Salmon-killing McNary Dam was erected on tribal fishing sites in the Columbia River. Most of the hydro-power from the dam went to now-defunct aluminum mills and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

After centuries of dam building, a nationwide movement to dismantle these aging barriers is showing how free-flowing rivers can restore ecosystems, improve safety, and reconnect people with nature.

With more than 550,000 dams in the United States, free-flowing rivers are an endangered species. We’ve dammed, diked, and diverted almost every major river in the country, straightening curves, pinching off floodplains, and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals. But this has come at a great cost. Freshwater biodiversity—all the organisms that hail from our rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands—is among the most threatened on the planet. Dams have played a big role in that demise, pushing fish, mussels, and other animals to the brink, and some over it. In North America, nearly 40 percent of fish are imperiled, and 61 species have blinked out since 1900.

A growing dam removal movement has led to some 2,200 dams being blasted and backhoed from U.S. rivers—most of them in the past 25 years. It’s an extraordinary turn of events for a dam-loving country. Europeans began erecting river barriers soon after they arrived in North America. Massachusetts’s Old Oaken Bucket Pond Dam, built in 1640, is one of the country’s oldest known dams. Thousands more followed across New England, then down the East Coast, and eventually westward. They powered mills that ground corn, cut lumber, forged tack, and produced textiles. As dams raised the height of the water behind them, they also smothered rapids and white water so that logs could be floated from upstream forests—where they were felled—to downstream industry, where they were processed. After hydroelectric power replaced mechanical power in the 1880s, the dams kept towns and cities alight.

As dam building pushed westward, dam heights pushed skyward. Hoover Dam, built in the 1930s with the labor of 21,000 men, sits 726 feet high and more than 1,200 feet long—more a fortress than infrastructure. Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington rises to 550 feet and stretches nearly a mile long. The United States emerged from the Great Depression into a dam-building frenzy that lasted more than 30 years, dubbed the “go-go years” by Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, his iconic book on western water. Between 1950 and 1979, approximately 1,700 dams were built each year.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which built many of the country’s mammoth dams and reengineered its rivers, had a motto: “Our rivers: total use for greater wealth.” Millions of Americans cashed in on the boom, often without giving it a thought. Politicians and regulators championed dams for their power, flood control, water storage, and recreational potential. Indeed, dams shaped the architecture of the West, irrigating millions of arid acres to grow crops for people and livestock, corralling drinking water for cities hundreds of miles away, churning the engines of war to create aluminum for fighter planes and plutonium for bombs, and turning valleys and canyons into giant swimming pools for our amusement.

Woody Guthrie captured the sentiment of those years in his 1941 song “Grand Coulee Dam,” which refers to the Columbia River as a “wild and wasted stream.” Wasted until it was dammed, that is. The folksinger, spurred by a government paycheck for his efforts, penned 26 songs espousing the virtues of the Columbia River’s dams. That sentiment was also a natural extension of an ethos brought to the Americas by European colonists: Nature should be harnessed, subjugated, bent to the will of those manifesting their destiny. Along the way, any impact on fish and river health was either poorly understood or simply ignored. Often the latter. Also ignored were obligations to tribes that had treaty rights to fish rivers that were quickly becoming empty of fish.

For most Indigenous people, dams didn’t bring enrichment or progress; it was one more theft from the enduring process of colonization in which food, community, ceremony, and sovereignty were stolen. Barry McCovey Jr., a member of the Yurok Tribe in California, called the dams on the Klamath River, where his people reside, “cultural genocide.” Dams have swallowed creation sites, burial grounds, gathering places, fishing holes, homelands, and human history.

In the 1990s, then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt reflected that we have been building, on average, one large dam a day every day since the Declaration of Independence. It hasn’t been without ecological consequences either. Dams have decimated migratory fish populations by blocking their access to vital upstream habitat for spawning, feeding, and evading predators. The barriers also obstruct the downstream movement of sediment and nutrients, thus depleting riverbanks and coastal beaches, hastening erosion, and reducing the growth of riverside plants that feed insects, birds, and other animals.

The water that backs up behind a dam—its impoundment—turns a river into an unnatural lake. Migrating young salmon that once quickly rode spring freshets to the ocean must now navigate slow-moving water over a wide expanse, which takes more energy and increases the chances that they’ll end up as dinner to a hungry predator, of which there are many if you’re a tiny fish. And that’s all before they have to run the turbine gauntlet and face the drop from the dam’s height to the water below. The slack water in an impoundment behind the dam can also heat up, turning these reservoirs into bathtubs with lethal temperatures for some fish. The warm water can also spur the spread of invasive species that prey on native residents.

Dams upend so many natural processes that it could be argued a river dammed isn’t really a river at all. It’s also possible that many of us don’t remember how a free-flowing river really looks and sounds. Dam removals can help restore not just river function but our collective memory, and I think we’ll need to do a lot more of it. The U.S. dam-building flurry hit its peak in the 1970s, and since 2000, we’ve been taking down more dams than we’ve been building. But the dam removal movement didn’t happen spontaneously. It was fought for by tribes, conservationists, fishers, and eventually broad, somewhat unlikely coalitions. It was also aided by environmental laws that protect clean water and endangered species, by scientific studies of dam removals and their impacts, and by regulators willing to manage adaptively.

Many people may see removing dams as outlandish. After all, they provide clean, cheap energy, right? But it turns out that only 3 percent of dams produce hydropower. Although hydropower is often placed in the “clean energy” column, dams and reservoirs also produce greenhouse gases, such as methane, and some do so to a significant degree.

Climate change poses yet more challenges. In drought-plagued regions, such as the Colorado River Basin, very little water can leave major reservoirs too low to produce hydropower or deliver water supplies. On the flip side, many dams today aren’t designed to withstand climate-amplified storms, which are increasing in frequency and severity, can threaten public safety, and may leave big cleanup bills. A big storm in 2023 put Montpelier, Vermont, underwater, and experts found that dams actually made the flooding worse.

There are many compelling environmental reasons to remove dams—including the long list of ecological consequences given above—but public safety is also paramount. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the nation’s dam safety a “D” grade in 2021. Until 2019, there were more than 15,000 “high-hazard” dams, where a failure would result in the loss of life. And there’s ample reason to be worried. The average age of our dams is 57 years, and more than 8,000 have surpassed 90 years. Aging dams require regular maintenance to ensure their safety, but this comes at a significant cost. As of 2024, $165 billion was required to rehabilitate all nonfederal dams in need of repair, and another $27 billion was needed for federal dams, according to the ASCE 2021 report.

Dams also don’t have to fail to be dangerous. At U.S. low-head dams, many only a few feet tall, some 1,400 people have drowned because of the unseen and unsafe hydraulics that these dams produce. The 6-foot-tall Dock Street Dam in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has taken 31 lives between 1913 and April 2025.

Of course, many of our dams serve critical purposes, and I’ve yet to meet a dam removal advocate who thinks that they should all come down. I certainly don’t. But there’s no shortage of low-hanging fruit when it comes to dams worthy of demolition. Tens of thousands of dams—in some states, the majority of dams obstructing rivers and streams—no longer serve a useful purpose. These so-called deadbeat dams include mill dams, where the mills are decades (or centuries) gone, and obsolete dams, such as the 168-foot-tall Matilija Dam in Southern California, which was built for water storage but filled with silt in just 50 years. Some dams are orphans, with no known owner and therefore no one overseeing their upkeep. In many cases, it’s cheaper to take down dams than to refurbish and retrofit them to meet modern safety and environmental laws.

Dam removals can also be a necessary step toward ameliorating harm to Indigenous communities from the loss of food sovereignty, treaty rights, cultural resources, and homelands. More people are now realizing the benefits of restoring nature for nature’s sake—for the bears, birds, and beavers. For the salmon and cedars. Certainly, that’s been the case on the Elwha River in Washington state. People also benefit from ecological restoration. Over the last few decades, we’ve started to better account for what healthy rivers provide. These ecosystem services have helped put a value on something invaluable.

These days, we’re still building dams, although fewer than before, which is a step in the right direction. But to undo centuries of environmental harm, we’ll need bigger leaps.

American Rivers has set an ambitious goal to work with partners to remove 30,000 dams and open up 300,000 river miles by 2050. That work is aided by aquatic connectivity teams now operating in 26 states and counting. There are also some other unlikely partners, such as the hydropower industry, although it’s not a booster of every project.

“It has really come down to safety and economics. They’re electing to take out their lower-performing assets,” Brian Graber, senior director of River Restoration at American Rivers, told me. “There are many more dam owners who want to remove dams, and so trade groups, like the National Hydropower Association, are no longer adversaries.”

Opening up rivers, I think, opens up a door of possibilities both for fish and people. It allows us to reimagine how to grow food without emptying rivers of life, how to generate clean energy without driving extinction, and how to move forward without leaving part of the community behind. We can be better neighbors to each other, but also better people on this planet.

