pressure children to conform to the state’s favored religious beliefs and interfere with parents’ right to guide their children’s religious instruction.

Today’s Supreme Court filing, a joint petition for a writ of certiorari in both cases, follows an April decision by the en banc U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit allowing the state-selected version of the Ten Commandments to go up in the plaintiffs’ classrooms. By a narrowly decided vote, the 5th Circuit ruled that S.B. 10 does not violate either the Establishment or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment — despite a 1980 Supreme Court case striking down a nearly identical Kentucky law.

“As a rabbi and parent, forcing a Christian version of the Ten Commandments on children in every classroom is particularly upsetting,” said plaintiff Rabbi Joshua Fixler (he/him) of Houston. “I am not only worried about my own kids, but I’m deeply concerned about all the children in my congregation. These displays put children in the position of having to defend themselves and their families’ religious beliefs against a government mandate that makes them feel different and separate from their classmates.”

“Texas politicians shouldn’t have a seat at the table in deciding how our children receive their religious education. That decision belongs to our family,” said plaintiffs Rebekah (she/her) and Ted Lowe (he/him), an Austin-based interfaith couple who are raising their children in the Christian and Jewish traditions. “This law puts one version of religious beliefs above all others in our public schools and sends a message to our children that what we teach them about religion at home is somehow wrong.”

“By requiring displays of religious doctrine in every classroom, the state is interfering with our family’s decisions about how our children engage with religion,” said plaintiff Nichole Manning (she/her), a Dallas-area atheist who is raising her children in a nonreligious tradition that gives them the space and autonomy to develop their own beliefs about religion. “As a parent, I intentionally choose to have my children attend public school because I prefer an educational environment without any religious affiliation. In a diverse public school environment, all students should be treated with equal respect, regardless of their religious beliefs, or lack thereof.”

“The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected this kind of government-imposed religion before, and it should do so again,” said Chloe Kempf (she/her), staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas. “Having these posters in Texas classrooms puts students at risk of bullying, stigmatization, and religious coercion. Our nation’s bedrock principle of separating church and state means that families and faith communities — not politicians — get to decide what role religion plays in children’s lives. Texas students deserve public schools that welcome them for who they are, respect their religious or nonreligious backgrounds, and give them the high-quality education they need to build their futures.”

“Fifty years ago, the ACLU won a Supreme Court victory against a nearly identical Kentucky law — and we aim to do it again,” said Cecillia Wang (she/her), national legal director of the ACLU. “In our country, no legislature can force its preferred scripture on public school students and families.”

“Families – not politicians or public school officials – get to decide how, if, and when children engage with religion,” said Rachel Laser (she/her), president and CEO of Americans United. “We urge the Supreme Court to make clear that these Ten Commandments mandates violate students’ and families’ religious freedom as promised by the U.S. Constitution. With ever more states attempting to force one version of religion into public school classrooms, our nation must recommit to our foundational promise of church-state separation, the lynchpin of religious liberty.”

“This case concerns decisions about personal belief and religious instruction, and whether under our Constitution they remain with families and faith communities or are commandeered by the state,” said Jon Youngwood (he/him), global co-chair of the Litigation Department at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. “The First Amendment has long protected the freedom of individuals to determine for themselves how they engage with spirituality and religion. Those protections are especially important in the public-school setting.”

“The First Commandment, dictating which god must be worshipped, is the antithesis of our First Amendment,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor (she/her), co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. “It is not the government’s role to daily expose young children to a coercive display of one religion’s set of religious edicts in our public schools. Our public schools exist to educate, not to proselytize.”

The Lowe and Fixler families share more about how they will be impacted by these Ten Commandments displays and why they oppose them in newly released, heartfelt videos that can be viewed here; transcripts are available here.

Access the U.S. Supreme Court certiorari filing here: https://www.aclutx.org/app/uploads/2026/08/10C-SCOTUS-Petition.pdf

After decades organizing from within the labor establishment, Joe Uehlein realized that winning real climate and economic justice meant moving beyond the limits of traditional labor and environmentalism. As former…

As a teenager, I would ride the public bus from the corner of my block to my high school each morning, watching the neighborhood of West Brighton blur behind the gossamer of dew suspended in the air as mist. On the foggiest mornings, I’d peer over the top of Grimes Hill to find the Verrazzano Bridge shrouded, the air thick enough to obscure it entirely, and the edifice all but vanished beneath an opaque sky. “I guess they forgot to put the bridge out today,” my friend would joke. We’d giggle and move on to more pressing matters: midterms, crushes, who saw whom with whom at the mall. The mist was a natural backdrop, turning the world crystalline, a million minuscule jewels refracting the sunlight and diffusing the morning into a languid, rolling onset. As the bus groaned along, the droplets would part to let it pass, and there was an elegance in its cordial shifting aside to accommodate our movements, a symbiosis.

