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The year is 2036. Connected Autonomous Vehicles comprise 25 percent of the cars on the nation’s streets and roads and fleets of robo-cabs crisscross cities. But after one such CAV blows a stop sign and kills a pedestrian, federal cybermarshal Dana Grant starts asking questions — but can Grant get to the bottom of the “accident” … or undercover a plot to use these connected AVs to kill thousands? That’s the plot of “Autokill” (Open Road Media) by “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz and playwright Cary Pepper. To purchase the full book, click here. But for now, curl up with Chapter 3, “What Was Wrong?” in this exclusive excerpt.

After staring at the computer screen for several minutes, Dana Grant sat back and slowly shook her head. She wasn’t happy and she didn’t know why.

The case seemed simple enough. Last week, a Connected Autonomous Vehicle killed a 35-year-old woman in California. She was sitting in a park, set back from the road some 50 feet, when she was struck by the vehicle. According to local police, the car ignored a stop sign, which was one reason the case landed on Dana’s desk. That, and of course, the fatality.

Dana Grant was a federal cybermarshal assigned to the National Transportation Safety Board’s Portland-based CAV unit, Western Sector. With thousands of robo-cabs, trucks, and buses on the nation’s roads and streets, the National Transportation Safety Board had created a new branch to investigate CAV-related accidents. It was similar to the division that investigated aviation incidents, but only two offices had been opened so far (Eastern Sector was head-quartered in Boston), its operating budget was smaller, its staff had not been provided with the in-depth training that allowed agents in the aviation division to effectively probe air-transport events, and, unlike the aviation division, the CAV unit had no NTSB Training Center.

The marshals had been promised such expertise, but the agency, despite being in existence for six years, was still getting “up to speed” and Congress (swayed by the powerful CAV lobby) had repeatedly failed to adequately fund it, leaving many marshals to obtain any special training they felt they needed on their own, at their own expense. Dana had overheard several of her colleagues proudly vowing not to “go all tech” as long as they had to pay for it themselves.

Not Dana. If she were doing the job, she wanted to be as good at it as she could be. Just as she’d gone the extra distance as a cop in Phoenix. Since joining the unit, she’d been taking workshops and reading as much as she could to educate herself on the intricacies of CAVs. When she needed help, she didn’t hesitate to reach out to the small network of advisors and consultants she’d slowly assembled around her during the five years she’d been on the job.

Influenced by those advisors and consultants, Dana had stopped using the word accident when talking about her cases. She investigated crashes.

An accident is an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause. But CAVs, obeying algorithms designed for maximum safety and free of road-rage-inducing ego, didn’t do things unexpectedly or take potentially-dangerous risks. So when a CAV collided with anything, it wasn’t an accident. It was a crash.

Dana also quickly learned that crucial to investigating and understanding any incident involving a CAV meant knowing how to read and interpret the information gleaned from its black box, which included every decision, maneuver, and change the vehicle made during a trip. It included interactions with passengers. It included everything the car did, saw, and heard. And because this data was all in computer code, it required knowing how to understand what you were looking at.

Even with all the time Dana had spent learning about this arcane corner of the universe, she still had large gaps in her knowledge of it. But she was light years ahead of every other agent in her office, and she knew it.

Now Dana sat pondering why the CAV ignored the stop sign. Programming error? Software failure? Faulty sensing equipment? If any of those were the issue, did the problem lie with Relyable, the company that manufactured the car? Or was it a matter of a repair, similar to fixing the brakes on a human-driven car? And if that were so, was the root cause a failure by the company that operated the vehicle to properly maintain it?

Or, if it was a programming or software error, did that signal a failure by the engineers at the company that made the car? Which would mean Dana had to see if the same company created both the computer code and the software, because it was possible that correct computer code had been negated by faulty software.

A third possibility was that someone tampered with the stop sign, which happened often in the 2020s, when kids defaced traffic signs or anti-AVers tried to demonstrate the weakness of autonomous infrastructure. Then came the 2029 Topeka School AV bus crash. A couple of teenagers out for kicks turned a 30-mph sign in to one reading 80 mph by making the three an eight. The bus raced around a sharp curve doing 80, left the road, and plunged 35 feet down an embankment, killing 21 children and the bus attendant.

For the next three years, all AV school buses had to have a human driver. Meanwhile, every inch of roadway in the United States was minutely mapped: every traffic sign, signal, lane marking, and channelization. And the federal government required any change, no matter how small, to be immediately entered in the central Geographic Information System Command file, the huge database where all this information lived. Failure to do so resulted in states and cities losing as much as billions in federal highway dollars. Now, any discrepancy between what an AV saw and what was in the GIS database, was detected by the CAV’s Command Center (all the companies that operated CAVs had command centers that controlled their fleet) in a nanosecond, and the GIS Command Center threw the vehicle into fail-safe mode, choosing the safest available option for its next action.

If a vehicle saw “80 mph” but the database listed “30 mph,” the GISCC would send an alert, slow or stop the vehicle, and a remote driver would take over the CAV. In addition, all other vehicles from that company would be alerted and a post-mortem would be conducted.

The system worked almost flawlessly in cities and on state roads; the only gaps now were the small towns and rural areas that didn’t have the ability to update the GIS files, or the few places where locals believed that routinely updating their files was an infringement by an overbearing government. Since 2033, there had been only nine instances of minor crashes due to un-updated traffic devices, and none due to vandalism. Could this be the first?

Maybe. Yet Dana had a gut feeling it was something else. There were thousands of Relyable delivery robos operating in the county and there hadn’t been similar incidents. Which suggested that the computer code, the software, and pretty much everything else in the vehicle was operating properly. So what else could it be?

Relyable had already responded to the police-finding that the car went through the stop sign. Company spokespeople maintained that the sign had been defaced with both a hole and grafitti, so the fault lay not with the vehicle and its sensing equipment, but with the town for not repairing the sign. Relyable also noted that the town had been cited four times for not complying with GIS Command. The company could not be held responsible, it reasoned, for signage or traffic signals that were not repaired or replaced in a timely manner.

Dana studied pictures of the sign; there was no question that it had been vandalized. A tagger had gone to work on it, and there was a hole dead center in the middle of the O. If it was a bullet hole, someone was quite a shot.

Did that mean the CAV had not seen the sign? Or had it seen the sign but was no longer able to identify it as a signal to stop, perhaps interpreting it as nothing more than a lamppost or structure designating street parking? Why did the Topeka fail-safe protocol fail?

“Oh, you caught that California thing.”

She hadn’t heard Kyle coming up behind her. But now there was that soft wheezing through his seemingly-always-clogged nasal passages. Perhaps if he lost some weight… The thought ran through her head almost every time she saw Kyle. He wasn’t obese. Just unnecessarily overweight, all in his belly, which hung over his belt in a loose fold.

Kyle Beaumont would always be overweight, always breathe heavily through his nose, always be, in Dana’s mind, one nasal breath away from a heart attack. Which of course she hoped would never happen. She didn’t hate Kyle or wish any bad would come to him. She just wished he wasn’t her boss.

Not because he was overweight and breathed through his nose. Because he was always hovering, and he wasn’t thorough. He’d been with the NTSB 20 years to her 5, and was more interested in clearing cases than conducting competent, thorough investigations.

So, rather than encourage his people to spend as much time as they needed to properly run a case, he’d be satisfied with a preliminary finding, even one still open to questions, if it added to the “Case Closed” log he submitted weekly to the head of the Portland bureau.

As a result, Dana’s unit had a high closure rate, which Kyle was determined to maintain. But given how they were achieving it, she wasn’t sure that was something to be proud of.

Their findings tended to hold the vehicles or companies blameless, and Dana sometimes wondered about that. But the truth was, in crashes involving CAVs and human drivers, it was almost always the human driver at fault. CAVs had proven themselves to be more consistent, more stable, and less erratic than human drivers. They were not distracted as easily or as often, never tried to beat a changing traffic light or speed past an approaching train, and had no interest in pushing themselves to test their power, speed, or endurance.

So the fact that Kyle’s long list of closed cases often found in favor of the CAV wasn’t surprising. Nevertheless, Dana often found herself wishing he didn’t reach that conclusion quite so fast.

Standing behind her looking over her shoulder, he’d moved closer. She knew, without turning, because the heavy breathing was now only inches from her ear.

“New perfume?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“You smell different. New shampoo?”

“Nope.”

“Different soap, maybe?”

She pictured him sniffing the air around her. Or, worse, sniffing her.

“Same soap.”

“Something about you is different. Are you …?”

It was time to end this. She shifted in her chair, sending it backward into his foot, then turned around and was “surprised” to see the wheel of the chair pressing on his shoe and the edge of her seat against his leg.

“Oh, sorry! I didn’t realize you were that close.”

“No harm done,” he assured her, reaching down to lightly rub his knee. “You still working on that?” he nodded toward her computer.

“Hmm-hmm,” she muttered, studying the screen again to indicate she was too distracted to talk.

“Stop sign was vandalized. The town didn’t update its GIS records. Like the company says, it’s their fault. Can’t you close it?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she started. “I—”

“You have ‘a feeling,”’ he finished for her. “Here we go.”

She hated when he did that. But it had been years since she took him seriously when he said those things in that tone of voice. That had stopped after working with him for two months, when she almost caved in the wake of his response to her first “feeling.”

That first time, still new to the unit and trying to find her way, she’d almost let him intimidate her because she was half-doubting herself: Had she really been on to something, or was it more an attempt to prove she could do the job?

But she stuck with it, and it paid off. Driver vs. CAV, and the driver swore the robo had swerved into his lane. There was activity to the right of the CAV that might have made it swerve toward the driver, but a check of the black box showed it swerved no more than a foot and did not cross the double yellow line that separated the vehicles.

On a hunch, Dana checked the driver’s cell-phone records and found that he’d been on the phone at the time of the accident. It was him, not the robo, that had swerved across the
double yellow line.

Two lessons learned: Always trust her gut, and never listen to Kyle about such matters.

It took her a while to stop railing at herself for letting him come as close as he did to shutting her down, but she finally landed in place of self-understanding: she was navigating new territory with insufficient training. She was allowed a few missteps; she could forgive herself. Afterward, she did more than that, using the episode to redefine their relationship.

Never one to be intimidated (easily or otherwise), not even as a child, she would never again be bullied by a bureaucrat now that she was 35, carried a badge, and believed (knew) that she was better suited for this work than he was.

“Here I go,” she corrected him. “It’s not gonna affect your life much.”

“Except what it’s gonna do to our clearance rate.”

“You mean my clearance rate?”

“Ours includes yours. You slow up, we slow up.”

“I’ll work this extra fast.”

“Work what? The cops confirmed the CAV went through the stop sign. No one’s contesting that. The cops confirmed the stop sign was vandalized. No one’s contesting that. The town didn’t update its GIS file. You wanna blame the robo? It’s like, someone blindfolds you, then blames you for walking into something. How much more open-shut can you get?”

“Looks that way.”

“Except you know better.”

“I just want to leave it open a little longer so I can—”

“You can have a little more time on this. But don’t take too long. And don’t neglect your other cases.”

“I never do,” she answered, fingers busy on her keyboard, focusing on her screen, as a way to end the conversation.

Finally sensing their talk was over, Kyle walked away, triggering a new train of thought for Dana: What kind of ratings was he getting on his quarterly evaluations? But why go there? For years he’d been part of a federal bureaucracy that valued meeting quotas and demonstrating its own skewered sense of “efficiency.” She knew exactly the kind of evaluations he was getting. And he knew exactly how to keep getting them. And keep his job.

She peered at the screen for real now, hoping to find something new. Kyle was right about one thing: It did seem like an open-and-shut case. The CAV had functioned perfectly until it encountered the vandalized stop sign.

So what was bothering her? What was wrong?