This excerpt is adapted from Tara Lohan’s Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life (2025, Island Press). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from Island Press. It was produced for the web by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Why America Is Removing Thousands of Dams and Letting Rivers Run Free” by Tara Lohan is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.

The post Why the US is Removing Thousands of Dams and Letting Rivers Run Free appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Salmon-killing McNary Dam was erected on tribal fishing sites in the Columbia River. Most of the hydro-power from the dam went to now-defunct aluminum mills and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

After centuries of dam building, a nationwide movement to dismantle these aging barriers is showing how free-flowing rivers can restore ecosystems, improve safety, and reconnect people with nature.

With more than 550,000 dams in the United States, free-flowing rivers are an endangered species. We’ve dammed, diked, and diverted almost every major river in the country, straightening curves, pinching off floodplains, and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals. But this has come at a great cost. Freshwater biodiversity—all the organisms that hail from our rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands—is among the most threatened on the planet. Dams have played a big role in that demise, pushing fish, mussels, and other animals to the brink, and some over it. In North America, nearly 40 percent of fish are imperiled, and 61 species have blinked out since 1900.

A growing dam removal movement has led to some 2,200 dams being blasted and backhoed from U.S. rivers—most of them in the past 25 years. It’s an extraordinary turn of events for a dam-loving country. Europeans began erecting river barriers soon after they arrived in North America. Massachusetts’s Old Oaken Bucket Pond Dam, built in 1640, is one of the country’s oldest known dams. Thousands more followed across New England, then down the East Coast, and eventually westward. They powered mills that ground corn, cut lumber, forged tack, and produced textiles. As dams raised the height of the water behind them, they also smothered rapids and white water so that logs could be floated from upstream forests—where they were felled—to downstream industry, where they were processed. After hydroelectric power replaced mechanical power in the 1880s, the dams kept towns and cities alight.

As dam building pushed westward, dam heights pushed skyward. Hoover Dam, built in the 1930s with the labor of 21,000 men, sits 726 feet high and more than 1,200 feet long—more a fortress than infrastructure. Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington rises to 550 feet and stretches nearly a mile long. The United States emerged from the Great Depression into a dam-building frenzy that lasted more than 30 years, dubbed the “go-go years” by Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, his iconic book on western water. Between 1950 and 1979, approximately 1,700 dams were built each year.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which built many of the country’s mammoth dams and reengineered its rivers, had a motto: “Our rivers: total use for greater wealth.” Millions of Americans cashed in on the boom, often without giving it a thought. Politicians and regulators championed dams for their power, flood control, water storage, and recreational potential. Indeed, dams shaped the architecture of the West, irrigating millions of arid acres to grow crops for people and livestock, corralling drinking water for cities hundreds of miles away, churning the engines of war to create aluminum for fighter planes and plutonium for bombs, and turning valleys and canyons into giant swimming pools for our amusement.

Woody Guthrie captured the sentiment of those years in his 1941 song “Grand Coulee Dam,” which refers to the Columbia River as a “wild and wasted stream.” Wasted until it was dammed, that is. The folksinger, spurred by a government paycheck for his efforts, penned 26 songs espousing the virtues of the Columbia River’s dams. That sentiment was also a natural extension of an ethos brought to the Americas by European colonists: Nature should be harnessed, subjugated, bent to the will of those manifesting their destiny. Along the way, any impact on fish and river health was either poorly understood or simply ignored. Often the latter. Also ignored were obligations to tribes that had treaty rights to fish rivers that were quickly becoming empty of fish.

For most Indigenous people, dams didn’t bring enrichment or progress; it was one more theft from the enduring process of colonization in which food, community, ceremony, and sovereignty were stolen. Barry McCovey Jr., a member of the Yurok Tribe in California, called the dams on the Klamath River, where his people reside, “cultural genocide.” Dams have swallowed creation sites, burial grounds, gathering places, fishing holes, homelands, and human history.

In the 1990s, then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt reflected that we have been building, on average, one large dam a day every day since the Declaration of Independence. It hasn’t been without ecological consequences either. Dams have decimated migratory fish populations by blocking their access to vital upstream habitat for spawning, feeding, and evading predators. The barriers also obstruct the downstream movement of sediment and nutrients, thus depleting riverbanks and coastal beaches, hastening erosion, and reducing the growth of riverside plants that feed insects, birds, and other animals.

The water that backs up behind a dam—its impoundment—turns a river into an unnatural lake. Migrating young salmon that once quickly rode spring freshets to the ocean must now navigate slow-moving water over a wide expanse, which takes more energy and increases the chances that they’ll end up as dinner to a hungry predator, of which there are many if you’re a tiny fish. And that’s all before they have to run the turbine gauntlet and face the drop from the dam’s height to the water below. The slack water in an impoundment behind the dam can also heat up, turning these reservoirs into bathtubs with lethal temperatures for some fish. The warm water can also spur the spread of invasive species that prey on native residents.

Dams upend so many natural processes that it could be argued a river dammed isn’t really a river at all. It’s also possible that many of us don’t remember how a free-flowing river really looks and sounds. Dam removals can help restore not just river function but our collective memory, and I think we’ll need to do a lot more of it. The U.S. dam-building flurry hit its peak in the 1970s, and since 2000, we’ve been taking down more dams than we’ve been building. But the dam removal movement didn’t happen spontaneously. It was fought for by tribes, conservationists, fishers, and eventually broad, somewhat unlikely coalitions. It was also aided by environmental laws that protect clean water and endangered species, by scientific studies of dam removals and their impacts, and by regulators willing to manage adaptively.

Many people may see removing dams as outlandish. After all, they provide clean, cheap energy, right? But it turns out that only 3 percent of dams produce hydropower. Although hydropower is often placed in the “clean energy” column, dams and reservoirs also produce greenhouse gases, such as methane, and some do so to a significant degree.

Climate change poses yet more challenges. In drought-plagued regions, such as the Colorado River Basin, very little water can leave major reservoirs too low to produce hydropower or deliver water supplies. On the flip side, many dams today aren’t designed to withstand climate-amplified storms, which are increasing in frequency and severity, can threaten public safety, and may leave big cleanup bills. A big storm in 2023 put Montpelier, Vermont, underwater, and experts found that dams actually made the flooding worse.

There are many compelling environmental reasons to remove dams—including the long list of ecological consequences given above—but public safety is also paramount. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the nation’s dam safety a “D” grade in 2021. Until 2019, there were more than 15,000 “high-hazard” dams, where a failure would result in the loss of life. And there’s ample reason to be worried. The average age of our dams is 57 years, and more than 8,000 have surpassed 90 years. Aging dams require regular maintenance to ensure their safety, but this comes at a significant cost. As of 2024, $165 billion was required to rehabilitate all nonfederal dams in need of repair, and another $27 billion was needed for federal dams, according to the ASCE 2021 report.

Dams also don’t have to fail to be dangerous. At U.S. low-head dams, many only a few feet tall, some 1,400 people have drowned because of the unseen and unsafe hydraulics that these dams produce. The 6-foot-tall Dock Street Dam in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has taken 31 lives between 1913 and April 2025.

Of course, many of our dams serve critical purposes, and I’ve yet to meet a dam removal advocate who thinks that they should all come down. I certainly don’t. But there’s no shortage of low-hanging fruit when it comes to dams worthy of demolition. Tens of thousands of dams—in some states, the majority of dams obstructing rivers and streams—no longer serve a useful purpose. These so-called deadbeat dams include mill dams, where the mills are decades (or centuries) gone, and obsolete dams, such as the 168-foot-tall Matilija Dam in Southern California, which was built for water storage but filled with silt in just 50 years. Some dams are orphans, with no known owner and therefore no one overseeing their upkeep. In many cases, it’s cheaper to take down dams than to refurbish and retrofit them to meet modern safety and environmental laws.

Dam removals can also be a necessary step toward ameliorating harm to Indigenous communities from the loss of food sovereignty, treaty rights, cultural resources, and homelands. More people are now realizing the benefits of restoring nature for nature’s sake—for the bears, birds, and beavers. For the salmon and cedars. Certainly, that’s been the case on the Elwha River in Washington state. People also benefit from ecological restoration. Over the last few decades, we’ve started to better account for what healthy rivers provide. These ecosystem services have helped put a value on something invaluable.

These days, we’re still building dams, although fewer than before, which is a step in the right direction. But to undo centuries of environmental harm, we’ll need bigger leaps.

American Rivers has set an ambitious goal to work with partners to remove 30,000 dams and open up 300,000 river miles by 2050. That work is aided by aquatic connectivity teams now operating in 26 states and counting. There are also some other unlikely partners, such as the hydropower industry, although it’s not a booster of every project.

“It has really come down to safety and economics. They’re electing to take out their lower-performing assets,” Brian Graber, senior director of River Restoration at American Rivers, told me. “There are many more dam owners who want to remove dams, and so trade groups, like the National Hydropower Association, are no longer adversaries.”