It has been many years since I watched a foggy dawn envelope the Verrazzano. And yet today the bridge still disappears, though under more precarious circumstances. Today, wildfire smog flattens buildings into vague silhouettes. New York City is an amber ghost. The smog, graceless, abides by none of mist’s boundaries; it sticks to my skin, to my face, clings to my eyelashes, and embeds itself between the threads of my clothes. And I am haunted by the image of young girls on the S66 bus in West Brighton, joking to one another about a government employee forgetting to put the bridge out today. A new generation of teens might make the same quips now: “Someone’s getting fired,” one might joke. The other coughs in response. They should have masks on, but they do not, because they are teenagers, and for them, masks faded from normalcy three years ago. This—squinting through a neighborhood mired in murk, hacking through school gossip, heads fuzzy with carbon monoxide and Instagram reels—this is their normalcy.

Today, wildfire smog flattens buildings into vague silhouettes. New York City is an amber ghost.

For much of the northeastern United States, the return of smoke from Canada’s wildfires has become an unwelcome summer ritual. Air quality alerts have stretched across more than twenty states as nearly nine hundred active fires continue to burn across Canada, sending dangerous levels of fine particulate pollution thousands of miles from their source. The fires are expected to continue burning interminably, unquenchable. Residents of New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and dozens of other U.S. cities find themselves locked indoors, watching an air quality index map on their phone screens display infrared globs of red and purple wading across the pinpoints of their homes.

Three years ago, when wildfire smoke from Canada suffocated New York’s skies, some people here assumed it was a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe. The effects of climate change were still contested, or even ignored. This was by capitalist design: fossil fuel-funded misinformation has manufactured political uncertainty. That strategy, however, had a time limit, only capable of existing in the space between the general public’s secondarily informed understanding of the issue and their lived experience of it. This year in New York, back-to-back snowstorms pummeled the city this winter, and repeated heat waves have already ravaged the first half of the summer. The polluted air has returned quickly enough to be recognized as patternistic. People can no longer argue whether climate change is coming when the smoke is at our door. We simply look around and know it is the inverse: we are in climate change’s house, built upon the bones of capitalism, adorned with the gilt extracts of imperialism, and ornamented with a novelty rug fashioned out of a taxidermied extinct species.

Yet the extreme quickly becomes the ordinary. This phenomenon is well-documented, coined by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine as “disaster capitalism.” Klein writes: What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up. This is precisely the case in the instance of the wildfires, demonstrated furthermore in the current overall narrative shift from climate denial to acceptance. Canada’s boreal forests have always burned, though the scale, frequency, and intensity of these fires have increased undeniably due to rising temperatures from anthropogenic climate change. The climate crisis can thus no longer be credibly disputed, yet the economic system to which it is intrinsically tied has not changed. So the narrative has adapted in order to create another market to exploit.

From private insurers withdrawing from disaster-prone regions while charging higher premiums elsewhere, to investment firms marketing climate-risk portfolios, to the tech promise that artificial intelligence will optimize energy use even as it drives a massive expansion of electricity demand through new data centers, capital profits from both producing climate instability and managing its consequences.

Rather than mitigating environmental collapse, the perspective of inevitability allows for commercially viable solutions. Entire industries have emerged around the adaptation to a less livable world, so long as the drivers of the livability loss are not questioned. From private insurers withdrawing from disaster-prone regions while charging higher premiums elsewhere, to investment firms marketing climate-risk portfolios, to the tech promise that artificial intelligence will optimize energy use even as it drives a massive expansion of electricity demand through new data centers, capital profits from both producing climate instability and managing its consequences. These industries are bought into upon the urging of governments to prepare for disasters rather than prevent them. Today’s teenagers on the bus, unequipped to process urgency without a solution, may instead respond with resignation. The thing some of them feel most equipped to do, the only resource they know at their disposal, is to click ‘add to cart.’ For others, however, these experiences are radicalizing, and the electricity of their adolescence is channeled into climate action.

Meanwhile, exposure to wildfire smoke is profoundly unequal. Wealthier households can remain indoors with central air conditioning and high-quality filtration systems. Many can work remotely. Working-class people, by contrast, often have little choice but to labor outdoors or in poorly ventilated buildings. Delivery drivers, agricultural workers, construction crews, warehouse workers, sanitation workers, teachers in disinvested and poorly maintained school buildings, and countless others continue producing value while inhaling dangerous concentrations of particulate matter. Research following the historic 2023 smoke event found that exposure to wildfire pollution also followed familiar patterns of environmental injustice, disproportionately affecting communities already burdened by poor air quality, inadequate healthcare access, and economic inequality. The working class bears the brunt of the various, well-documented health impacts of exposure, which in 2023 resulted in 82,100 premature deaths worldwide. And to stay safe this time around, the onus has been placed back onto the suffering individual rather than those driving the crisis

Exposure to wildfire smoke is profoundly unequal…. Working-class people, by contrast, often have little choice but to labor outdoors or in poorly ventilated buildings.

Local governments have largely responded with adaptation rather than transformation. In New York and elsewhere, citizens are advised to monitor the Air Quality Index, remain indoors, purchase air filters, wear respirators, and reduce strenuous outdoor activity. New York State Governor Hochul’s air quality advisory listed recommendations for a variety of groups, directing outdoor workers to “stay hydrated,” and for outdoor camps, schools, and childcare providers to, vaguely, “watch for symptoms and take action as needed.” These recommendations reveal the limits of capitalist climate policy and explain why neoliberal solutions are so disconnected from the scale of the crisis: safety must not disrupt profitability, and that contradiction is resolved by placing the burden back onto the workers.