• Even accounting for manufacturing, swapping out a gas-powered vehicle for an electric one results in 50 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The break-even point is about 18,000 miles, which the average person drives in a year and a half. The benefits are greater for older cars built under less stringent environment standards and in places with green electric grids. The only exceptions are for plug-in hybrids that run mostly on batteries or a second car that isn’t driven much. (Grist)
• Rail projects are still moving forward despite the Trump administration’s animosity toward them. (Quartz)
• Robotaxis seem to be getting glitchier as Waymo grows, and the cities it’s expanding into are unprepared. (New York Times)
• Cities too often ignore medium-density “missing middle” development that encourages walking. (CNU Public Square)
• Walking to school has gotten a lot harder than many adults remember. (Upworthy)
• A town just outside Boston prioritized safety over speed, and the result has been zero traffic deaths over the past three years. (Christian Science Monitor)
• Richmond announced plans for quick-build safety improvements at 700 intersections as part of its Vision Zero program. (WRIC)
• Gov. Mike Braun may have been on shaky legal ground when he extended Indiana’s gas tax holiday. (Indianapolis Star; paywall)
• A Houston developer is building a 12-story, 2,000-space parking garage that takes up an entire city block. (Chron)
• The increasing popularity of giant U.S.-style trucks and SUVs in Australia has led to an uptick in pedestrian deaths, even as driver and passenger fatalities continue to decline. (The Conversation)
• In Bogota, bike advocates are fighting back against the gender stereotype that cycling is only for men. (The Guardian)
• The massive Grand Paris Express metro expansion will feature 68 new architect-designed transit stations. (Arch Daily)

The oil industry just posted some of its best profits in years while Americans pay more at the pump

President Donald Trump promised to “cut your energy prices in half” within his first year in office using his “energy dominance” agenda. Instead, energy dominance has produced record profits for oil companies and higher gas prices for everyone else.

Eight of the world’s largest oil companies made a combined $93 billion in profit in the second quarter of 2026, nearly double what those companies made last year, and more than $1 billion in profit every single day. The increase in profits is connected to the US-Israeli war on Iran, which disrupted oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and pushed global oil prices above $126 per barrel at their peak.

ExxonMobil reported $14.5 billion in profit, its highest quarterly total in four years, while Chevron posted $12 billion, its highest quarterly profit in at least six years. Shell earned $9.8 billion, its second-highest quarterly profit ever, and Saudi Aramco topped the list at more than $33 billion.

US refiners also raked in the profits. Valero Energy reported $3.7 billion in net income, up from $714 million a year earlier and its most profitable quarter on record by earnings per share. HF Sinclair’s profit roughly quadrupled year-over-year, and PBF Energy swung from a loss to over $1 billion in profit.

None of this windfall is reaching consumers. The national average price for a gallon of gas was $4.01 on August 10, and prices are higher than a year ago in every state. Refiners say fuel inventories will be slow to rebuild, meaning the high prices are likely to stick around even as the price of crude oil drops.

Oil companies aren’t using their record profits to expand drilling or refining, either. ExxonMobil alone returned $9.4 billion to shareholders in the second quarter through dividends and stock buybacks, and Shell started a new multibillion-dollar buyback program of its own. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has pointed to record US energy production as evidence that the administration’s regulatory rollbacks are “unlocking the full potential of our domestic energy resources.” But record production and record profits have not translated into lower prices, expanded supply, or any clear benefit for American taxpayers.

In fact, Congress and the Trump administration are giving the oil and gas industry a tax break for drilling on public lands. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, cut the onshore royalty rate from 16.67 percent back to 12.5 percent. Interior has also moved to make it cheaper to drill on public lands, proposing a rule that would cut cleanup bonds from $500,000 to $25,000 and shrink the public comment period on lease sales from 90 days to 10. Taxpayers for Common Sense estimates the royalty rate decrease alone has already cost the public $489 million, a figure it warns could climb into the billions as 2026 lease sales get underway.

Oil and gas production, Converse County, Wyoming. BLM Wyoming

This isn’t the “energy dominance” Americans were promised. Trump’s declaration of a “national energy emergency” was based on the need to bring down energy prices for Americans, arguing that inadequate domestic supply “causes and makes worse the high energy prices that devastate Americans.” His “Unleashing American Energy” executive order relied on that “energy emergency” to justify a number of policy actions ostensibly aimed at increasing energy production, presumably to increase domestic supply and bring prices down.

If there were an actual energy emergency, and if the Trump administration was serious about addressing it, the administration would have spent the past year and a half investing in a rapid build-out of inexpensive domestic energy sources like solar, wind, and battery storage. But the administration has actually done the opposite, putting up roadblocks to renewable energy development and paying developers nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to abandon offshore wind projects that were already underway. Meanwhile, the administration is doing everything it can to rush oil, gas, and coal projects by cutting corners on environmental reviews and avoiding public comment whenever it thinks it can get away with it. Interior’s current plan would compress reviews that once took up to two years into a single month, and cut the public comment period for projects expected to cause environmental harm down to about 10 days.

This strategy is working splendidly for oil and gas companies. For American families, it’s been a disaster that’s squeezing them when they’re already struggling with rising costs in all other areas of their lives. Adding insult to injury, oil and gas companies are locking Americans out of their public lands by nominating and leasing public lands they don’t intend to drill, tying up both the land itself and management agency resources with unserious nominations and leases. The real energy emergency is the oil and gas takeover of our national public lands at the expense of preserving some of America’s most valuable natural places.

The post Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda is only helping oil and gas companies appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Updated on August 11, 2026, to reflect the proposition name. Originally published on January 16, 2026.

For advocates working at the intersection of environmental protection and climate-smart growth, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has long been a source of both pride and frustration. While it has been a critical tool to protect our natural and working lands, its procedural delays have often been used to stall projects essential to a low-carbon future: dense infill housing and transit-oriented development in our existing communities.

In July 2025, however, at the urging of Governor Newsom, the California legislature passed some of the most impactful changes to CEQA since its inception. Taken together, the two bills (AB 130 and SB 131) provide robust statutory CEQA exemptions for infill housing and housing element rezonings, require the state to map infill areas where exemptions would apply, and narrow the scope of the administrative record, helping to curtail anti-housing litigation.

Despite these monumental changes that address the barriers to critical infill development, California’s business lobby and sprawl developers were left unsatisfied. Now, they are proposing a ballot initiative that would make far more radical changes to the law. After gathering enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, this is now called Proposition 45.

While the rhetoric of the measure (initially called Building an Affordable California Act, or BACA) seems to be aligned with urbanist goals and those of the broader abundance and affordability movements, the actual policy details and mechanics of the initiative—and the progress we’ve already achieved in the legislature last year—suggest that the costs it brings far outweigh any potential benefits.

Below, we outline seven reasons why the measure should be rejected (click to read more):

1. Major Reforms Have Already Been Enacted

For years, a primary objective for California’s urbanists was to stop the abuse of environmental law against projects that genuinely help the environment: dense, transit-oriented housing.
In a landmark shift for the state, that goal has largely been realized. Following years of advocacy by urbanists, the legislature passed a clean statutory CEQA exemption for infill housing. AB 130, which Greenbelt Alliance was proud to support, is already being utilized across California, allowing builders to move forward with climate-friendly housing in high-opportunity areas like Palo Alto or Beverly Hills without the threat of being endlessly delayed by the environmental review process. While there is room for technical refinements, the fundamental issue at hand—the misuse of environmental laws to delay environmentally-friendly housing projects—has largely been addressed.

2. Everything is “Essential”

As the saying goes, “the devil is in the details”, and that’s certainly true for the BACA initiative. While modest on the surface, BACA creates a completely new set of rules for what it calls “essential” projects. So what, exactly, is an “essential project”?

The list is incredibly broad. Under Article 2, Section 21013, “essential projects” include housing, water, transportation, clean energy, transmission, broadband, and healthcare infrastructure. In practice, this definition encompasses a wide range of large-scale developments. For example, new freeways and existing freeway expansions would qualify as “essential transportation” projects; large greenfield sprawl developments would be treated as “essential” housing projects; and new dams and reservoirs would qualify as “essential” water projects. The definition even includes all “related and ancillary infrastructure,” meaning that highway interchanges, utility extensions, and water pipelines that enable sprawl developments also receive streamlined approval. All of these are enormous projects in terms of size and scale, with major potential environmental impacts. Yet, just like an apartment building in an urban area, under BACA, they would qualify for a significantly truncated review process.

In effect, this new CEQA process mirrors the fundamental flaw of its predecessor. While the old system failed to exempt low or no-impact projects from excessive review, the new one errs in the opposite direction, fast-tracking high-risk developments with significant potential for harm.

3. All Timelines Are Not Created Equal

The BACA initiative imposes strict timelines for this new class of projects that it deems “essential”: the environmental review process can take no more than one year. On the surface, a one-year limit on an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) seems reasonable. And for certain projects, like an apartment building on a parking lot in downtown San Francisco, or a townhome development in an LA suburb, it would be.

However, the measure’s definition of “essential” includes highways, dams, large-scale subdivisions, and other major projects. The environmental review required for projects at this scale cannot be done in a single year. Surveying hundreds if not thousands (or even tens of thousands) of acres of undisturbed and undeveloped land for species nesting patterns and habitat, water pollution impacts, and other environmental concerns physically cannot be accomplished within the timeframe laid out in the initiative. By forcing these projects into such a condensed timeline, we will be creating a system that overlooks genuine environmental harm in favor of speed.

For projects with unambiguous environmental benefits, such as housing developments within already urbanized areas, such speed makes sense. Many of the project types considered by this measure do not have the same clear, unambiguous benefits.

4. Restrictive Alternatives

One of CEQA’s most critical tools for preventing environmental harm is its alternative analysis provision, which allows for the identification of better project locations and designs. Currently, CEQA requires agencies to analyze a “reasonable range of alternatives” that could reduce environmental impacts, including different sites, reduced intensity options, and designs that avoid sensitive resources. This is how agencies can say, “this housing should be built downtown on a parking lot instead of on farmland,” or “this highway expansion has an alternative transit solution.”

BACA restricts this to just three options: the proposed project, one alternative designed by the applicant themselves (which doesn’t even need to be at a different location), and “no project.” The applicant’s alternative can be a slightly modified version of their original proposal on the same site. This eliminates the core mechanism for steering projects away from environmentally sensitive locations toward more appropriate sites, exactly the tool needed to prevent sprawl, protect open space, and ensure development happens in the right places.

5. The Evidentiary Standard

Maybe the most radical change incorporated in the ballot measure is to CEQA’s standard of review. Right now, CEQA allows a lead agency (generally a city or county) to use its own discretion to explore project alternatives and negotiate environmental mitigations. BACA proposes to eliminate this by requiring that environmental impacts only be found significant if they violate objective, quantifiable standards already in existing law when the project was proposed, which doesn’t sound inherently unreasonable! 

However, the measure doesn’t actually require jurisdictions to adopt such standards; instead, it exploits their absence. If numerical thresholds don’t already exist for resources like oak woodlands, groundwater, or wildlife corridors, impacts to them essentially can’t be found significant regardless of severity. A genuine objective standards approach would mandate jurisdictions adopt protective thresholds and update them as science improves. This measure rewards weak standards, freezes them at application date, and prevents improvements based on new knowledge.

6. Ballot Box Permanence

Finally, one of the greatest flaws of the measure is its rigidity. Should it pass, BACA would require a 2/3rds vote of the legislature to amend.

California has a long, storied history with ballot box governance, where initiatives become impossible to adjust as new problems arise. The 2/3rds requirement virtually guarantees the law could never be changed, regardless of what issues may arise. An unchangeable measure, with foreseeable negative impacts for the state, may have lasting consequences for generations.

Some of the project types included in this measure, such as clean energy or transmission infrastructure, may benefit from the types of streamlining being considered if careful, targeted changes were made. Rather than a broad, clunky initiative that will be extremely difficult to change, we should advocate for those reforms through the legislative cleanup process already underway.