Opening up rivers, I think, opens up a door of possibilities both for fish and people. It allows us to reimagine how to grow food without emptying rivers of life, how to generate clean energy without driving extinction, and how to move forward without leaving part of the community behind. We can be better neighbors to each other, but also better people on this planet.

This excerpt is adapted from Tara Lohan’s Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life (2025, Island Press). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from Island Press. It was produced for the web by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Why America Is Removing Thousands of Dams and Letting Rivers Run Free” by Tara Lohan is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.

The post Why the US is Removing Thousands of Dams and Letting Rivers Run Free appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Salmon-killing McNary Dam was erected on tribal fishing sites in the Columbia River. Most of the hydro-power from the dam went to now-defunct aluminum mills and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

After centuries of dam building, a nationwide movement to dismantle these aging barriers is showing how free-flowing rivers can restore ecosystems, improve safety, and reconnect people with nature.

With more than 550,000 dams in the United States, free-flowing rivers are an endangered species. We’ve dammed, diked, and diverted almost every major river in the country, straightening curves, pinching off floodplains, and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals. But this has come at a great cost. Freshwater biodiversity—all the organisms that hail from our rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands—is among the most threatened on the planet. Dams have played a big role in that demise, pushing fish, mussels, and other animals to the brink, and some over it. In North America, nearly 40 percent of fish are imperiled, and 61 species have blinked out since 1900.

A growing dam removal movement has led to some 2,200 dams being blasted and backhoed from U.S. rivers—most of them in the past 25 years. It’s an extraordinary turn of events for a dam-loving country. Europeans began erecting river barriers soon after they arrived in North America. Massachusetts’s Old Oaken Bucket Pond Dam, built in 1640, is one of the country’s oldest known dams. Thousands more followed across New England, then down the East Coast, and eventually westward. They powered mills that ground corn, cut lumber, forged tack, and produced textiles. As dams raised the height of the water behind them, they also smothered rapids and white water so that logs could be floated from upstream forests—where they were felled—to downstream industry, where they were processed. After hydroelectric power replaced mechanical power in the 1880s, the dams kept towns and cities alight.

As dam building pushed westward, dam heights pushed skyward. Hoover Dam, built in the 1930s with the labor of 21,000 men, sits 726 feet high and more than 1,200 feet long—more a fortress than infrastructure. Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in Washington rises to 550 feet and stretches nearly a mile long. The United States emerged from the Great Depression into a dam-building frenzy that lasted more than 30 years, dubbed the “go-go years” by Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, his iconic book on western water. Between 1950 and 1979, approximately 1,700 dams were built each year.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which built many of the country’s mammoth dams and reengineered its rivers, had a motto: “Our rivers: total use for greater wealth.” Millions of Americans cashed in on the boom, often without giving it a thought. Politicians and regulators championed dams for their power, flood control, water storage, and recreational potential. Indeed, dams shaped the architecture of the West, irrigating millions of arid acres to grow crops for people and livestock, corralling drinking water for cities hundreds of miles away, churning the engines of war to create aluminum for fighter planes and plutonium for bombs, and turning valleys and canyons into giant swimming pools for our amusement.

Woody Guthrie captured the sentiment of those years in his 1941 song “Grand Coulee Dam,” which refers to the Columbia River as a “wild and wasted stream.” Wasted until it was dammed, that is. The folksinger, spurred by a government paycheck for his efforts, penned 26 songs espousing the virtues of the Columbia River’s dams. That sentiment was also a natural extension of an ethos brought to the Americas by European colonists: Nature should be harnessed, subjugated, bent to the will of those manifesting their destiny. Along the way, any impact on fish and river health was either poorly understood or simply ignored. Often the latter. Also ignored were obligations to tribes that had treaty rights to fish rivers that were quickly becoming empty of fish.

For most Indigenous people, dams didn’t bring enrichment or progress; it was one more theft from the enduring process of colonization in which food, community, ceremony, and sovereignty were stolen. Barry McCovey Jr., a member of the Yurok Tribe in California, called the dams on the Klamath River, where his people reside, “cultural genocide.” Dams have swallowed creation sites, burial grounds, gathering places, fishing holes, homelands, and human history.

In the 1990s, then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt reflected that we have been building, on average, one large dam a day every day since the Declaration of Independence. It hasn’t been without ecological consequences either. Dams have decimated migratory fish populations by blocking their access to vital upstream habitat for spawning, feeding, and evading predators. The barriers also obstruct the downstream movement of sediment and nutrients, thus depleting riverbanks and coastal beaches, hastening erosion, and reducing the growth of riverside plants that feed insects, birds, and other animals.

The water that backs up behind a dam—its impoundment—turns a river into an unnatural lake. Migrating young salmon that once quickly rode spring freshets to the ocean must now navigate slow-moving water over a wide expanse, which takes more energy and increases the chances that they’ll end up as dinner to a hungry predator, of which there are many if you’re a tiny fish. And that’s all before they have to run the turbine gauntlet and face the drop from the dam’s height to the water below. The slack water in an impoundment behind the dam can also heat up, turning these reservoirs into bathtubs with lethal temperatures for some fish. The warm water can also spur the spread of invasive species that prey on native residents.

Dams upend so many natural processes that it could be argued a river dammed isn’t really a river at all. It’s also possible that many of us don’t remember how a free-flowing river really looks and sounds. Dam removals can help restore not just river function but our collective memory, and I think we’ll need to do a lot more of it. The U.S. dam-building flurry hit its peak in the 1970s, and since 2000, we’ve been taking down more dams than we’ve been building. But the dam removal movement didn’t happen spontaneously. It was fought for by tribes, conservationists, fishers, and eventually broad, somewhat unlikely coalitions. It was also aided by environmental laws that protect clean water and endangered species, by scientific studies of dam removals and their impacts, and by regulators willing to manage adaptively.

Many people may see removing dams as outlandish. After all, they provide clean, cheap energy, right? But it turns out that only 3 percent of dams produce hydropower. Although hydropower is often placed in the “clean energy” column, dams and reservoirs also produce greenhouse gases, such as methane, and some do so to a significant degree.

Climate change poses yet more challenges. In drought-plagued regions, such as the Colorado River Basin, very little water can leave major reservoirs too low to produce hydropower or deliver water supplies. On the flip side, many dams today aren’t designed to withstand climate-amplified storms, which are increasing in frequency and severity, can threaten public safety, and may leave big cleanup bills. A big storm in 2023 put Montpelier, Vermont, underwater, and experts found that dams actually made the flooding worse.

There are many compelling environmental reasons to remove dams—including the long list of ecological consequences given above—but public safety is also paramount. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the nation’s dam safety a “D” grade in 2021. Until 2019, there were more than 15,000 “high-hazard” dams, where a failure would result in the loss of life. And there’s ample reason to be worried. The average age of our dams is 57 years, and more than 8,000 have surpassed 90 years. Aging dams require regular maintenance to ensure their safety, but this comes at a significant cost. As of 2024, $165 billion was required to rehabilitate all nonfederal dams in need of repair, and another $27 billion was needed for federal dams, according to the ASCE 2021 report.

Dams also don’t have to fail to be dangerous. At U.S. low-head dams, many only a few feet tall, some 1,400 people have drowned because of the unseen and unsafe hydraulics that these dams produce. The 6-foot-tall Dock Street Dam in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has taken 31 lives between 1913 and April 2025.

Of course, many of our dams serve critical purposes, and I’ve yet to meet a dam removal advocate who thinks that they should all come down. I certainly don’t. But there’s no shortage of low-hanging fruit when it comes to dams worthy of demolition. Tens of thousands of dams—in some states, the majority of dams obstructing rivers and streams—no longer serve a useful purpose. These so-called deadbeat dams include mill dams, where the mills are decades (or centuries) gone, and obsolete dams, such as the 168-foot-tall Matilija Dam in Southern California, which was built for water storage but filled with silt in just 50 years. Some dams are orphans, with no known owner and therefore no one overseeing their upkeep. In many cases, it’s cheaper to take down dams than to refurbish and retrofit them to meet modern safety and environmental laws.

Dam removals can also be a necessary step toward ameliorating harm to Indigenous communities from the loss of food sovereignty, treaty rights, cultural resources, and homelands. More people are now realizing the benefits of restoring nature for nature’s sake—for the bears, birds, and beavers. For the salmon and cedars. Certainly, that’s been the case on the Elwha River in Washington state. People also benefit from ecological restoration. Over the last few decades, we’ve started to better account for what healthy rivers provide. These ecosystem services have helped put a value on something invaluable.

These days, we’re still building dams, although fewer than before, which is a step in the right direction. But to undo centuries of environmental harm, we’ll need bigger leaps.

American Rivers has set an ambitious goal to work with partners to remove 30,000 dams and open up 300,000 river miles by 2050. That work is aided by aquatic connectivity teams now operating in 26 states and counting. There are also some other unlikely partners, such as the hydropower industry, although it’s not a booster of every project.

“It has really come down to safety and economics. They’re electing to take out their lower-performing assets,” Brian Graber, senior director of River Restoration at American Rivers, told me. “There are many more dam owners who want to remove dams, and so trade groups, like the National Hydropower Association, are no longer adversaries.”