This assessment is not to disregard the absolute necessity of adaptation and climate resilience measures. The most under-resourced and those that contribute the least to climate change bear the largest brunt of its effects. Working-class communities need cooling centers, flood protection, public health infrastructure, and disaster preparedness immediately. But adaptation under capitalism means adapting workers to conditions with no intention to improve those conditions. Climate change is often presented as a universal threat: we are all in this together. Yet we are not all exposed to it in the same way, and we certainly do not possess equal power to respond to it. The climate crisis is therefore also a crisis of class power, and adaptation without transformation is, in reality, an accommodation of the class divide.

The climate crisis is therefore also a crisis of class power, and adaptation without transformation is, in reality, an accommodation of the class divide.

The wildfire smoke wafting from the north is noxious to our bodies as well as our expectations. The characterization of the climate crisis as inevitable obscures the fact that it is socially produced and therefore contestable. We must reject the separation between the worker and the environment, the absorption of climate politics as capitalist “common sense,” and the notion that the goal is to survive disasters more efficiently. We must push forward the thing that shatters the sedative of perceived normalcy: an alternative.

I traveled back to Staten Island, where I no longer live, one night during the height of the smog. The streetlights on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway undulated in a gloomy haze until the mouth of the bridge opened and the bus slipped down the throat of the outer borough. Through the soot-stained window, I expected to see what I usually see on this oft-traversed route: the glittering city melting back and the inky waves washing up against a vast, dark beach ahead. But now, as I peered through the shifting slats of stringers, I found… nothing. I looked across to the windows on the other side of the aisle, and the view was identical: beyond the layer of grime clinging to the glass, a wall of blackness, as if we were suspended in a void. The residue in the air had congealed in my lungs, and my chest began to convulse in protest. I coughed and coughed, and the spit in my mouth tasted almost nostalgic, like a fine morning mist.

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: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; modified by Tempest.

The post The smoke is at our door appeared first on Tempest.

A new investigation by Public Citizen reveals that 57 individuals within the Trump administration, excluding President Trump, are individually worth as much as $100 million, eight of whom are billionaires. The analysis underscores the growing economic divide between the average American worker, who earns $65,000 a year, and the politically-connected individuals who hold the power to address the economic strain facing the general populace.

Of the 57 ultra-wealthy individuals identified, 31 have personal assets exceeding $100 million, while the remainder have assets reaching $100 million. Forty of them are running federal agencies and institutions, including the Department of Commerce, Treasure and Education, as well as the Securities and Exchange Commission, NASA, Social Security Administration and Office of Personnel Management. The other 17 are serving as U.S. ambassadors.

The concentration of wealth is striking compared with previous administrations:

• Donald Trump: 57 individuals with assets of $100 million or more, including eight billionaires, excluding Trump.
• Joe Biden: Five individuals with assets of $100 million or more, including two individuals whose assets reached $1 billion or more.
• George W. Bush: Five individuals with assets of $100 million or more, including one billionaire.
• Barack Obama: Three individuals with assets of $100 million or more, including one billionaire.

“It is deeply concerning to see people with extraordinary wealth controlling the levers of power in our government,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “The Trump administration is putting an unprecedented number of multi-millionaires and billionaires in charge of institutions that are supposed to serve all Americans. When the people holding the reins of government are drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the ultra-rich, it leads to misplaced incentives and corruption, and begs the question whose interests they are truly serving.”

“The breadth and depth of the economic divide we quantified in this report, identifying 57 ultra-millionaires in key positions in our government and leading at least ten critical federal agencies, should be deeply troubling to anyone concerned about the welfare of our democracy,” said Douglas Pasternak, Public Citizen researcher. “These individuals have sweeping financial conflicts and are more likely to govern based on their own personal monetary interests than the vital interests of the American public.”

Public Citizen’s analysis comes amid growing concerns about the influence of wealthy donors and corporate interests in the Trump administration and the corruption that this is contributing to. While financial success should not disqualify anyone from public service, the unprecedented concentration of extreme wealth among administration officials warrants scrutiny. This is especially true when wealthy political supporters are rewarded with positions overseeing institutions responsible for regulating markets, distributing public resources, and protecting the public interest.

Read more about Trump’s wealthy administration here.

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The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record. 

Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River. 

They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.

The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.

Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.

Record lows

At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.

The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August. 

The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres. 

While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.

Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:

“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.” 

Compounding factors

The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief. 

Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change. 

Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah. 

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This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.

At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992. 

Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:

“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.

“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”

On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.

Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:

“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

Related Mapped: How climate change affects extreme weather around the world 19.03.2026 Attribution Guest post: Is climate change making UK droughts worse? 26.08.2025 Drought Global soil moisture in ‘permanent’ decline due to climate change 27.03.2025 Drought West Africa’s deadly rainfall in 2022 made ‘80 times more likely’ by climate change 16.11.2022 Attribution

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