7. The Costs Are Just Too High

California faces converging affordability crises: insurers fleeing the state, utility rates climbing, and municipal budgets straining under unsustainable costs. All of these issues stem from the same source: decades of sprawling outward, often into fire-prone areas, leaving us with infrastructure we cannot afford to maintain and risks we cannot afford to insure.

BACA will accelerate these failures by trading short-term speed for permanent costs. By gutting CEQA’s alternatives analysis—the primary tool for steering projects away from costly, high-risk locations—this limits agencies to the developer’s preferred site, one alternative the developer designs themselves, and “no project.” It freezes environmental standards at the date of application, rewarding jurisdictions with weak protections. And it requires agencies to approve permits within strict timelines regardless of fiscal consequences, because most cities lack the quantitative standards BACA requires to find fiscal impacts “significant.”

The result: even if we build some things faster today, we’ll be paying the tab forever. Even more homes in fire zones will continue to destabilize our insurance markets. More infrastructure extensions will push up our utility rates. More sprawling subdivisions that generate less revenue than they cost to maintain will ensure even higher taxes. BACA promises affordability through speed but delivers the opposite: cheaper to build, but financially ruinous to sustain.

At a time when people are struggling to make ends meet, and when the federal government is doing all it can to roll back our environmental protections, the last thing we need is to double down on the failed policies we have tried for decades and know do not work.

Proposition 45 will hurt the environment and your wallet.

Greenbelt Alliance strongly opposes Proposition 45 and urges voters to vote NO on 45 this November.

The post Chamber-Backed CEQA Initiative Is A Proposition Californians Can’t Afford: No on Prop 45 appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

This article Why bravery and heartbreak are essential to organizing was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

I could tell that Yotam Marom’s debut book, “For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness,” might shift how movement workers think — about telling the truth, and about the personal and political transformation actually required to win and wield power — as I compared notes with two field organizers fighting data centers around the country. 

We had been knocking on hundreds of doors in every kind of neighborhood: Black and brown homeowners in big cities, Latino farmworkers and white farmers in rural towns, parents and students and elders in watersheds across the West and exurbs in the South, all disgusted with data centers. Everyday people are blocking big tech expansion in real time, out of love for their communities and each other, and the ride feels full of possibility. 

Could we move people who’ve never been in motion before — but are now packing zoning meetings, turning each other out in the hundreds, and stopping billion-dollar data centers — into durable political realignment? Could we make the potential crash of the inflated, overextended tech economy into something that could remake politics and the economy — in time to stop the consolidation of authoritarianism?

Those possibilities are real, and that’s why we’re working as hard as we are. But as we compared notes, I felt that familiar tug of dread. All three of us on the phone were veterans of movement moments, big and small. We had all seen coalitions we’d built simmer in misalignment and anger, eventually turning inward or breaking. We had been in room after room where we kept pushing towards an urgent goal, papering over real contradictions in order to get to the next action, the next march, the next move. But we didn’t have a plan to fundamentally shift power, and even when we won, more often than not, our opponents would adjust as we waned or broke, and our people would be worse off than when we started.  

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The three of us talked through how the anti-data center movement might avoid these traps. How could this exploding resistance shift the balance of power at a pivotal time? But when one of the organizers on the line said, “have you read this book, ‘Powerlessness and You,’ or something?” I laughed and let out a breath. I knew what book she meant, and I was thrilled she had found it, too. 

“For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness” should be in every organizer’s backpack, dog-eared and a little mangled, because it is a primer for exactly the kind of practice we must take on to meet the challenges we are facing now. 

Marom got his start as a leading organizer at the heart of Occupy Wall Street, and went on to support the leaders building some of the most impactful movement organizations of the last decades, like Dream Defenders, the Sunrise Movement and Uncommitted. He’s also supported us at my own organization, People’s Tech Project, and multiple other tech justice groups as we’ve engaged in the sleeves-up hard work of crafting strategy to take down the ascendant tech oligarchy. 

In “For Louder Days,” he takes the story of his life — from the hopes and heartbreaks of Occupy, to the growth, setbacks and contradictions of the movement to end the Israeli occupation — and spells out his lucid diagnoses of the most critical stumbling blocks of the American left in its fight for hearts, minds and actual power. 

At the core of his assessment: Our movements are woefully underdeveloped in the practice of generative conflict for the sake of good strategy — and that underdevelopment warps and buries the steady love that drove us to come together in this work in the first place.  

Millions in the streets

“For Louder Days” opens in the middle of Occupy at its height, October 2011, when the occupation of Zuccotti Park was spreading nationally and getting buttressed by veteran organizers as it built a realignment of American politics in real time. With generosity, Marom crisply relates how he responded to a call from Spanish comrades for a global day of action, and helped lead the expansion of Occupy into an international project. He and his comrades had a clear hypothesis — that this action would capture the energy boiling over after an attempted eviction from the park and grow the movement far larger — and they worked, heads down, to test it. 

He walks us through the meetings, coalitions, struggles and planning that made it possible. (I’ve never before read a book about meetings that I couldn’t put down.)

He captures the joy and dizzying hope that we’ve all felt at the denouement of those sweaty 20-hour days for weeks on end. He describes what it felt like on Oct. 15, 2011, with 80,000 in the street at Times Square and millions joining globally, to be in the center of the universe as Occupy went worldwide. 

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators converge in Times Square, New York City on Oct. 15, 2011. (Getty/Mario Tama)

“I have been sobered by the history of revolutions that came before and my own small defeats at the hands of this opponent we’re squaring off against,” he writes. “But now — despite all of this good sense, despite my cynicism, despite the layers of armor I have put around my heart along the way — I can’t help but be swept away by this moment. I am completely under its spell.”

The global day of action was powerful and effective. Eighty countries saw supporting protests. Forty-five new occupations were launched around the United States, from big cities to suburbs to small, bright-red communities. 

The group that came together to plan Oct. 15 was ready to plan the next escalation for Nov. 17.  But when challenged by another faction inside Occupy’s leadership — because of course, there is leadership, even (especially!) in an ostensibly leaderless project and movement — Marom was pressured to shut down the ad hoc group inside Occupy that pulled off the day of action. He tells the all-too-familiar story of falling apart: how they lost time as they struggled with each other and with themselves, and lost momentum and membership, eventually leading to the end of the occupation after 57 days. He lays bare the battles whirling inside him as he made the choice to shut down that ad hoc group — a choice that contributed to the end of Occupy. 

This account begins an incredible progression of chapters showing us what Marom learned in the next decade-plus as he advised, facilitated, flanked and organized with the leaders of many other movements. What he saw was a crucial common thread that he calls the “politics of powerlessness.” 

The politics of powerlessness

Marom describes the politics of powerlessness as a deep ambivalence towards actually winning and holding power. When we attack or destroy leadership, weaponize hurt and identity, keep ourselves “enclosed and safe and comfortable,” and refuse risks, we are choosing powerlessness. When we avoid conflict, hide from the grief and loss inherent in making hard choices, or follow instinct and habit, we neither win nor grow. “[The politics of powerlessness are] reinforced by ideas that are easy to reach for, even if they are thin and by habit, and routine,” Marom writes. “It goes hand in hand with an instinct to turn away from the brokenness in each other rather than a commitment to turn toward each other whenever at all possible.” 

Marom goes on to break down, with real compassion for all of us and for himself, the totally understandable and human reasons why organizers choose the politics of powerlessness, while making plain, story after story, the choices movements and their leaders have to make to actually get and keep power. That includes strategy that forces us to say no to almost everything so we can say yes to what we truly need to do to win. A reckoning with the rank that exists in all groups and what it means to hold leadership. Balancing an attention to organizational belonging with an uncompromising focus on purpose. A rekindling of our sense of deep love, for each other and for those we’ve hurt and who have hurt us, across all lines and borders, for the sake of the world we hunger to build.

Marom hasn’t written this book as a hectoring finger-wag at a movement that has lost its way and its right to lead. He wrote it because he has skin in the game, and he has earned a very grounded belief that we can feel, survive and get through that necessary grief in order to build the mature people, organizations and movements that we need.  

Previous Coverage

Movements cannot shy away from conflict

In the chapter called “Good Strategy and Telling the Truth,” Marom tells a story about CAAAV — a seminal working-class Asian organization working on housing across New York City. In 2021, CAAAV’s leaders decided to pull back from some beautiful, hopeful organizing in order to choose transformative campaigns that could make them truly powerful. 

The choice was heartbreaking. Instead of continuing to build committees of working-class Chinese, Bengali and Korean tenants in Queensbridge Houses, a public housing development in Queens, they made the choice to kill that project and throw their weight — and all their Chinese organizers — into an under-resourced but fast-growing campaign in Chinatown.  Marom tells the story with reverence and respect as CAAAV faced the loss and grief that would come, as they chose to abandon some potential members and lose staff to chase real strategy and power. 

Marom tells us why taking on those losses and grief were worth it for CAAAV, and what became possible because of their bravery. Because CAAAV leaders were wise and human enough to close a chapter and invest their resources elsewhere, they won big victories, and learned that winning and moving to offense would transform conditions for every working-class person in the city. This was a fundamental shift in their strategy. By choosing to focus, CAAAV and its sibling group CAAAV Voice were in a strong position to win giant campaigns and organize major new bases. It also enabled them to work with other brilliant immigrant organizations like DRUM Beats and the Democratic Socialists of America to back a long-shot socialist mayoral candidate — Zohran Mandani — who could make the vision of the people real. 

Accompanied through hard choices

I carried the book with me all spring across the country, as I organized with tech workers in the Southwest, data center fighters in Philadelphia and Memphis, and comrades across the tech justice movement. Because Marom knits together the hard-won lessons of failure with how making hard choices can transform our ability to win, they felt practical and applicable in real time. This was particularly true for me, since I’d had practice making those choices myself. Marom and another extraordinarily skilled facilitator, BJ Star of the Wildfire Project, have worked with my group and others fighting an ascendant and brutally damaging tech industry in this wild moment. 

I worked with a small group of organizers to break one organization into three, build and sunset teams, and try a wildly ambitious alignment process with leaders of 15 tech justice organizations. As some of the bravest and most beautiful tech justice organizations struggled together over years, there were many days when I felt that we could win if we had the accompaniment and hope of BJ Star and Yotam Marom. 

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While we can’t have that, at least not yet, the DNA of what they do and the lineages that shaped them is knit through many of the organizers and organizations I love best. In the meantime, this book is a ridiculously good start. When I see young organizers in Missouri and seasoned elders in Oakland and friends on a mountaintop in Peru all saying that this book stirred them, made them cry, it gives me a lot of confidence that we can change in the ways we need to.  

There are many ways I remain uncourageous in this revolutionary life. There is honesty I need to bring to old comrades even if it causes us pain. I could bring necessary conflicts to the surface in tech justice organizing, even if it risks a rupture, or disquieting and unbalancing something that we all deeply want to work. I could offer and receive love from unlikely people, that I’m holding myself back from giving, from getting.

“For Louder Days” gets into those contradictions in a way that will stay with you for a long time, and maybe change you. I hope this book can accompany you as you make your way, fight, love, and above all, make the hard choices necessary for good, clear strategy, and for your own transformation. 

This article Why bravery and heartbreak are essential to organizing was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

North Carolina regulators are weighing Duke Energy’s rate-hike requests that could raise power bills for customers across the state.

By Autumn Bracey

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson said he will not sign a proposed settlement in the Duke Energy Progress rate case that would raise residential electric bills by about 6.8% over the next two years.

The utility’s original filing had sought an 18.1% increase on residential rates over two years. Duke announced a settlement last week with the North Carolina Public Staff and other parties, and in testimony before the North Carolina Utilities Commission, Kendal Bowman, North Carolina president for Duke Energy Progress and Duke Energy Carolinas, said the residential rate increase would now be 6.8% over two years.