Opening up rivers, I think, opens up a door of possibilities both for fish and people. It allows us to reimagine how to grow food without emptying rivers of life, how to generate clean energy without driving extinction, and how to move forward without leaving part of the community behind. We can be better neighbors to each other, but also better people on this planet.

This excerpt is adapted from Tara Lohan’s Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life (2025, Island Press). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from Island Press. It was produced for the web by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Why America Is Removing Thousands of Dams and Letting Rivers Run Free” by Tara Lohan is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.

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Coastal flooding along the lower Columbia. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency Review Council’s long-overdue report on the fate of the agency is scheduled for release next week. But in case you missed it, news broke recently — via a leaked draft of the report obtained by The New York Times — that the council recommended preserving the agency, rather than making it “go away,” as requested by Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Per a January executive order, the report was supposed to be released on November 16, which was “within 180 days of the date of the Council’s first public meeting.” That deadline was apparently extended because the draft report’s content allegedly did not meet the administration’s approval. According to The New York Times, the draft proposed changes included restoring FEMA to a cabinet-level agency that reports directly to the president — a status it held before 2003 — and speeding up the distribution of aid to states. This latter recommendation was the outcome of a nationwide survey conducted by the council’s Federal-State Coordination Subcommittee. Based on 1,300 responses from states, territories, and tribes, the survey resulted in five recommendations: expedite the flow of federal resources to communities, boost local and regional preparedness, protect and update the nation’s key emergency capabilities, build up regional resilience, and integrate and unify a national resilience network.

According to the Times, Noem is in the process of reducing the 100-page draft report to 20 pages. As previously noted, the official report is not out until next week, and its contents may differ. But it’s worth noting that Trump and Noem thought they were stacking the deck by appointing mostly Republicans to the council, including former and current governors of Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia, as well as Michael Whatley, chairman of the Republican National Committee. However, the Trump administration appears to misunderstand a fundamental aspect of FEMA.

Yes, the agency has many flaws. The response to Hurricane Katrina is the best-known failure of the federal government in responding to a catastrophic event. But there are more recent criticisms – such as the difficulty that smaller, rural governments face in applying for grants, or the length of time it takes to provide cash aid to those who successfully complete applications. These are the types of flaws the review council and others have urged the federal government to address. That’s because there is bipartisan support for federal disaster and mitigation assistance. Just this last July, leaders from both parties of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure introduced a bill in Congress aimed at these very issues, including making FEMA a cabinet-level agency.

FEMA’s status among officials and the public stems not from the agency being beloved, but because its services are necessary. When an agency like FEMA provides a critical service but is itself flawed, we should fix it rather than dismantle it. Trump and Noem don’t appear to understand this, and their alleged efforts to undermine their own review council demonstrate a willingness to prioritize political goals over what’s actually needed to save lives. Political games or some strict, abstract ideology shouldn’t be a barrier to the nation’s safety, especially when it means ignoring the practical need for a strong, functional, and well-funded FEMA.

The choice facing the administration is not between a flawless agency and no agency; it is between fixing a critical service essential to every state and abandoning communities to disaster for the sake of political expediency.

This first ran on CEPR.

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Image by David Wirzba.

It’s been 20 years since I retired from the Air Force and 40 years since I first entered Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt at the southern end of the Front Range that includes Pikes Peak in Colorado. So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF). Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction. Raised Catholic, I learned that God created the universe out of nothing. By comparison, nuclear creators aren’t gods, they’re devils, for their “creation” may end with the destruction of everything. Small wonder J. Robert Oppenheimer mused that he’d become death, the destroyer of worlds, after the first successful atomic blast in 1945.)

In my Cheyenne Mountain days, circa 1985, the new “must have” bomber was the B-1 Lancer and the new “must have” ICBM was the MX Peacekeeper. If you go back 20 to 30 years earlier than that, it was the B-52 and the Minuteman. And mind you, my old service “owns” two legs of America’s nuclear triad. (The Navy has the third with its nuclear submarines armed with Trident II missiles.) And count on one thing: it will never willingly give them up. It will always “relentlessly advocate” for the latest ICBM and nuclear-capable bomber, irrespective of need, price, strategy, or above all else their murderous, indeed apocalyptic, capabilities.

At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.

So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion (and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.

I Join AF Space Command Only to Find Myself Under 2,000 Feet of Granite

My first military assignment in 1985 was at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado with Air Force Space Command. That put me in America’s nuclear command post during the last few years of the Cold War. I also worked in the Space Surveillance Center and on a battle staff that brought me into the Missile Warning Center. So, I was exposed, in a relatively modest way (if anything having to do with nuclear weapons can ever be considered “modest”), to what nuclear war would actually be like and forced to think about it in a way most Americans don’t.

Each time I journeyed into Cheyenne Mountain, I walked or rode through a long tunnel carved out of granite. The buildings inside were mounted on gigantic springs (yes, springs!) that were supposed to absorb the shock of any nearby hydrogen bomb blast in a future war with the Soviet Union. Massive blast doors that looked like they belonged on the largest bank vault in the universe were supposed to keep us safe, though in a nuclear war they might only have ensured our entombment. They were mostly kept open, but every now and then they were closed for a military exercise.

I was a “space systems test analyst.” The Space Surveillance Center ran on a certain software program that needed periodic testing and evaluation and I helped test the computer software that kept track of all objects orbiting the Earth. Back then, there were just over 5,000 of them. (Now, that number’s more like 45,000 and space is a lot more crowded — perhaps too crowded.)

Anyhow, what I remember most vividly were military exercises where we’d run through different potentially world-ending scenarios. (Think of the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick.) One exercise simulated a nuclear attack on the United States. No, it wasn’t like some Hollywood production. We just had monochrome computer displays with primitive graphics, but you could certainly see missile tracks emerging from the Soviet Union, crossing the North Pole, and ending at American cities.

Even though there were no fancy (fake) explosions and no other special effects, simply realizing what was possible and how we would visualize it if it were actually to happen was, as I’m sure you can imagine, a distinctly sobering experience and not one I’ve ever forgotten.

That “war game” should have shaken me up more than it did, however. At the time, we had a certain amount of fatalism about the possibility of nuclear war, something captured in the posters of the era that told you what to do in case of a nuclear attack. The final step was basically to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. That was indeed my attitude.

Rather than obsess about Armageddon, I submerged myself in routine. There was a certain job to be done, procedures to be carried out, discipline to adhere to. Remember, of course, that this was also the era of the rise of the nuclear freeze protest movement that was demanding the U.S. and the Soviet Union reach an agreement to halt further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons. (If only, of course!) In addition, this was the time of the hit film The Day After, which tried to portray the aftermath of a nuclear war in the United States. In fact, on a midnight shift in Cheyenne Mountain, I even read Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which envisioned the Cold War gone hot, a Third World War gone nuclear.

Of course, if we had thought about nuclear war every minute of every day, we might indeed have been cowering under our sheets. Unfortunately, as a society, except in rare moments like the nuclear freeze movement one, we neither considered nor generally grasped what nuclear war was all about (even though nine countries now possess such weaponry and the likelihood of such a war only grows). Unfortunately, that lack of comprehension (and so protest) is one big reason why nuclear war remains so chillingly possible.

If anything, such a war has been eerily normalized in our collective consciousness and we’ve become remarkably numb to and fatalistic about it. One characteristic of that reality was the anesthetizing language that we used then (and still use) when it came to nuclear matters. We in the military spoke in acronyms or jargon about “flexible response,” “deterrence,” and what was then known as “mutually assured destruction” (or the wiping out of everything). In fact, we had a whole vocabulary of different words and euphemisms we could use so as not to think too deeply about the unthinkable or our possible role in making it happen.

My Date With Trinity

After leaving Cheyenne Mountain and getting a master’s degree, I co-taught a course on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy. That was in 1992, and we actually took the cadets on a field trip to Los Alamos where the first nuclear weapon had largely been developed. Then we went on to the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where, of course, that first atomic device was tested and that, believe me, was an unforgettable experience. We walked around and saw what was left of the tower where Robert Oppenheimer and crew suspended the “gadget” (nice euphemism!) for testing that bomb on July 16, 1945, less than a month before two atomic bombs would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroying both of them and killing perhaps 200,000 people. Basically (I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn), nothing’s left of that tower except for its concrete base and a couple of twisted pieces of metal. It certainly does make you reflect on the sheer power of such weaponry. It was then and remains a distinctly haunted landscape and walking around it a truly sobering experience.

And when I toured the Los Alamos lab right after the collapse of the other great superpower of that moment, the Soviet Union, it was curious how glum the people I met there were. The mood of the scientists was like: hey, maybe I’m going to have to find another job because we’re not going to be building all these nuclear weapons anymore, not with the Soviet Union gone. It was so obviously time for America to cash in its “peace dividends” and the scientists’ mood reflected that.