“Duke brought down their rate increase to 6.8%, but that’s still too high for families and still more than the company needs to cover its investments,” Jackson said. “We’re not signing it.”

…

Regulators hold hearings

On Tuesday, the North Carolina Utilities Commission held hearings on the proposed increase.

WCNC spoke with NC WARN, a nonprofit that educates the public about Duke Energy’s practices. The group says that while customers have seen some wins with lower rates in the past, the new requests are a reminder of why it’s important to keep paying attention.

“I think it’s really important we question the reason for these rate increases,” Sara Heilman, clean energy strategist for NC WARN, said. “We understand the connection and correlation between requested rate increases and Duke Energy’s business model, which really serves to profit its executives and shareholders at the expense of affordability for North Carolinians.”

Rising bill despite falling usage

Heilman also pointed out that per-capita electricity use has actually declined over time, which she says makes it even more important for policymakers to scrutinize the data before approving any rate hikes.

“Our allies at the Energy and Policy Institute show customers, even using the same amount of electricity over the same years, are still seeing increases in their power bills,” Heilman said. “It really has a lot to do with Duke Energy’s investments in fossil fuels, like fracked-gas power plants, and the connection between those investments and the affordability crisis.”

Continue reading

The post NC AG Jeff Jackson rejects Duke Energy rate settlement, calls 6.8% hike ‘still too high’ — WCNC Charlotte appeared first on NC WARN.

By Renee Umsted

As temperatures in the Triangle soar, Duke Energy customers are noticing higher bills.

On social media, customers claim they’re not using more energy, or that they’re trying to use less. But they still say that bills are getting higher each month, and are more expensive than this time last year.

Are high temperatures to blame for expensive energy bills?

It’s summertime. It’s hot and humid. Your air conditioning system is working harder to cool your home.

And if you ask Duke Energy, that’s the story.

“Cooling demand across North Carolina was 43% above normal by July 4 following multiple periods of extreme heat, according to federal weather data,” the Charlotte-based company wrote in an Aug. 7 news release. “For many customers, increased air-conditioning use is the primary reason energy use and bills may be higher than normal.”

Is it Duke Energy’s fault?

But there are other factors to blame for higher bills, said Sara Heilman, clean energy strategist at NC WARN, a nonprofit that advocates for a transition to clean energy and promotes energy and climate justice.

“I think the most central thing contributing to rising electric bills is that there is a direct correlation between profit for Duke Energy executives and investors, and rising costs for North Carolinians,” Heilman said in a video interview.

Duke Energy reported $5 billion in profits last year, The News & Observer previously reported. Last week, it reported its strongest-ever second quarter (April through June), with more than $1 billion in net income.

When the utility builds new infrastructure such as a power plant or high-voltage power line, customers pay for the cost of the project, plus an additional percentage as profit, Heilman said.

“There’s this incentive for Duke to be building as much as possible, even when it’s not necessarily needed,” Heilman said.

Continue reading

The post Your electric bill is up. Is it because of the heat or Duke Energy? — The News & Observer appeared first on NC WARN.

The author, Betsy Pfeiffer, was a UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) Fellow and Greenbelt Alliance research collaborator between February and May 2026.

How do we help Californians understand that building homes in existing communities is good for commutes, wallets, and the environment? Over the first half of 2026, I had the opportunity to work with Greenbelt Alliance to identify existing housing and climate narrative strategies and develop guidance to increase impact.

To understand how Greenbelt Alliance can communicate this link more effectively to Californians, I consolidated existing research, recent polling done by EMC Research, and stakeholder input into a best practices playbook for communicating about climate and housing in California.

According to polling from 2025, California voters’ top five issues are cost of living, housing, crime, traffic, and climate change. Local land-use policies that prioritize infill development can address four out of five of those issues, but that same poll also showed that most voters don’t understand that connection. When asked what local governments could do about climate change, only 3% of respondents said housing policy, and a third of all respondents had no answer at all.

California has historically prioritized housing development on undeveloped land outside of existing communities—known as sprawl. These policy choices have normalized long commutes while driving up the cost of living, increasing traffic, and undermining Californians’ health and quality of life. These land use patterns also lead to more Californians living in areas that are vulnerable to wildfire and floods, which fuels insurance pressures that drive up housing costs statewide. In turn, pollution and global warming gases from so many long commutes are contributing to climate change.

While the links between housing and climate change are clear to many of us working in the field, they can be difficult to talk about in a way that resonates with the general public. There is a growing body of research on the most effective ways to communicate about the environment and housing separately, but little guidance exists on how to connect them.

Day-to-Day Life Resonates

The single most consistent finding from the research, the polling, and the advocates I interviewed is that messages rooted in tangible, everyday benefits outperform everything else. Quality-of-life messages combine those top four concerns from the poll—cost of living, housing, affordability, and climate change—by emphasizing that more housing in existing neighborhoods means less time in traffic, less money spent on gas, and less impact on the environment.

Shorter commutes, walkable neighborhoods, and living closer to family are messaging winners.

The Environment Belongs in The Story

Environmental messages poll well in California, and research suggests that pairing them with quality-of-life framings strengthens the narrative, but the right environmental angle varies by audience.

Urban Californians, for example, seem to respond most to framings that treat care for the environment or fighting climate change as broad values, not aligned with specific actions.

When speaking to rural and suburban residents, conservation messages, in contrast, may be more effective. And framing matters—”Protecting open space” earned strong support, but “stopping sprawl” did not. This difference reflects a broader best practice principle to link messages to existing concerns and keep the framing proactive and solutions-oriented.

Developing a positive framing for stories about disaster avoidance is a bigger challenge. Fire and flood hazards are among the most effective ways to connect housing and climate change, but to work as a housing development narrative, these messages need to execute a pivot that can be difficult to pull off. Moving from why “not to build” in certain places to “why to build” in others can be difficult to communicate effectively and simply in a single message. For now, wildfire threats and insurance pressures seem to land most powerfully with rural and suburban Californians, but urban residents are beginning to share those concerns as climate impacts reach more of the state.

The research demonstrates that quality of life framing applies broadly, but a more nuanced approach is needed when talking to urban versus suburban/rural audiences. Additionally, staying safe from fire and flood is a promising narrative for all Californians, but the messaging needs to be refined and tested. Finally, simpler is better: trying to combine all of these into a single message risks diluting the impact of each.

The Big Picture

Greenbelt Alliance and allies have the opportunity to shift the current public perspective on both housing and the environment to emphasize that housing is a climate solution. The quality of life plus environment pairing has strong evidential support, but it has yet to be tested. And while stakeholder input suggests that separating audiences into urban versus suburban/rural is a reasonable starting point, it’s an inference rather than a tested finding. 

Encouragingly, Californians already care about what infill housing can deliver: shorter commutes, lower costs, walkable neighborhoods, land protection, and a healthier climate.

Header Photo: View from Berkeley Hills. By Chris LaBasco Photography

The post Build California Here appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

With more than two decades of advocacy efforts and many twists and turns, the site known as Tesla Park in eastern Alameda County needs protection once again. 

In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom, the Legislature, and the California Department of Parks and Recreation reached a $31 million agreement to protect the Alameda-Tesla Expansion Area from off-highway vehicle (OHV) recreation on the land.

We are now asking our supporters to reach out to legislators to ask them to support establishing Tesla as a State Natural Reserve. We need your urgent help because State Parks plans to release the general plan and Environmental Impact Report by the end of the year. We cannot let Tesla’s irreplaceable resource values be damaged by short-term thinking. Send an email to Assemblymember Bauer-Kahan and Senator McNerney in a few easy steps using this action alert!

Tesla has natural and cultural resources of statewide significance that exceed the statute for Reserve classification, from extraordinary biodiversity to an essential critical linkage wildlife corridor to important historic and prehistoric cultural resources. Learn more here. 

Historic Fight

With the mobilization of a coalition of organizations, led by the Save Tesla Park campaign, Greenbelt Alliance helped fight this battle for Tesla Park—and won. The land has rare ecological value and contains an abundance of highly sensitive natural and cultural resources. Learn more here. 

This agreement was part of the 2021 Natural Resources Budget Trailer Bill AB 155/SB 155, which ended plans to expand the Carnegie State Vehicular Recreation Area (SVRA) into the 3,100-acre Tesla Park and provides resources to reallocate this high-environmental-impact activity to a different, more appropriate location. 

For at least two decades, Tesla Park was at risk of becoming a destructive off-highway vehicle/motorized recreation park as an expansion project for the Carnegie SVRA. In 2019, Governor Newsom vetoed legislation that would have preserved Tesla Park, and in June 2021, threatened to line-item veto a Tesla Park protection item in the budget unless it was removed. Ultimately, the Tesla budget language was passed.

Now, this land will become a new unit of the state park system, under the control of State Parks and the Parks and Recreation Commission. A planning process is currently being conducted to determine the classification of Tesla Park as a unit of the park system and its management and use plan, with $1 million allocated to the planning process. 

Greenbelt Alliance and the coalition to Save Tesla Park are working to have Tesla classified as a State Natural Reserve, which can provide low-intensity public access, education, and enjoyment, including hiking, nature appreciation, cultural resource interpretation and tours,
and ensure that its irreplaceable natural and cultural resources are protected forever.

With information from Friends of Tesla Park.

The post Tell Legislators to Make Tesla Park a Natural Reserve appeared first on Greenbelt Alliance.

I went for a run this morning, on a paved trail that runs along a little creek surrounded by a few loblolly pine trees and some red maples, a little bit of urban nature surrounded by houses, streets, and suburbia. It was humid in the early summer morning, with mist steaming up off the concrete […]

The National Park Service is reportedly weighing a land swap that would allow a data center to be built inside Prince William Forest Park in northern Virginia, one of the D.C. area’s largest green spaces and a Civil War-era site.

Developer Highland Digital owns an “inholding,” land inside the park’s boundaries that was privately held before the park was established, and was considering building a data center there. But that site has wetlands and streams that complicate permitting, so Highland Digital came up with a workaround: swap its wetland-heavy inholding for other Park Service land nearby that would be easier to develop. It hired lobbyist Jeff Small, a former senior Interior department official in the first Trump administration, to work on the swap in May 2025.

According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the deal looks balanced on paper but actually leaves “the developer com[ing] out ahead” with land “primed for development.” Representative Eugene Vindman’s office asked the Park Service in mid-July whether it even has legal authority to trade park land without congressional approval and says it never got a response, while Highland Digital has since withdrawn a permitting application and scrapped a public meeting without explanation. Since becoming Interior secretary, Doug Burgum has been a vocal advocate of artificial intelligence and data centers.

Huffman, Dexter launch investigation into Energy Fuels execs

Members of the House Natural Resources Committee have opened an investigation into whether Energy Fuels executives traded on advance knowledge of President Donald Trump’s decision to shrink Bears Ears National Monument by more than 90 percent. The company’s CEO, Ross Bhappu, bought 74,000 shares on July 7, the largest insider purchase in company history, and Chairman Bruce Hansen bought 4,000 more the next day, just five days before Trump stripped monument protections from nearly 1.4 million acres, including uranium-rich areas the company has eyed for years.

Representatives Jared Huffman and Maxine Dexter say the company’s lobbying ties to the administration, including a former Trump Interior official on retainer, “may have enabled” Bhappu and Hansen to learn of the announcement early, and they’re demanding Energy Fuels’ communications with Interior, Agriculture, and Defense officials.

Quick hits Opinion: Doug Burgum is the real vandal behind Trump’s failed Reflecting Pool renovation

Daily Beast | Bismarck Tribune

Trump’s fire chief defends crackdown on letting wildfires burn

E&E News

Opinion: Proposed changes to federal oil and gas provisions are bad for public land, private property owners and democracy

WyoFile

Organ Pipe monument closes roads to clear path for 2nd border wall construction

Arizona Daily Star

‘A day of infamy’: Construction bulldozes through Big Bend National Park

GearJunkie

Opinion: Why is Burgum licking Trump’s boots?

Dickinson Press

Six takeaways from the slashing of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante

Outside

OnX tool connects Montanans to public land comment opportunities

Bozeman Daily Chronicle

Quote of the day

In the desert, there is no more valuable habitat than where the trees grow… In this arid region, diversity and abundance of plant and animal species is nowhere greater… This is what they chose to destroy first.”

—Former Big Bend biologist Raymond Skiles on border wall construction inside the park, GearJunkie

Picture This

@Interior

A single lightning strike can reach temperatures nearly 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun. At White Sands National Park, that incredible heat can fuse gypsum sand into formations called fulgurites, better known as “fossilized lightning.”

Feature image: Trail along creek in Prince William Forest in Virginia; Source: Diana Robinson/Flickr

The post NPS is quietly considering a data center deal inside a Virginia forest appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

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The post Ease of Registering and Betting Togel123 Link Alternatif appeared first on HAMBACHFOREST.

Meteorologists' report shows record and near-record temperatures across the globe in 2025

Source

Originally published at the “Earth Chxrch” page of Neil Young’s Times-Contrarian. Talen is the religion editor at the Contrarian.  

The distance between our realization and actualization has changed — and it is a tragic dangerous thing that you and I share. Realizing can come in many forms. With the environmental movement the realization was the reading of Silent Spring. (For others among us, it was Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang.) That book by Rachel Carson made the danger from toxic chemicals in the air, water and soil — and our bodies — very real. We saw the danger. We could imagine and fear it. We were motivated to act.

We need to study the distance between realization and actualization, between oppression and revolution, between information and fight-or-flight. That distance, the billionaires and captains of the investor class have discovered, is the key to their control.

The old belief in journalism, and in the courts, and in the common sense of democracy is “If we have the facts, we can act.” In the United States the distance between realization and actualization has become an impassable distance. Our sensory experience of a thing has been blown up and filled with light, with attention-manipulating vibrating light, a bubble of signals the size of Grand Central Station, and we float around inside its delicious weightlessness — and we can’t kill the screen and get out of our chair.

If we become aware of the global heatwave that flared into fires and droughts in the summer of 2023 and is still overheating us, then we have before us endless pages of pixels, featuring the agony and suffering of the innocent of the world. We struggle to walk thousands of miles with climate refugees. We cry with parents of a child overcome by heat. We listen to wise biologists, as systems of natural life die and extinction looms.

So far all this reality on the screen amounts to one big human hesitation. We keep wondering why there is no uprising against the current increasingly silent spring. We are lost in the over-developed realization of danger. Ironically, the realization is increasingly unreal. We are growing a vivid and very convincing realization of a mass mortality event, but we can’t kill the screen and rise from our chair.

The strongmen and the billionaires are aware that AI will gives us as never before the sensation of democracy while pushing any action off the horizon. All-information, all-the-time will leave us overloaded and listless. Big money learned long ago to handle the irony of that in the age of AI. The ordinary computer users would know much more about the truth of their toxins and bullets, union-busting, and tax-evading. But the masters of the universe are secure in the knowledge that we will stay put in our dopamine drop.

Meanwhile the revolution against the Earth killers cannot be put off another day. The disappearance of life of all kinds is only accelerating. The climate change may be irreversible now, but if we don’t try, if we continue to put our hopes in the COP parlays with big oil, if we go on believing that our radical standing up cannot happen — then consumerism, the products and the screens and nonsense wars must prevail. Realize a dead planet with the occasional billionaire bunker…

Now is a moment in our history we cannot get wrong. And there is a battle that can set things right. The data centers multiplying now like an international rash are plundering energy and water, buying off local politicians, and daring us to cross from our realization to our action. The all-partisan uprising against the ugly super-warehouses is heartening. But the State of Virginia already hosts over 600 data centers. This battle may go on for years against the might of Silicon Valley, but in the struggle we will dramatize a clear message… and escape from that cathedral size bubble of pixels.

Will we escape that AI mind-prison? Will we take what we realize over into what we actually do? It’s like remembering how to love.

Remembering How to Love

There would be a moment in the realization-actualization cycle where we could be independent, kill the screen and stand up and walk into media-free reality…. and let’s call that moment The Decision. As the realization becomes the actualization there is a border, a moment when all the information is gathered and we stop, we make the decision to act. We commit.

We shut down the information which favors inactivity, sluggish consideration, endless assessment (although with AI maybe it’s more like a happy druggy sort of drifting… ). When we are finally free of all that, we say “Got It! Let’s Do It! Let’s Go!”

We are simplifying, aren’t we. We are consciously sharpening that learn-decide-act sequence. Why is this important. It’s that this preventable mass mortality event that is taking place — we’re sitting in a chair watching a screen. We could be organizing a drama at the door of Gaza-financing and AI-financing JPMorgan Chase, or we could be singing at a data center-resisting rally, or we could be screaming through the cyclone fence at an ICE concentration camp.

But the screen addiction takes our body far away from the global emergency. In our consumer society nowadays, with the screen the main product, consumerism is in a battle with the crisis of the physical environment. This is a battle for the attention of the consumer.

If the product wins, we lose our lives.

That is the message we tell ourselves at the moment of The Decision, at the start of action. So far for most of us, The Decision and the start of action continue to be a watching-only experience. Even if The Decision is consciously a turning away from this strong medium; even if we know we won’t be able to do our work for the Earth unless we turn away from the screen — chances are we are still watching. Oh yes, lots of the most powerful condemnation of the computer is done at the very computer that is being condemned.

The Revolution Will Not Be Computerized. In the end, we need to sober up. And for most of us, The Decision can’t be vague and shaky. We must make the decision to act with computers or iPhones not in the room.

Let’s practice. Demonstrate to ourselves that we can do it. Practice ending the incoming information. Practice stopping and making the decision. Practice obeying the decision, moving into the action.

Go to the wild Earth every day, walk in the woods, float in the lake. The infinite mystery of the Earth saves us if we let it. That’s the way that the Earth will save herself, taking the humans off-line. Letting us remember how to love.

The post Remembering How to Love Again in the Time of AI appeared first on The Revelator.

Replacing a gasoline car of any age—even a brand-new one—with an electric vehicle will almost always lower overall carbon emissions, according to a new analysis. The findings resolve a key conundrum about making the switch from gasoline to electric vehicles, the researchers say.

Driving an electric vehicle (EV) produces less emissions than driving a gasoline car, and the disparity is growing ever wider as electric grids decarbonize. So it has been obvious for a while that if you’re in the market for a new car the best choice for the environment is an EV. But manufacturing an EV produces more emissions than manufacturing a gasoline car, and this has led to uncertainty about the break-even point.

That is, if you own a gasoline car that works fine now and are considering when to replace it with an EV, should you drive the gasoline car into the ground, staving off the hefty emissions burden of EV manufacture for as long as possible? Or should you replace it as soon as budget allows, and start to reap the benefits of the EV’s much lower operating emissions?

“Even if you scrapped a new gas car, the EV still wins,” says study team member J. Elliott Campbell, chair of the environmental studies department at the University of California in Santa Cruz.  “The environmental advantage of EVs is now crystal clear.”

Campbell and his collaborator Roland Geyer, at the University of California in Santa Barbara, calculated the life-cycle carbon emissions of keeping a gasoline car on the road for 16 years (the typical lifetime of a passenger vehicle) compared to replacing it with an EV.

They considered many different vehicle types and timelines for replacement, as well as electricity sources, individual driving habits, battery size, and other parameters.

Replacing a gasoline car with an EV makes climate sense across a broad range of scenarios, even when the gasoline car is new, the researchers found. Of course, that won’t be affordable for most people. But it’s a stark illustration of the climate benefits of EVs.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:In a comparison of life-cycle emissions, EVs crushed combustion cars

 

In the analysis, climate benefits were generally greatest when gasoline car was scrapped in year 1, leading to an average 58% reduction in emissions over the 16-year period. It takes about three years of driving an EV to make up for the greater emissions involved in manufacturing it.

“I was shocked that even scrapping a hybrid gives big climate benefits,” Campbell says.

In 92% of the scenarios the researchers ran, replacing a gasoline car or hybrid vehicle with a battery electric vehicle before the end of its lifespan reduced overall carbon emissions. The exceptions: scenarios involving the least efficient EVs drawing power from the dirtiest electric grids; plug-in hybrids; and gasoline cars that are driven very few miles annually.

The energy mix of local electricity grids can shift the break-even point. But across most of the United States, it’s worth replacing even the most efficient gasoline cars early. And for the most common gasoline car models sold in the United States, early replacement makes climate sense even in areas with the dirtiest electric grids.

The benefits of switching to an EV will become even greater in the coming years, as electric grids decarbonize and battery recycling technology improves, which will decrease manufacturing emissions associated with EVs.

Campbell is now working on an analysis of the mass of materials involved in EVs compared to gasoline cars. “An EV has a 0.5 ton battery but a gas vehicle can use 20 tons of petroleum in its life,” he says. Batteries can be recycled, “but once you burn petroleum it’s essentially gone forever.  I think more work needs to be done to explore this material advantage for EVs.”

Source: Campbell J.E. and R. Geyer. “The climate benefits of retiring a fully operational internal combustion engine vehicle.” Science 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.

In western Kenya, youth organising through Farm Labour Solidarity Building is reshaping how communities value agriculture, collective work and indigenous knowledge.

The post Under the Mango Tree: Youth Solidarity and the Seeds of Peasant Agroecology in Kenya appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

The recent publication of reflections by former members of the International Socialists (IS) and its youth group, Red Tide, is a welcome, if overdue, recollection of the successes and failures of building a socialist presence in key industries and among high school students in the United States in the 1970s.

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor (Haymarket Books) offers first-hand accounts of those who sought to implement a rank-and-file strategy with varying degrees of success as they sought to bring socialism from below to key sectors of the U.S. working class.

Unfortunately, the opening for turning some of the militancy of that period into a socialist base was shut midway through the decade by global conditions that proved insurmountable for the IS, as well as the mass movements of that period.1For a broad outline of the period, as well as a summary of IS labor strategy, see Joel Geier, “When Socialists Joined the Rank-and-File Upsurge.” Largely missing from the collection, though, is the perspectives debate that tried to address how these material changes undercut the IS strategy, requiring an altered approach for building a socialist base. The debate is important because it gave birth to the International Socialist Organization (ISO), whose more measured perspective allowed it to carry forward the project of socialism from below during a decades-long working-class retreat.

Strategy under stress

The IS was founded in 1969 near the peak of nearly two decades of mass social movements and deepening radicalization. By the mid-1970s the conditions that gave rise to this period had changed. By 1976 it was becoming clear to some that the general perspectives and strategy that had guided the IS since its founding no longer fit. After a four-month debate with the IS majority over its “mass work” perspective en route to a “workers’ combat organization” and a deepening commitment to strategic implantation of comrades in key industries and unions, the minority, or Left Faction (LF), was expelled in the opening session of a Special Convention held in Detroit in March 1977. After the expulsion, 52 members of the LF convened at the Veterans’ Memorial Building to establish the framework of a new organization, the International Socialist Organization (ISO). The debate leading to the expulsion focused on strategy and tactics, not the foundational principles defining socialism from below.

Although the current period does not replicate the 1970s, there are many reasons that a new generation of socialists looks to the IS experience of building independent rank-and-file organizations in key industries and unions during the 1970s. Two current organizations—Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and Labor Notes—are rooted in the IS work of that decade. Both reform organizations were supported by the LF/ISO from their beginning. So, why did the IS expel a third of its members in 1977? The arguments over the 1976–77 IS perspectives provide lessons that the current generation of socialists might find useful in their efforts to build organizations and to construct a perspective that fits the current period and avoids some of the mistakes of the past.