Now, just imagine that 33 years after I took those cadets there, Los Alamos is once again going gangbusters, as our nation plans to “invest” another $1.7 trillion in a “modernized” nuclear triad (imagine what that means in terms of ultimate destruction!) that we (and the rest of the world) absolutely don’t need.  To be blunt, today that outrages me. It angers me that all of us, whether those like me who served in uniform or your average American taxpayer, have sacrificed so much to create genocidal weaponry and a distinctly world-ending arsenal. Worse yet, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, we didn’t even try to change course. And now the message is: Let’s spend staggering amounts of our tax dollars on even more apocalyptic weaponry. It’s insanity and, no question about it, it’s also morally obscene.

The Glitter of Nuclear Weapons

That ongoing obsession with total destruction, ultimate annihilation, reflects the fact that the United States is led by moral midgets. During the Vietnam War years, the infamous phrase of the time was that the U.S. military had to “destroy the town to save it” (from communism, of course). And for 70 years now, America’s leaders have tacitly threatened to order the destruction of the world to save it from a rival power like Russia or China. Indeed, nuclear war plans in the early 1960s already envisioned a massive strike against Russia and China, with estimates of the dead put at 600 million, or “100 Holocausts,” as Daniel Ellsberg of Vietnam War fame so memorably put it.

Take it from this retired officer: you simply can’t trust the U.S. military with that sort of destructive power. Indeed, you can’t trust anyone with that much power at their fingertips. Consider nuclear weapons akin to the One Ring of Power in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who puts that ring on is inevitably twisted and corrupted.

Freeman Dyson, a physicist of considerable probity, put it well to documentarian Jon Else in his film The Day After Trinity. Dyson confessed to his own “ring of power” moment:

“I felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

I’ve felt something akin to that as well. When I wore a military uniform, I was in some sense a captive to power. The military both captures and captivates. There’s an allure of power in the military, since you have a lot of destructive power at your disposal.

Of course, I wasn’t a B-1 bomber pilot or a missile-launch officer for ICBMs, but even so, when you’re part of something that’s so immensely, even world-destructively powerful, believe me, it does have an allure to it. And I don’t think we’re usually fully aware of how captivating that can be and how much you can want to be a part of that.

Even after their service, many veterans still want to go up in a warplane again or take a tour of a submarine, a battleship, or an aircraft carrier for nostalgic reasons, of course, but also because you want to regain that captivating feeling of being so close to immense — even world-ending — power.

The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.

No matter how many bunkers we build, no matter that the world’s biggest bunker tunneled out of a mountain, the one I was once in, still exists, nothing will save us if we allow the glitter of nuclear weapons to flash into preternatural thermonuclear brightness.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Clifty Coal Plant, Madison, Indiana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

It appeared to be a grim déjà vu when the final gavel dropped in Belem, Brazil and the COP30 text once again avoided naming fossil fuels.

But this apparent diplomatic failure obscured something more consequential: after hours of fraught, last-minute negotiations, countries reaffirmed the “United Arab Emirates consensus” from COP28 — the only UN agreement to date to reference a fossil-fuel phaseout. And the pathway it implies is already taking shape. In April, Colombia and the Netherlands will convene governments in Santa Marta, Colombia for the first global summit dedicated explicitly to the transition away from fossil fuels.

Tripling Renewable Energy, Doubling Efficiency, and Cutting Methane

At COP28 in Dubai, governments committed to tripling renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency by 2030. Combined with deep cuts to fossil methane, these pledges form a powerful trio. According to the Climate Action Tracker, fully implementing them would reduce projected warming by about 0.9°C this century, from 2.6˚C to 1.7˚C — enough to determine whether Paris Agreement targets remains within reach. If delivered, they would do more to collapse fossil-fuel demand than any language missing from the COP30 outcome text.

The energy system is already shifting. In the last two years, China has driven an unprecedented solar surge — adding more capacity in 2024 alone than the rest of the world combined, now hosting roughly half of global installed solar power, and exporting ultra-cheap panels that are flooding markets globally. As solar prices plunge, renewables are undercutting coal and gas markets globally. Doubling energy efficiency, if it can be achieved, cuts demand at a scale equivalent to adding vast new clean-power capacity, but without the economic and environmental burden of new plants.

Deep cuts to fossil methane — the primary component of gas, and a climate pollutant roughly 80 times more powerful than CO₂ over 20 years — require producers to eliminate leakage, venting, and routine flaring. These measures raise compliance costs, increase saleable gas, and make new fossil expansion harder to justify. Taken together, these commitments amount to a key part of the de facto fossil-fuel phaseout pathway.

But voluntary pledges alone won’t get us there. The Global Methane Status Report 2025 finds that despite over 150 countries endorsing the Global Methane Pledge, methane emissions continue to rise.

And even when we look beyond voluntary pledges to the domestic laws, regulations, and policy measures that represent a plan of action — as reflected in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Methane Action Plans — the gap remains enormous. Fully implementing all NDCs would cut global methane emissions by only about 8 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. That is far short of the 30 percent Global Methane Pledge goal and well below the 45 percent cut UNEP associates with keeping 1.5°C within reach.

The EU Leads the Way on Methane Regulation

The missing ingredient is enforcement — and the most important development on that front is not the Global Methane Pledge but the EU Methane Regulation.

Adopted in 2024, the EU rules apply not only to methane emitted within Europe but also to imported fossil fuels. Because the EU is the world’s largest importer of oil and gas — and its suppliers account for roughly 30 percent of global oil and gas methane emissions — these rules may do more to cut global methane than any voluntary pledge ever could. For the first time, countries exporting gas and oil to Europe must meet strict leak-detection, monitoring, and venting and flaring requirements. Non-compliant fuels can effectively be shut out of the EU market.

This is regulatory gravity: when the world’s largest buyer sets a standard, producers must adapt or lose access.

Some already have. Companies like ConocoPhillips have set near-zero methane-intensity targets by 2030 and earned top-tier marks for emissions reporting — clear signals that they intend to compete under strict import regimes. Meanwhile, fossil-fuel trade groups are lobbying aggressively to weaken the EU rules, arguing they threaten U.S. LNG exports. Investors disagree: in October, asset managers representing over €4.5 trillion urged the EU not to dilute nor delay its methane law, highlighting methane as a material financial risk.

The deeper truth is that the EU methane rules are already going beyond the Global Methane Pledge and achieving reductions in fossil-methane emissions across borders, backed by market access and legal penalties rather than voluntary promises.

Science points in the same direction. The International Energy Agency concludes that methane from fossil-fuel operations could be cut by around 75 percent by 2030 using technologies available today. Combined with renewable and efficiency pledges, these reductions undermine the economic case for expanding fossil-fuel production. New LNG terminals, oil fields, and long-lived gas infrastructure would rapidly become uneconomic — stranded assets in the making.

Pledges Are Not a Plan

Methane is responsible for roughly a third to a half of today’s warming, and because it is short-lived, rapid reductions can deliver measurable cooling within a decade. Without binding limits on fossil methane, the world cannot meet its climate goals, no matter how fast renewable energy grows.

This is the real lesson of COP30: pledges are not a plan. Tripling renewables, doubling efficiency, and slashing methane can transform global energy systems — but only if they are backed by binding rules, border measures, and enforcement. The EU methane regulations represent the first serious attempt at such enforcement.

The next opportunity to broaden that effort will not come at COP31, but in April 2026, when Colombia and the Netherlands co-host the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta.

It will be the first global summit to center the production side of the climate crisis. And it exists because grassroots movements made it unavoidable: years of pressure from youth organizers, Indigenous land defenders, and frontline communities pushed governments and companies toward positions once dismissed as radical — including today’s mainstream demand for a fair, full fossil fuel phaseout. Santa Marta is happening not as a symbolic gesture, but because people insisted on real action.

If COP30 could not bring itself to state that fossil fuels must be phased out, Santa Marta can. And it can ground that commitment in the tools governments have already endorsed: accelerated renewables, deep efficiency gains, and enforceable methane standards — led, in practice, by the EU.

For the United States, the moment is defining. Federal methane rules are being dismantled. But U.S. states need not wait. Colorado, New Mexico, and California already have some of the strongest methane rules in the world. By aligning with Europe’s approach — and sending governors or senior officials to Santa Marta — they can help build a transatlantic coalition for binding methane limits and an orderly fossil-fuel phase-down.

The path from COP30 requires fewer pledges and more enforceable governance. Countries already know what must be done. The task now is to turn an implicit roadmap into a binding framework capable of delivering the cuts that matter most — starting with methane in the oil and gas sector.

This first appeared on FPIF.

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Image by Sam Grozyan.

The United States of America was unofficially represented at COP30, the annual UN climate conference (November 10-21) in Belem, Brazil by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). He was not granted the privilege of officially representing the U.S. The State Department refused to facilitate his trip, refused to acknowledge the senator as a representative of a congressional delegation, refusing to acknowledge COP30, refusing to acknowledge global warming. This is the first time in Senator Whitehouse’s career that the executive branch of government has dictated a congressional member’s CODEL (Congressional Delegation paid trip for members).