Mass movements prepare the way

It is important to understand the context that led to the founding of the IS in 1969. A mass movement for Black civil rights in the United States and an international antiwar movement against the U.S. imperial war in Vietnam pulled millions into radical activity. In addition, a second wave women’s rights and liberation movement emerged, followed by a movement for gay rights and liberation. These, too, had international links. But it was the uprising of students and the largest ever workers’ general strike in France in May 1968 that captured the imagination of a new generation of radicals looking for revolutionary possibilities. Besides the May events in France that nearly toppled the government, cracks in the Eastern bloc, anti-colonial struggles in Africa, and guerilla insurgencies in Latin America reinforced revolutionary aspirations.

The year 1968 was the watershed year of this period. Beginning with the Tet offensive by the National Liberation Front in Vietnam in late January, which exposed the lie that the U.S. military was winning its war there, and ending with the election of the Republican, Richard Nixon, to the presidency with a plurality of less than one percent of the vote, 1968 screamed for fundamental change. Between Tet and Nixon’s election came President Lyndon Johnson’s near abdication, two assassinations (Dr. Martin L. King, Jr and Robert F. Kennedy), mass uprisings (France, Czechoslovakia), guerrilla struggles (Latin America), and wide disaffection with the Democratic Party after it nominated the war supporter and Johnson’s vice president Hubert Humphrey to challenge Nixon. This turbulent year exposed many of the cracks in the international system of capitalist exploitation, which could no longer impose its will on the masses unopposed.

By the end of 1968, the search for how to organize for revolutionary change was well underway. A generation of activists informed by their experiences now looked for a blueprint, or at least a model, for how to make a revolution. Many looked to the Cuban and Chinese guerilla achievements for guidance. Others looked back to 1917 and the first successful worker-led revolution in Russia. Most of the models were top-down, substituting self-appointed leaders and organizations that would make the revolution for the masses. Working-class self-emancipation (Bolshevism) in Russia had been replaced by a bureaucratic and self-appointed ruling class (Stalinism).2https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1967/xx/revlost.htm Reconnecting workers to the tradition of self-emancipation was never going to be easy, but it was worth a try in the context of mass social movements in the United States and Europe, as well as anti-colonial struggles in the South.

Following the breakup of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the summer of 1969, the International Socialist Clubs (ISC) and remnants of several SDS chapters (Seattle, Austin, Chicago, Baltimore, Ann Arbor) met over Labor Day weekend that year in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to lay the groundwork for a national organization. By the end of the year, convinced that the period of radicalization had entered a new stage, the IS was launched, setting its sights on joining the working class. What happened in the effort to build a revolutionary workers’ organization as the period of radicalization began to ebb over the next decade is a history that is both instructive and cautionary. It is the history of the International Socialists and its successor organizations, the ISO, and a third organization, Solidarity.

Revolution in the air

Before neoliberalism, globalization, or financialization entered the lexicon, workers in several sectors of the U.S. economy flexed their muscles—sometimes with their union’s blessing, more often in opposition to official leaderships. For the Left this period became known as the “rank-and-file rebellion.”3Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, Cal Winslow, eds., Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt During the Long 1970s. (New York: Verso, 2010); Dan Labotz, Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union. (New York: Verso, 1991).In tandem with a growing restlessness and outright insubordination in the military as the war in Vietnam dragged on, an upsurge of workers challenged the status quo and the post–World War II narrative of upward mobility and middle-class status.4David Cortwright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005). Soldiers who were drafted into a war they only half believed in came home to a country deeply divided. Beneath the flag-waving and imperial chest-thumping a new attitude was born.

The endless war in Vietnam, along with the drive for profits at home, produced a consciousness of resistance among many frontline soldiers and workers alike. A growing attitude emerged that challenged the bosses in factories and officers in Vietnam. Soldiers increasingly refused to follow dangerous orders for a war that seemed pointless (or which they opposed on political grounds). Officers who gave reckless orders became targets for fragging (battlefield assassination).5Allthatsinteresting.com. Gina Dimuro, May 14, 2020.

In factories and warehouses resistance was often expressed individually through “work-to-rule” slowdowns rather than coordinated actions, but united unofficial strikes, often led by rank-and-file militants, were not uncommon. Wildcat strikes grew in this period, accounting for a third of work stoppages, with the 1970 postal strike being the largest (with more than 200,000 workers taking part). Miners struck several times in the decade without official notice and gave birth to Miners for Democracy to fight the corrupt Tony Boyle regime in the United Mine Workers.

Between 1968 and 1971, strikes and labor reform movements reached historic proportions. In auto plants, Black-led shop floor organizations like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) fought the company on the factory floor and racism in the union. Even during the 1974 recession there were nearly as many strikes as in the peak year of 1970.6Brenner, Brenner, and Winslow, Rebel Rank and File, 141.

Against this background a revolutionary current emerged. Elements of this current could be found in the early sixties, but it was the watershed year of 1968 when the radicalization broke explosively into the open internationally.7Philipp Gassert and Martin Klimke, eds., On the Edge of World Revolution. (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2018); Chris Harman, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After. (London: Bookmarks, 1988). Millions of young radicals began to draw revolutionary conclusions from their experiences. It was now time to create the organizations necessary to effectively challenge the status quo of war, hunger, and inequality. Revolution was certainly in the air and nourished a generation eager for change. The May events in France suggested that rebellion was growing in the working class—the material force capable of challenging the capitalist system.

Berkeley ISC leaves campus for the factory floor

The Independent Socialists at the University of California, Berkeley under the leadership of the Marxist scholar Hal Draper was the dominant Left organization there in the 1960s, and played a leading role in civil rights, free speech, and peace movements. Loosely affiliated with ISC groups in Chicago, New York, Ann Arbor, and Baltimore—many of whose members had been comrades in the Young People’s Socialist League and the Student Peace Union—the Berkeley ISC student leaders Joel Geier and Mike Parker determined it was time to establish a national revolutionary organization committed to the principles of workers’ self-emancipation: workers’ control of their workplaces, a government democratically elected from councils of workers, and a movement of workers tied to “neither Washington nor Moscow,” but to international socialism. This socialism-from-below orientation differentiated the ISC/IS from most of the emerging revolutionary groups that identified with the so-called actually existing socialist states of China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. In the end, it was Maoism that attracted the largest following of the 1970s radicals in the United States.

With the inspiration of the French May, and cracks in the Eastern bloc coinciding with the breakup of SDS in 1969, Geier and Parker broke with Draper, who believed that a national organization was unsustainable and that the period of radicalization had peaked.8https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1971/alt/alt.htm Further, he considered their rank-and-file strategy to be effectively dual unionism and therefore divisive. Meeting over Labor Day 1969, with representatives from various student clubs (including the ISC) and SDS affiliates, the foundation for a national organization was outlined.9https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/is-us/IS-documents/69/69-09.pdf By the end of 1969 the IS had coalesced with a perspective to move off the campuses and join the industrial working class. Toward that goal, Detroit was chosen as the national headquarters and a monthly paper, Workers’ Power, would lead the way.

While it would take a series of internal arguments to cohere the organization, by 1973 the IS was on its way to carrying out its perspective of implementing the rank-and-file strategy.10Kim Moody, In Solidarity: Essays on Working-Class Organization in the United States (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 75–148. The implementation rested on getting jobs in key industries: auto, steel, telephone, and trucking (freight and parcel) were the initial priorities, followed by postal workers in the wake of their impressive wildcat strike. The plan was to establish rank-and-file caucuses in the affiliated unions and to cohere a group of workers who would be a pole for a new kind of orientation,workers’ control of the workplace.11https://solidarity-us.org/rankandfilestrategy/ This would necessarily involve challenging the existing union leaderships that operated under the principle of business unionism—collaboration with the bosses—which had been firmly established in the post–World War II era.

In brief, the perspective of sending students into strategic industries, building opposition groups in unions, and educating a layer of worker-militants to commit to socialism was a monumental undertaking for an organization of less than 300 members. Nevertheless, with commitment high, promising objective conditions, and some early, if modest, successes in locating like-minded workers, any doubts about the strategy were marginalized.

Successes drive the perspective

One measure of success was the number of rank-and-file organizations built in the targeted industries. By 1975, there were four auto caucuses, five Teamster rank-and-file newspapers, and three caucuses in telephone and steel. In addition, teachers in New York and the Bay Area were active in opposition groups in their respective unions. With the help of a targeted pamphlet, The Struggle for Workers’ Power!, and regular Workers’ Power paper sales at main post offices, several postal workers joined the IS in this period.

A significant breakthrough came in 1976 with the Master Freight Agreement (MFA) campaign, led by Teamsters for a Decent Contract, an ad-hoc group of IS implants and fellow militants in the freight industry, as well as United Parcel Service (UPS) workers. The campaign was spread through rank-and-file newspapers and organizations to some twenty cities, and successfully established a national opposition group in the Teamsters Union that materially helped shape a contract outside official union channels.

This success led to a national rank-and-file organization, TDU, launched in September 1976. Its main orientation targeted both local and national leaderships of the Teamsters, offering a rank-and-file alternative. TDU soon established itself as the main reform group in the Teamsters Union and the organization to affiliate with if you wanted to challenge entrenched leaderships in your local.

In tandem with TDU, embedded IS women working at UPS in Cleveland launched their own organization: UPSurge. Based on their experience, they targeted the company rather than the union leadership with a newspaper, UPSurge, and built opposition groups among drivers and package loaders. Their success in the Midwest brought them in touch with a rank-and-file group in Louisville, Kentucky, that boosted UPSurge’s credibility among Teamsters. Targeting company bosses instead of union heads eventually led to friction within the IS Teamster fraction and became a sharp divide in the perspectives debate in 1976–77.

Successes mask underlying conditions

By the time of the 1976 National Convention in July, the IS could point to several successes in implementing the overall labor strategy. Not only had the freight workers been instrumental in building a successful national contract fight, but in the process they had established a viable national rank-and-file organization, TDU. That success led to a handful of key rank-and-file leaders joining the IS, though few stuck beyond the formation of TDU, especially as an economic recession took hold, leading to layoffs and a dampening of militancy. The mass civil rights movements and women’s and gay liberation movements also were forced to retreat to defend their gains.

Independent rank-and-file organizations were replicated in other targeted industries around the country: telephone workers in New York, Louisville, and Seattle, autoworkers in Detroit, California, and New Jersey, steelworkers in Gary and Pittsburgh, and UPS workers in multiple cities showed what was possible. Overall, the successes covered over the many objective and subjective difficulties that were beginning to erode nearly two decades of militancy and protest. As from a flea on the back of an elephant, the view from a limited vista did not produce a picture of the whole animal. The ride was thrilling, but the destination could not be strategically determined with the small forces at hand, despite the high-level of commitment from IS comrades. Nevertheless, the leadership of the IS was prepared to claim success for its perspective at its 1976 Convention in Dearborn, Michigan, and take the next step—mass work.

Misreading the tea leaves

While there were many implementations of the rank-and-file perspective of which the IS could be proud, they were not sufficient to declare victory. Nevertheless, at the 1976 Convention held in the ballroom of the Dearborn Hilton, the national leadership declared that the IS was ready for the “next step in our mass work perspective… In mass work on shopfloors and around economic issues, we try to give a lead to the backward, reactionary, and cowardly workers as well as to the militants.”12https://www.marxists.org/history. “Mass Work, Politics, Building the Party,” 1976 Executive Committee document.