The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM)

In meetings with country representatives outside of COP30 official proceedings, Senator Whitehouse learned what’s happening to hopefully limit global warming, concluding that one way to climate safety is by imposing a fee on polluters. According to studies by Potsdam Institute, “a price on carbon” is one of the ways not yet implemented to tackle global warming.

The senator met with the Europeans, the Brits, and the Australians. The EU is instituting a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which is a global price on carbon that comes via tariffs. It is already law and set to go into effect in 2026. The conservative UK government is also in the process of figuring out how they’ll handle a carbon tariff. Australia is also looking into it.

Whitehouse: “This is sending a global price signal that if your goods are more carbon intensive than ours, we are going to charge you for that. You cannot pollute and export for free any longer.” However, a fee on carbon pollution is no guarantee of climate safety; on the other hand, not instituting a carbon fee is a pathway for climate failure, likely taking down civilization at some unexpected juncture. It’s gotten that serious.

In that regard, the value of oil and gas subsidies in the U.S. are $700 billion per year. That’s the value of polluting for free that the fossil fuel industry receives. It’s no surprise they were willing to “grease” the president with several hundred million dollars to do whatever they want to do.

American Opinion Polls on Carbon Pollution

According to the senator, Trump does not represent American interests. He only represents fossil fuel interests, not the American public. Proof is found in recent polls, as expressed in Senator Whitehouse’s speech, stating that a proposal to “limit carbon pollution by big corporations” is supported by 72% of Americans. Whereas Trump’s Mar-a-Lago commitment to fossil fuel interests has been sealed with several hundred million dollars of grease following his open offer to do whatever they want for a one-billion-dollar quid pro quo. This is simply one more weird oddball difficult to rationalize stance against America’s best interests. Nearly 2/3rds of the American public want “limits to carbon pollution.”

According to the senator’s speech, when ask if a “fee should be imposed for polluting,” Americans polled said ‘Yes’ by a resounding 74%. Once again, Trump would certainly oppose such a fee since he has already sold his soul to the polluters. American citizens diametrically oppose Trump on carbon pollution. Two-thirds of Americans favor a fee on carbon polluters. Significantly, the EU is instituting such a fee; the UK is considering it; Australia is considering it. This may become a global movement now that all past approaches over the past 30 years by nations of the world, demonstrating concern about climate change at annual COPs, have so little to show for 30 years of meetings.

An updated poll Climate Change in the American Mind d/d June 17, 2025 conducted by Yale Climate Change Communications and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications d/d May 1-25, 2025, can be accessed.

COP30 Results- Global Warming Wins Once Again

According to Reuters d/d November 22, 2025: “World secures compromise deal at COP30 that sidesteps fossil fuels.” This is one more COP failure to properly address the key reason behind starting UN climate conferences 30 years ago. The first UN climate conference, COP1, held in Berlin in 1995 started a process of negotiations to create “legally binding emission reduction targets” for the developed countries of the world. That initial “statement of purpose” remains fluttering in midair directionless, heartless, meaningless, out of reach with each annual meeting. Next year Antalya, Turkey will host the staging arena for COP31’s chatter, wine, caviar, nearly guaranteed disappointing results, and photo ops for state leaders.

The Ultimate Impact of Failure to Challenge Climate Change

Senator Whitehouse’s Senate speech (Nov. 21) discusses the outcome of failure to address climate change. Accordingly, big trouble is on the docket by avoiding the climate change issue. This threat of upcoming trouble is voiced by leading figureheads in finance. Senator Whitehouse refers to it as the Great Climate Insurance Collapse, warned by finance authorities, claiming climate change alone could reduce global GDP by 10-20%.

“In 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage” (Federal Reserve Board Chair Powell) because people will not be able to get home insurance. This, in turn, eliminates home mortgages. “Whole regions of the U.S. are going to become so climate risky that they’re uninsurable.” (Whitehouse)

According to the senator, Florida is on a fast-track: “In Florida the insurance market is already trembling, propped up, perhaps even fake.” The likely scenario is a cascade: “It goes from climate risk-to un-insurability-to mortgage failure-to property value collapse-to recession.” Still, a typical Florida family home is $407,830 in 2025 versus $410,000 in 2023, not too much of a decrease in value in two years but still a decrease as sources say typical Florida buyers experience “climate change denialism” to an extreme despite several obvious risks. Meanwhile, Florida is the most expensive state for home insurance in the country and likely going higher, pricing many buyers out of the market.

Extreme Climate Change Shows Up in the Damnedest Places, Clobbering a Town in Nebraska

“In Cozad, Neb., a hailstorm last year caused an estimated $100 million in damage, according to local insurance agent Brian Messersmith, in a town of just 4,000 people. After the storm, many homeowners and business owners in town say they were dropped by their insurers and forced to scramble to find new, generally more expensive, policies. Others saw the price of their existing policies go up significantly. The average cost of homeowners insurance in Nebraska this year is nearly $6,400, according to Bankrate. That’s the highest in the country, and almost $4,000 above the national average.” (It’s Harder to Get Home Insurance. That’s Changing Communities Across the U.S., NPR, November 12, 2025)

A cascading climate change situation is what the chief economist of Freddie Mac told a Senate committee could happen. Freddie Mac is not a green organization. Freddie Mac is a mortgage company warning the country of climate change negatively impacting the real estate market.

The finance community is warning of big economic trouble because of climate change. These are not green NGOs. The Economist magazine featured an article entitled The Next Housing Disaster, predicting a $25 trillion hit to global real estate because of climate change’s home insurance meltdown.

The president of Aon Insurance, one of the biggest in the country, testified before the Senate budget committee, saying climate risk is a “systemic risk,” which means the issue is not confined to where it originates, it spreads. For example, the 2008 recession was systemic with the mortgage meltdown hurting everybody throughout the economic system. But now we are confronted with global systemic risks that could be globally cataclysmic after years of ignoring climate change.

Two Million Canceled Home Insurance Policies

The climate-engineered home insurance crisis is already happening and threatens to get much worse as the Trump administration officially ignores climate change, labeling it a “hoax”: “In one five-year period, 2018-2023, insurers canceled nearly 2 million homeowner’s policies in the face of rising climate risks.” (How Climate Risks Are Putting Home Insurance Out of Reach, YaleEnvironment360, September 15, 2025) Why would major insurance companies cancel 2,000,000 home insurance policies if climate change is a hoax?

Gunther Thallinger of Allianz SE, the world’s largest insurance company warned about the prospect of hitting 3C, which Senator Whitehouse believes is coming: “The financial system as we know it ceases to exist and capitalism ceases to be viable.”

The Mortgage Bankers Association says the fiscal risk associated with climate change may exceed the capacity of insurance and governmental assistance in some regions of the country.

Climate Deniers Threaten Entire Financial System

If major finance executives, including the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and leading finance entities like Aon Insurance and Allianz SE believe climate change is a systemic risk to the financial system, what more is needed to reverse the administration’s anti-science, anti-climate change campaign that will harm every American and take down the entire financial system. There are no winners under this scenario, only losers, including climate deniers.

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Protest march led by Trevor Ngwane, United Front, from Soweto to the G20 conference center in Johannesburg (November 23). Photo: Premilla Mur.

The third weekend in November offered the world two disastrous days for solving polycrisis problems, starting in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém at the United Nations climate summit (‘COP30’) on November 22, just as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa hosted (most of) the Group of 20 leaders in Johannesburg. The G20 comprises 19 of the world’s major economies plus the European Union and, in 2023, the African Union was added (tokenistically).

The body was formed in 1999 as a finance ministers’ club at a Berlin meeting, at a time of nervousness about economic crises in several middle-income countries, including South Africa. But it was in 2008 that the G20 graduated to a heads-of-state annual meeting, due to deregulated U.S. banking rapidly degenerating, starting with real estate speculation, leading to Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsing. U.S. President George W. Bush was told by his financial managers that the coming global meltdown would urgently require new funding sources, especially from middle-income countries with large surplus dollar reserves.

As the G20’s first major act, South African finance minister Trevor Manuel led a committee to grant the International Monetary Fund (IMF) nearly $1 trillion worth of new funding, approved by the G20 in an April 2009 London emergency meeting. That session also coordinated central banks’ low interest rates and money printing, termed Quantitative Easing (‘QE’), so as to flood liquidity into financial markets and thus avoid a repeat of the 1930s Great Depression.

And again in 2020 during the Covid-19 crisis, G20 leaders agreed that their capitalist self-interest was threatened sufficiently by widespread pandemic-prevention lockdowns and economic seizures, that further QE and much lower interest rates were needed. In addition, a brief pause on the poorest countries’ foreign debt repayments was offered. But that didn’t prevent three African economies that were among the 2010s fastest-growing in the world – Zambia, Ghana and Ethiopia – from defaulting on foreign debt repayments between 2020-23, and terrible fiscal pressure to mount across the continent.