From an orientation on the “militant minority” to a declaration that the IS was now ready to do “mass work” with a membership no larger than 342 (according to the 1976 National Secretary report), raises the question: Who was leading whom? This triumphalist assessment of the organization’s accomplishments suggested that nothing was wrong with the overall perspectives outlined in the 1975 IS pamphlet The Struggle for Workers’ Power, which boldly projected that in the 1976–77 bargaining round,

[W]e will become a workers’ combat group in the lead of a growing rank-and-file movement or be set back severely.

…By three years from now we want [the workers] to be the leadership of the IS, and a working class and black leadership, which has already started the process of constructing factory branches.

We want to double our membership by the next convention [1976]. In the next 2-3 years, we want to have the core of a party—worker cadres, factory branches, national rank and file movements, a weekly paper, a theoretical journal, a strong youth group, and a working class and black leadership.

This outline for the next period was far ahead of the concrete achievements and completely overlooked the material forces at hand. Even if the membership had doubled by 1976, it would still be well short of the numbers needed to carry out these tasks. Indeed, many at the 1976 convention felt that militancy was beginning to wane, though to voice caution without a clear alternative would have led to isolation, or worse. According to National Secretary Glenn Wolf, adherence to the “Workers Combat” perspective would become a condition of membership.13Notes from Steve Leigh, November 1976 joint meeting of Portland and Seattle IS branches.

Radical period begins to ebb

Internationally much had changed since the founding of the IS. By 1974, the Portuguese revolution was in abeyance and in Chile the socialist government had been crushed by a military coup with the help of the CIA. In 1975, the US retreated from Vietnam, thus ending the antiwar movement. The Black Power movement, which gave rise to the Black Panther Party in 1966, was under physical attack as early as 1969 from local and national law enforcement and was slowly being driven to the margins. An Indigenous movement was literally gunned down by federal agents in South Dakota in 1973. These early warnings signaled that defending and building movements would require a growth in solidarity not seen since 1968.

Even the promise of workers’ power seen in the numerous wildcat strikes and other forms of resistance to the boss’s relentless drive for profits was beginning to wane. An economic downturn in 1973–75 and corresponding layoffs had already weakened militancy in the manufacturing sector.14Monthly Labor Review, September 1983.

Domestically, the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976 signaled a shift from the pro-labor Roosevelt era to a program of deregulation and a neoliberal agenda favoring profits at the expense of workers’ needs. Layoffs soon became the norm as capital looked for cheaper locations to retool, either overseas or in the non-union south. Neoliberalism replaced New Dealism as the framework for exploitation, producing a consciousness of self-preservation rather than a spirit of rebellion and solidarity in workplaces.

In retrospect, it is clear now that the IS perspective had reached its limits by 1976. The leadership’s assessment at the Convention that year exaggerated successes and projected a triumphant period ahead. While there were doubters at that convention, they were unprepared to challenge the perspective openly. They did, however, begin to lay the groundwork for a counter-narrative, which would culminate in a formal factional challenge later that fall.

Employer’s offensive

Before turning to the debate that challenged the IS leadership’s perspective, it is important to note the fundamental shift of capital that was underway by the mid-1970s. No longer was capital prepared to invest in the old manufacturing systems, especially in steel, communications, transportation, and auto. The international challenge from one-time foes Japan and Germany forced U.S. manufacturers to close old production systems and seek new locations to retool for profitability.

In the heartland of U.S. manufacturing from St. Louis to Boston, factories and mills were shuttered, giving rise to what became known as “the rust belt.” Jobs that had once given many workers a middle-class life disappeared. International competition for profits now dominated. Workers, especially in the heartland, were the victims. From the promise of a home, a couple of cars, and college for the children, manufacturing workers suddenly found themselves on the dole.

Known as “the employers’ offensive,” this period not only wreaked havoc on manufacturing workers’ lives, but reverberated throughout the working class. Restaurant workers who catered to auto workers, for example, lost their jobs. Detroit, the city built by the auto industry, lost more than 300,000 residents, or 20 percent of its population, in the 1970s. When mortgages couldn’t be paid, whole blocks of houses were abandoned and fell into disrepair, thus hollowing out the city. Weed patches replaced yards, and one-third of schools were shuttered.

Besides the damage inflicted by corporate restructuring, Carter and Congress legislated pro-capital measures to assist in this restructuring. For example, removing regulations on telephone, airlines, and trucking gave rise to cutthroat competition and lower wages. Jobs that moved to the south, where new auto plants were built, were now union free. Wages fell by more than half. Frustrated resistance often turned against foreigners (primarily Asians) for “taking American jobs,” thus replacing solidarity with xenophobia.

By 1980, with the election of Republican president Ronald Reagan, the rout of labor was well underway. To drive home the point that a new era had arrived, Reagan fired striking air traffic-controllers in 1981. Organized labor’s response was to rally in Washington, DC with more than 400,000 workers eager to challenge Reagan’s anti-worker assault. Unfortunately, official union leaderships looked not to solidarity on the picket line, but rather to a march to the ballot box to elect Democrats to Congress in 1982, ignoring the fact that it was a Democrat in the White House six years earlier who had ushered in the offensive against workers. Not only was this a blow to any meaningful resistance to the employer’s offensive, but it initiated doubts in the viability of workers to bring about positive social change through their own initiative.

Warning signals begin to pile up

Yet even before Reagan and the full extent of the employer’s offensive was known, some in the IS began to see the limits of the group’s perspective, especially in its aim of building a “workers’ combat organization” through “mass work.” One clue to these limits seemed obvious to the UPSurge comrades. While UPSurge had built an impressive rank-and-file organization, especially in the Midwest, it was not strong enough to meet the Teamster leadership’s threat to help the bosses fire workers who continued their wildcat strike in 1976.

But it was more than the weakness of UPSurge that signaled the limits of the IS perspective. It was the material pressures on the industrial cadre to adapt to their work environment that exposed the limits of implantation, especially as militancy waned and U.S. manufacturing retooled. Consciousness was shifting away from militancy and solidarity toward self-preservation and adaptation to the emerging neoliberal conditions.

Not comfortable with the exaggerated assessment of the IS leadership at the 1976 convention, and with some prodding interventions from Canadian comrades in attendance, several IS cadre began to question the road ahead. At first, these were informal gatherings of a handful of comrades who mostly asked questions: Why were we only able to recruit a few militants from our rank-and-file work? Why were Workers’ Power sales declining? Are we missing struggles apart from the targeted industries that might be more receptive to our politics? In the wake of the convention several comrades were unconvinced of the strategic role of the mass work perspective and the leadership’s insistence on sticking to the strategy of implantation in strategic industries when layoffs were the order of the day.

Two leading members, Cal Winslow, the industrial organizer, and Barbara Winslow, the women’s organizer, were alarmed by the exaggerated perspective and sought guidance from comrades they had worked with in the British IS in Coventry in 1969. Early in September 1976, the Winslows headed for London, where they met with leaders of the British IS, newly named the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Here they learned that the British were also alarmed at the IS’s exaggerated industrial perspectives.

Upon returning, the Winslows approached several comrades to determine if a formal opposition should be organized to raise concerns about the mass work perspective. With fifty-eight initial endorsers, the Left Faction assembled in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in early November. Twenty-two members attended the first meeting, along with two comrades from the Canadian IS who had witnessed the debate at the Dearborn convention. A Red Tide representative also attended.

The discussions at this first meeting led to the commission of three documents: “A New Course for the IS,” “Women’s Liberation,” and “Black Liberation.” A later document addressed the Portuguese Revolution, charging the leadership with an exaggerated assessment of the Portuguese Revolutionary Party’s strategy. However, most of the discussion held in branches throughout the four months of debate that followed centered on the leadership’s insistence on doubling down on mass work and sending comrades into the targeted industries even though hiring was at a near standstill.

The Left Faction perspective

On December 8, 1976, the Left Faction submitted a counter-perspective, “The New Course for the IS.”15Marxist Internet Archive, IS Documents Archive, Special Bulletin 3, December 11, 1976. Page numbers in brackets. The twenty-two-page document opened with the following assessment: “We believe the IS is in a deep crisis. The organization’s perspectives have failed. The organization’s politics and policies are shifting to the right.”

Countering the leadership’s assessment that the IS was ready to take the next step toward “a workers’ combat organization,” the LF offered a grim appraisal of the primary areas of work. The auto fraction submitted a sobering report: “We recruited and held no one from the plants in the past nine months. In the same period, we lost a number of members” (p. 6). The telephone fraction efforts were going nowhere and “there is deep demoralization and confusion among those who carry on.” From the steel fraction: “There is dissension in the fraction” (p. 7).

Even amid the major successes—the National Master Freight Contract campaign, the founding of TDU, and the UPSurge-led wildcat strike—the leadership admitted that the IS presence had been “liquidated for a prolonged period of time.” In concrete terms this meant that Workers’ Power had ceased to be integral to the activity of building rank-and-file organizations. The “New Course” charged, “More and more the organization takes on the characteristics of a ‘sect’ in its isolated existence, its frenzied activity, its endless internal meetings, its big talk, to no listeners” (pp. 4-5).

The document went on to argue that the IS’s strategy for building a revolutionary socialist current in the U.S. working class by taking jobs in key industries and challenging do-nothing union leaders was a “substitutionist” perspective that had led to a conservatized and demoralized cadre. Further, it challenged that objective conditions were ignored, thus making any weaknesses or failures of the mass work perspective  “the fault or short comings of the members: a voluntarist load that has crushed many fine comrades” (p. 9).

Whether or not the LF’s assessment of the leadership’s perspective was exaggerated, it nevertheless was a strong indicator that a debate was in order, especially considering the unease among most members in the organization that recruitment had virtually ceased. This fact was especially disconcerting when “mass work” became the description for all IS initiatives, no matter how minor.

The LF argued that the leadership’s adherence to a mass work perspective was confusing: “The IS cannot have it all ways. It cannot, at the same time, orient to the left bureaucracy, and to the ‘cowards and reactionaries’ in the rank and file, and also to the militant minority, in particular to the special demands and struggles of the oppressed” (p. 8).

Black and women’s issues were often lost when adhering to the tenets of mass work. In practice the mass work perspective strengthened “the conservative tendencies already strong in our industrial work.” In other words, the IS was missing its audience.

The principle of “every factory must be our fortress” that “must be the key to building a successful revolutionary workers’ party” (p. 10) in the long run, was acknowledged by the LF, but, they argued, “To reduce the question to one of white-collar vs. blue-collar or workers vs. students misses opportunities in the short-term, especially when conditions have changed.” In addition, “There is no way that a group of 300 can either chart the course of the class struggle, nor can it expect to impose ‘consistency’ on history” (p. 11).

The IS was substituting itself for the lack of militancy among the workers of industries it had chosen as key to the class struggle. Both the mass work perspective and the focus on strategic economic sectors were stand-ins for the real struggles of workers, wherever they might break out. By not coming to grips with the objective conditions, argued the LF, opportunities were being missed to build the organization. Many industrialized members in the targeted sectors, let alone long-time militants, were exhausted and demoralized. “Industrialization conservatizes the individual members and leads to conservatism in the entire organization. It focuses the attention of the organization not on the working class, but on its own middle-class members,” the LF noted. In short, “industrialization is a pessimistic, conservative and a substitutionist strategy” (p. 15).

Perhaps the most serious charge leveled at the leadership’s perspective was that, despite the rhetoric of being “best fighters for Black liberation,” there was little concrete attention paid to Black struggles, nor to training the few Black people who had joined the organization. In fact, the most serious Black work was left to Red Tide, which led a campaign to free a framed Black student, Gary Tyler, from a specious shooting charge. The LF believed it was the adherence to seeking jobs in targeted industries strategy that hampered a consistent plan for Black work, or for that matter, serious women’s work.

By 1976, there was plenty of evidence that the IS perspective had run its course and was only being maintained through a “pseudo-bolshevism” and a perverted interpretation of “democratic centralism”—orders from the leadership without the political backing sufficient to convince the membership that it was on the right track.