These two financial bailouts were G20 interventions that suggest, in a time of peril, imperial-subimperial fusion can be achieved. On the other hand, intra-capitalist divisions over handling Covid-19 vaccines and treatment were not solved within the G20 from 2020-22: British and German leaders vetoed efforts by South Africa and India wanting an Intellectual Property waiver (the way AIDS drugs were made generic in 2001, saving millions of lives). Ramaphosa was at his best appealing for health justice, allied with India’s Narendra Modi; but Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel were too intent on defending their own Big Pharma firms.

Since then, the world’s crises – climate and biodiversity catastrophes, brutal wars, economic volatility, the threat of rampant Artificial Intelligence, extreme inequality and others – have multiplied, and their causes now extend well beyond the greed and irresponsibility of the traditional Western imperial powers. In 2010 when the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa BRICS emerged as a counterpart to the G7, the G20’s responsibilities for global economic management were codified, but other crises were added to the workload. And the recent G20 presidencies of Indonesia (2022), India (2023) and Brazil (2024) – all BRICS members (Jakarta having joined in 2025) – highlighted the subimperial powers’ newly-significant roles, not in providing alternatives, but instead in legitimizing status quo multilateralism.

Indeed, with the advent of far-right Western rulers (Trump from 2017-21 and again since January this year, and in Italy, Giorgia Meloni since 2022), and three more neo-fascist parties currently leading in European polls – Reform in the United Kingdom (which hosts the 2027 G20), the Alternative for Germany, and the French National Front – there arises the threat and reality of fast-spreading ‘paleo-conservative’, economically-isolationist, xenophobic and socially-reactionary politics.

In this ominous period, the African continent’s first hosting of the G20 was meant to build upon Lula Ignacio da Silva’s November 2024 Rio de Janeiro summit, by taking the baton on coordinated international taxation of the ultra-rich and on food security, adding ‘disaster resilience and response,’ African debt relief, climate financing for a ‘just energy transition’ and ‘harnessing critical minerals for inclusive growth and sustainable development.’ The likes of Joe Stiglitz and other progressives were even drawn into a major inequality commission – albeit one which did not have the grace to recognize any social activists’ initiatives.

From the beginning of 2025, more than 130 official meetings were held in various glamourous South African sites. Not only did G20 civil servants labor over phraseology, but so did a myriad of allied groups Ramaphosa’s team had gathered: B20 for business (guided by McKinsey and Bain in spite of being told by Ramaphosa to fire those particular conslutants), L20 for workers, W20 for women, C20 for civil society, Ch20 for children, M20 for media, etc. But as the dust settles, it all appears for naught.

Rebuffed by Trump

In Johannesburg on November 22-23, the Nasrec setting for G20 leaders – minus Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mohammed bin Salman and Prabowo Subianto – was very different than what Ramaphosa must have anticipated when taking over management of the bloc last December. At that point, in Ramaphosa’s most obsequious mode – so different than in mid-2018 when he scathingly criticized Trump for interfering in local land reform politics – South Africa’s leader hurriedly invited the U.S. president-elect for a formal state visit and especially for a round of golf, replete with characteristic elite chuckling about taking time off to improve his game.

The invitation was repeated as late as the disastrous Oval Office meeting on May 22, when Ramaphosa handed over a R10 000, 14-kg golf course book, and his sidekick golf pro Ernie Els thanked Trump for the CIA’s empowerment of Pretoria’s apartheid-era army during its 1970s-80s invasion of Angola plus sponsorship of right-wing UNITA guerrillas – “you guys helped us“ – which killed up to a million black Angolans.

The South African elites’ sickening sweet-talk had begun soon after SA Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool was fired in March by U.S. foreign minister Marco Rubio for remarks about Washington’s new orientation to [white] ‘supremacy.’ The first reconciliation effort was made in April by special envoy Mcebisi Jonas – but failed since he was not even allowed into the U.S. by Rubio, due to similar (truthful) insults that he’d made in 2020 about Trump’s racism and narcissism. (Jonas also chairs the huge MTN cellphone company which is under attack in the U.S. courts for dubious activities in Afghanistan and Iran, when Ramaphosa was the firm’s board chair.)

The task of Trump-whispering then fell to ultra-neoliberal trade minister Parks Tau and Ramaphosa’s investment advisor Alistair Ruiters. Trump first imposed tariffs in February, on steel, aluminium and autos, which in subsequent weeks proved devastating to South African exports. The tariffs were expanded in April and again in August, when Trump also killed the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which since 2000 made many goods tariff-free. At that point, three new agriculture-sector victims – citrus (later retracted), nuts and vineyard products – were hit with a 30% tariff, mainly hurting the very Afrikaner farmers Trump had pretended to support through his bizarre, unsuccessful refugee recruitment gimmick, given his presumption the Afrikaners were suffering ‘genocide’.

Trump’s on-and-off ally Elon Musk – very badly raised in South Africa, “nearly beaten to death,” as he described his Johannesburg high school’s bullying culture, which his deranged father supported – and other U.S. capitalists also insisted that Ramaphosa drop Black Economic Empowerment policy, i.e., enforced sharing of investment assets. And powerful U.S. Zionists persuaded Trump to demand Ramaphosa retract the December 2023 case Pretoria filed at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel’s Gaza genocide. While failing to change Pretoria’s policy, Washington is still contemplating a messy, apparently inadequate offer by Tau to buy $12 billion worth of U.S. methane gas plus adulterated poultry, in turn threatening extreme damage via greenhouse gas emissions and local chicken factory-farm bankruptcies.

Trump’s rejection of U.S. participation contributed to the superficial, blindly-nationalistic character of commentary within South Africa. In his last pre-summit comment, on November 7, Trump announced, “It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa. Afrikaners (People who are descended from Dutch settlers, and also French and German immigrants) are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated. No U.S. Government Official will attend as long as these Human Rights abuses continue. I look forward to hosting the 2026 G20 in Miami, Florida!”

Miami is about 370 km south of the famous Disney World resort, where Mickey Mouse frolics. The souring of G20 diplomacy was witnessed in Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s (quite realistic) scenario for late 2026: “If the US do not want us to participate, the only way they can do it is to decline us a visa.”

Also reflecting Washington’s cartoonish arrogance, a last-minute request was made by the U.S. State Department to allow a deputy ambassador in Pretoria to formally receive the official G20 handover on November 23. Ramaphosa demurred, for this would violate his own conservative proceduralist mentality, which in turn led Trump’s jejune (28-year-old) press secretary Karoline Leavitt to claim on November 20 that the South African president was “running his mouth a little bit against the United States”. More such insults will no doubt come from the newly-approved U.S. Ambassador to Pretoria, far-right media activist Brent Bozell, who during the 1980s regularly denounced Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. Indignity upon indignity will continue to rain on South Africa from yankee perches.

Instead of pushing for the U.S. to be expelled from the body due to Trump’s multiple attacks on multilateralism (climate, public health, trade, aid, fascistic abuse of refugees and immigrants, genocide facilitation and other acts of geopolitical insanity including repeated invasion threats such as against Nigeria this month), Ramaphosa replied with a merely bureaucratic rationale: “America chose to boycott this summit. That’s their prerogative to do so. But what cannot happen is breach of protocol being forced down our throats.”

The White House reacted on November 23 with a banal claim that Ramaphosa was “refusing to facilitate a smooth transition of the G20 presidency. This, coupled with South Africa’s push to issue a G20 leaders’ declaration, despite consistent and robust U.S. objections, underscores the fact that they have weaponized their G20 presidency to undermine the G20’s founding principles.” Indeed, Ramaphosa’s main victory was getting an 11,000-word collective Declaration out of the group, instead of merely a (self-delegitimizing) ‘Chair’s Statement’. But the devils in the details soon became clear to critics.

From protocol indignities to ‘non-binding’ progressive policies and revealing omissions

What’s wrong with the documentation laboriously prepared in 2025 in those 130 meetings, putatively to guide G20 collective policy and action? Simply: another case of talk left, walk right.

Pretoria’s choice of three progressive theme words – solidarity, equality, sustainability – was uplifting, and were quickly recognized as the precise opposite of the new Trump regime’s agenda. As Rubio blurted out on X.com back on February 5: “I will NOT attend the G20 Summit in Johannesburg. South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability. In other words: DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change’.”

The provocative themes can be credited to the ‘sherpa’ guiding the process: Zane Dangor, director general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation. Five years ago, Dangor wrote (in the country’s main ezine) of his desire to hear voices of “eco-feminists/eco-socialists,” whose “ideas are required if we are to build a new politics that can improve the well-being of all people on a healthier planet.” He represents one of the finest cases of catapulting from South Africa’s liberation tradition into civil-service realpolitik, so it was no wonder that progressive NGOs took Dangor’s leadership and the three theme words at face value, and that so many joined the various drafting processes.

Gilad Isaacs, the director of what is probably the most ambitious and effective of these, the Johannesburg-based Institute for Economic Justice, expressed optimism on November 22: “The U.S. boycott will not derail the work. The credibility of the presidency will be measured not by the presence of any one country, but by whether the agenda set in the interests of the Global South is carried through and used in other forums.”