In reality, the perspective developed over the life of the organization had ceased to either attract new recruits to the IS or inspire many of its most committed adherents in the organization. It was time to change course.

Key to the perspective advocated by the LF was Workers’ Power, arguing that the small size of the IS required it to maximize its resources with concrete propaganda. Rather than tailing “a nonexistent ‘mass’ audience, at the lowest common denominator,” the paper must be “directed to the advanced workers, those in struggle” wherever they might be—not necessarily in predetermined industries. Furthermore, the paper could prove in practice how real democratic centralism works, when “it actually carries our political ideas” and is used as “our chief interventionist tool” (p. 20).

The LF proposed an outward-looking strategy: “It must turn to the actual struggles of the working class. The IS must develop local perspectives based on the actual conditions in each city and workplace” (p. 21). As the LF pointed out, the best guide for revolutionaries, especially with small numbers, can be found in Farrell Dobbs’ books of the Minneapolis Teamster’s struggles of 1933–34. The LF saw the Communist League’s approach in the 1930s as a model for the IS.

The SWP-UK intervenes

Even before the LF was organized or produced documents, the Central Committee of the British IS/SWP raised the alarm in a six-page letter to the National Committee of the IS in September. The main thrust of its concern was the “triumphalist” assessment of the national Teamsters contract campaign, as well as other efforts in building rank-and-file organizations. They cautioned against the immodesty and exaggeration of the leadership’s perspectives. In blunt terms they also dismissed the focus on strategic industries.

To drive the point home, they offered James Cannon’s observation on the first real success of Trotskyists in the United States:

Our comrades in Minneapolis began their work in the coal yards and later extended their organizing campaign away from the general drivers and helpers. That was not a preconceived plan worked out in the general staff of our movement. The drivers of Minneapolis were not by far the most decisive section of the American proletariat. We began our real activity in the labor movement in those places where the opportunity was open to us. It is not possible to select such occasions arbitrarily according to whim or preference. One must enter a mass movement where a door is open.

In short, the letter argued that the leadership’s perspective was “grossly exaggerated” and was in danger of driving the organization “into increasingly false political positions in an attempt to conceal what will become a growing gulf between pretensions and reality.” Unfortunately, this intervention from a fraternal organization was characterized as traitorous, thus branding any opposition as hostile to the IS project even before the LF emerged.

Was a split necessary?

Was the LF’s call for a new strategy so out of bounds that the majority needed to jettison nearly a third of its membership? In retrospect the split seems indefensible, especially given the conditions of the period and the collapse of the IS less than two years after the debate.

By the end of the four-month debate, both sides were exhausted and ready to move on. In lieu of expulsion (Item 1 of the Special Convention Agenda), the LF proposed a seven-point resolution to avoid a split, including disbanding the LF and accepting the majority perspective without demanding positions on the Executive Committee, even though it represented a third of the organization. Behind the scenes, though, including an Executive Committee meeting with an IS/SWP representative, it was clear that the two sides were ready to go their separate ways and prove in practice their perspectives.

It should also be noted that a small middle faction (Workers’ Power) argued for a compromise. This group, which included the well-known Teamster rank-and-file leader Pete Camarata, left the IS a year later. Soon after, the IS ceased to exist.

Conditions determined perspectives post-split

The guiding politics of “socialism from below” as a principle for revolutionary organization was never in question by any of the contending forces, only how to implement it under unpredictable conditions.

While the IS continued into the mid-1980s (and founded Labor Notes in 1979), its paper Workers Power ceased publishing in October 1978. The ISO and its paper Socialist Worker survived for 42 years and grew to be what was, perhaps, the largest revolutionary Left organization in the United States during the period of long retreat. The ISO strategy focused on campuses, especially those with an activist core. For example, anti-apartheid in South Africa and anti-Gulf War struggles helped radicalize students post-1970s. Through this strategy the ISO was able to introduce student activists to the occasional worker struggles that emerged during the 1990s such as the Caterpillar tractor and Staley sugar strikes in central Illinois and the Hormel meatpacker’s strike in Minnesota.

Several years after the IS collapsed, some of its members, along with recently expelled members of the Socialist Workers Party (US), launched the organization Solidarity, with a perspective of regrouping sections of the Left committed to struggles from below.16The ISO was not one of Solidarity’s targets for regrouping the Left. Solidarity continues to operate as a small socialist feminist organization with a bimonthly magazine, Against the Current.

For any organization aspiring to cohere the self-activity of workers, the lessons—good and bad—from the IS’s decade of trying to build rank-and-file organizations are worth examining. However, the internal debate that concluded that period is integral to understanding the full IS story.

Conditions had significantly changed since the IS’s beginning, and the organization had neither the numbers nor the influence needed to carry its ambitious perspectives forward. In some ways, the IS was a victim of its successes, which blinded it to forces much more decisive than a handful of militant rank-and-file organizations and their socialist backers.

One lesson that stands out from the successes and failures of the IS in the 1970s is the need to temper revolutionary objectives with a measure of modesty. The accomplishments of the IS are inspiring and instructive, but overestimating those accomplishments was fatal for the organization.

Nevertheless, as From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor illustrates, the comrades of the IS, who gave it their all, found the decade they joined the rank-and-file upsurge a meaningful part of their lives, rich with lessons for the current generation of socialists.

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: Rafaelgr; modified by Tempest.

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• If the chicken is biking and the egg is building bike infrastructure, new research shows that the egg comes first. Bike lanes and bike parking both lead more people to cycle to work, according to a French study in the journal Transport Policy. (Momentum)
• Road usage charges like Hawaii’s that rely on annual odometer readings are simple and non-intrusive, but they don’t take into account where and when those miles were driven. (Traffic Technology Today)
• Modern, connected urban transportation systems commonly leave out parking garages, resulting in a lot of unnecessary cruising around looking for parking. (Route Fifty)
• Planetizen is running a three-part series on traffic congestion.
• European right-wingers are just as in love with cars as their American counterparts. (The Loop)
• A bike- and pedestrian-friendly extension of 15th Street in Midtown Atlanta is set to open by the end of the month. (Urbanize Atlanta)
• The Atlanta Beltline, often blamed for gentrification, is building more affordable housing and starting a down payment assistance program. (WABE)
• Indiana Gov. Mike Braun is opposed to a lane reduction on a bridge connecting the state to Louisville. (WDRB)
• Cuyahoga County, Ohio is considering raising parking rates for the first time in a decade. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
• Signal Cleveland has lots of details about pending transit cuts.
• A pickup truck driver intentionally ran down two people on a Memphis sidewalk. (News 3)
• A Philadelphia state representative is introducing a bill to ban self-driving buses. (Billy Penn)
• A public transit YouTuber exposed massive cost overruns on the L.A. people mover project. (Hollywood Reporter)
• A Denver man is tracking down all of the stamps left by his grandfather, who poured the concrete for many of the city’s sidewalks. (Rocky Mountain PBS)

Donald Trump’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rolled into Santa Monica today to hold a hearing on the federal government’s plans to open up California’s coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, floating nuclear power plants (really!), rocket testing, and other questionable uses. Trump is using NOAA to challenge California’s – and only California’s – right to protect its coastlines.

Needless to say, California is not taking this lying down. Tribal leaders, environmental groups, local political leaders, and others gathered in the courtyard for a noon rally before the 2 p.m. meeting to tell the Trump Administration that California’s coast is not for sale.

“We know what is best for Los Angeles County, for California, and for our nation,” argued Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, after arguing that the Trump Administration is intentionally pushing policies that hurt Californians. “If they wanted to really help our communities, they would release billions of disaster aid to help our coastal communities desperate to rebuild their lives after the Palisades Fire.”

At the rally before the hearing, speaker after speaker took to the podium to denounce not just the idea that politics is clouding California’s environmental regulations, but just the opposite: that political concerns were pushing the administration’s attacks on California to the benefit of Trump’s political donors.

“We’ll keep fighting, but we know what’s going to happen today,” stated Congressman Dave Min (D-Irvine). “A bunch of you are going to go in and give your testimony, and this rigged review is going to come to the conclusion that has been preordained.”

Trump’s Plan

The Trump administration is reopening a federal review of California’s Coastal Management Program, raising the possibility that the state could lose some of its longstanding authority to protect its coastline should he succeed.

The program, which has been federally approved since 1978, operates under the federal Coastal Zone Management Act. It gives California a role in reviewing federally regulated projects that could affect the state’s coastal resources, including projects in federal waters. The California Coastal Commission, State Coastal Conservancy, and San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission all play roles in implementing the program.

That authority has allowed California to challenge or modify projects ranging from offshore oil development to pipelines, desalination facilities and rocket launches. Despite Trump’s claim that the state should lose its rights because of “environmental extremism,” the Coastal Commission has reviewed thousands of federally regulated projects over the decades, but has opposed only a small percentage of them.

NOAA is conducting a new review of the state’s coastal program after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick accused California of using its coastal authority to obstruct projects favored by the administration for political reasons.

Among the examples cited by federal officials is California’s opposition to expanded SpaceX rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. SpaceX has been firing test rockets from the base for the last half dozen years. But, the state has asked for more oversight of all rocket launches marines from Vandenberg accidentally fired 155-millimeter artillery shells over a major freeway in Southern California.

State officials, however, argue that the review is part of a broader effort to remove obstacles to the Trump administration’s plans for the coast, particularly its push to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.

Speaking at today’s hearing, Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary for Natural Resources, noted that after states were given greater purview in enforcing environmental standards for projects nearly six decades ago, the states participating in the Coastal Zone Management Act have approved 95% of the federally requested projects. In that same time, California had approved 96% of the projects.

Crowfoot continued with the theme that the federal review is more about politics and Trump’s feelings towards California than about policy.

“Americans across the country share the concerns we do about the health and safety of our coasts. The Trump Administration proposed expanded offshore oil drilling in the states of Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and California. When leaders of three states expressed strong concerns on behalf of their constituents, the federal government backed off those proposals…Yet they continue to target California,” he testified. Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina all voted for Trump in 2024.

The administration has proposed opening federal waters off California to new oil and gas leasing, something that has not happened in decades. It has also sought to restart the Sable pipeline, which has been shut down since the 2015 Refugio oil spill. Recently, the government spent billions of dollars to stop wind farms and other renewable energy projects from being built.

California’s coastal program was already reviewed under the previous administration. NOAA’s 2024 review included public meetings and stakeholder input, and a draft report completed in 2025 found that California had successfully implemented and enforced its federally approved program. The Trump administration nevertheless ordered another review.

If the federal government ultimately determines that California’s program does not comply with federal requirements, it could seek changes to the program or move toward decertification. That could weaken the state’s ability to challenge federal projects and put federal funding connected to the program at risk.

The confrontation is unusual enough that legal experts told the Los Angeles Times they were unaware of another instance in which the federal government had stripped a coastal state of its rights under the Coastal Zone Management Act. What happens in California could therefore establish a precedent for the relationship between the federal government and coastal states elsewhere.

Gabrielino Tongva & Chumash activist and singer Tina Orduno Calderon sings a welcome song at the Rally to Protect the California Coast. To listen to the song, click here. You Can Still Submit Comment

Californians who want to push back against the Trump administration’s effort to weaken the state’s coastal protections have a relatively simple place to start: tell the federal government what you think. You can submit your own comment electronically, here.

While the only in-person meeting was held (or is being held depending when you’re reading this) today, there are virtual meetings tomorrow and Wednesday, August 11 and 12. For more details on those meetings, click here.

“Trump is threatening California’s coast in pursuit of reckless offshore oil and gas extraction to pad the wallets of his corrupt oil cronies,” Newsom said in a statement. “We won’t stand by while Trump sidelines the people who rely on and care for California’s coast. Now is the time to make our voices heard. Give the Trump administration an earful.”

You can read the state’s official comments, here.