But in reality, derailment of all progressive G20-legitimating work is inevitable. One reason is the Declaration’s continual resort to two weasel words – ‘voluntary’ and ‘non-binding’ – in vital areas where capitalism desperately needs major doses of nationalization, or at minimum tough regulation:

“we welcome the G20 Critical Minerals Framework, which is a voluntary, non-binding blueprint… we welcome the Voluntary and Non-Binding G20 High-Level Principles on Sustainable Industrial Policy for Inclusive Economic Growth, Industrialization, Jobs and Equality… We discussed the need for improved integrity, and interoperability in carbon credit markets and note the voluntary and non-binding Common Carbon Credit Data Model… we note the South African Presidency initiative on a G20 Africa Cooperation Agenda on Trade and Investment, which is a voluntary and non-binding initiative… [and] look forward to the roadmap towards the implementation of Voluntary and Non-Binding High-Level Principles on Combating Illicit Financial Flows.”

Vicious U.S. politicians will inevitably make fun of this wishy-washy posturing, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent already declaring, “We have whittled down the G20 back to basics … the G20 had become basically the G100 this past year. So it will be a concentrated group in Miami, seeing the best America has to offer, with American leadership.”

Indeed, Washington’s role in delimiting Dangor’s wordsmithing was apparently effective, as a New York Times reporter documented on November 15: U.S. functionaries “had spent much of the year drawing red lines, skipping working meetings and refusing to negotiate in the lead-up to the final gathering in Johannesburg. The moves, they said, put into stark relief Mr. Trump’s aggressive foreign policy and distaste for multilateralism, compromise and anything he considers political correctness.”

In scaling back G20 energy-access rhetoric, the Times named Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Turkey as Trump’s saboteur allies. And on public health, “The U.S. delegation said it could collaborate on fighting noncommunicable diseases like cancer, but issues of equity, universal health care and support for the World Health Organization were nonstarters.”

Another example comes from a Media20 effort where a local reform leader, Michael Markovitz, wrote on FB how “we must also be honest about what was left out.” His team’s backroom support work on the M20 declaration – “endorsed by more than 70 organizations” – “set out four priorities essential to democratic resilience: information integrity, media sustainability, journalist safety, and the survival of public interest journalism.” But as a dismayed Markowitz discovered,

“None of these issues appear in the final Leaders’ Declaration at the G20 South Africa. There is no reference to information integrity. There is no acknowledgement of journalism’s role in safeguarding democracy. These are not minor omissions. In my view, it is a governance failure at the level of the G20. It is a gap that weakens the credibility of the multilateral system at the moment democracies need it most… If the information ecosystem is poisoned, every G20 goal becomes harder to achieve. Climate action, inclusive growth, digital cooperation and peaceful societies all depend on trusted information. In its absence, trust in important public institutions will continue to be eroded.”

G20 starves us of peace and food sovereignty

Even where host South Africans might have been ambitious in making demands, three other barriers arose to a serious declaration with implementation accountability: hypocrisy, a limited world view and upward-gazing elitism. On food security, for example, Ramaphosa had firmly signaled solidarity-equality-sustainability values in November 2024, at the Rio de Janeiro summit, beseeching fellow leaders that the G20 “must be capable of combating the use of hunger as a weapon of war, as we are now seeing in some parts of the world, including in Gaza and Sudan.”

Photo: Premilla Mur.

Yet five days earlier, his lead minister within the SA Presidency – Khumbudzo Ntshavheni – vocally advocated systematic starvation as a weapon of class war, against thousands of underground informal-sector gold miners about two hours’ drive southwest of Johannesburg, in Stilfontein: “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out.” Ntshavheni knew the consequences, because two weeks before that, she had bragged to the media how the police and army “blocked communities in and around these abandoned mining shifts in Orkney from delivering food parcels, water and necessities to these illegal miners.”

As a result, starving mineworkers were forced to eat cockroaches and human flesh. It is likely that, by mid-January 2025 when courts finally ruled Ntshavheni’s murderous practice must cease, many dozens or even hundreds of mineworkers had died due to starvation or, because in a desperately weakened state, they had tried to escape by climbing up extremely steep mineshafts – falling to their deaths.

There was much more hollow, hypocritical rhetoric in the Johannesburg Leaders’ Declaration, e.g., “We will work for a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Ukraine, as well as ending other conflicts and wars around the globe.”

Those crafting the Declaration’s vapid phrasing were too fearful to name the aggressors and profiteers – much less arrange punishment – in the four cases, which range from capitalists within the BRICS such as Emirati gold traders and Russian (Wagner Group) soldiers in Sudan; to Chinese and Johannesburg- and London-listed mining houses in the eastern DRC; to all G20 economies’ firms which trade with Israel; to Russia killing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian (and Russian) workers – yes, provoked initially by the G7’s eastward NATO military expansion but still inexcusable, and justifying a unified intervention to punish Putin effectively, to force him to return stolen territory (and children) and to pay reparations, in lieu of Trump’s incompetent Ukraine-surrender plan.

And speaking of Gaza, Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law Patrice Motsepe is still fueling the Israel Defense Forces with coal he co-supplies its powerplants (and 18% of the genocidaires’ grid), alongside Ramaphosa’s former coal-mining partners at Glencore, dating to the late 2000s in both cases. This fuel violates an ICJ ruling in July 2024 that states must halt “aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, and a United Nations General Assembly resolution two months later (with a vote of 124 for, 14 against) for states to “prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation” – plus Pretoria’s repeated Hague Group commitments to respect UN courts and prevent fuel from reaching the military.

Notwithstanding Palestine Solidarity Campaign protests at Motsepe’s offices and weekly demonstrations at Glencore’s Joburg headquarters, neither Ramaphosa nor the other G20 genocide collaborators had anything specific to say in the Leaders’ Declaration about the ICJ or International Criminal Court, which indeed they are actively undermining in relation both to Palestinians and climate justice, in view of an ICJ ruling in July that states (mainly G20 members) should pay their climate debt.

Other high-minded hypocritical fibs pothole the Leaders’ Declaration: “We affirm our unwavering commitment to act in accordance with international law including international humanitarian law and the Charter of the United Nations and its principle of peaceful settlement of disputes and in this regard, we condemn all attacks against civilians and infrastructure.” Yada yada.

When it comes to hunger crises, other important words are unmentionable in either the Declaration or G20 Food Task Force statement: multinational agribusiness, intellectual property, genetic engineering, carnivore, profiteering and speculation. These terms are not to be found, because they are assumed to be a natural part of corporate agriculture – although all undermine food sovereignty and climate sanity. Reforms like “land redistribution” and “agro-ecology” and genuine peasant empowerment are not mentioned; for they would violate the G20 Food Task Force’s commitment to “pursuing actions that are in compliance with WTO rules and obligations.” The G20 declaration pushes ‘food security’ phraseology without any concession whatsoever to the objectives of grassroots food sovereignty movements.

In addition to ignoring the content demanded by progressive anti-hunger and food-system activists, the most obvious aspect of any G20 official statement is silence about – and thus disrespect for – processes of civil society mobilization. The G20 Food Task Force statement ignores courageous movements around the world, e.g. the Via Campesina network, whose members have struggled valiantly for land redistribution and pro-peasant policies.

So civil society should have had no expectation of being taken seriously by the G20 in Johannesburg, within a country where more than 12 million of the 62 million population is considered to be food insecure, led by a hedonistic ruling class that exudes subimperial obeisance to agricultural imperialism.

Financial imperialism

The same upward-gazing obsession could be observed in the G20’s highest-profile task force – led by the same Trevor Manuel who bailed out the IMF in 2009 – on ‘Growth, Debt and Development’, which was aimed mainly at alleviating the home continent’s worsening fiscal crises, e.g. through IMF gold sales. The mass protests and demands from so many African movements where unrest has been intense in recent months – from Madagascar and Mozambique, up to Morocco and Tunisia – are not referenced, much less acknowledged and respected.

Specifically unmentionable for G20 financial-reform bureaucrats are the clear strategies coming from Kenya’s Gen Z since mid-2024, for example, demanding ‘debt audits’ to determine whether corrupt lending for corrupt projects should be considered ‘Odious Debt’ – so that the creditor takes a haircut, not just society’s most vulnerable. The two biggest South African parastatal debtors – Eskom electricity (for the Medupi and Kusile coal-fired power plants) and Transnet (for Chinese locomotives) – are obvious cases in which the fiscal burden of corruption soared over the past two decades due to Pretoria taking on foreign loan repayment obligations, even in cases where lenders like the World Bank were obviously implicated in the Odious Debt burden due to oft-acknowledged graft or project maldesign.

Many other civil society forces across Africa argue for ‘reparations’ based on standard ‘polluter pays’ principles, to be paid as ‘climate debt’ by the big Western and BRICS greenhouse gas emitters – including China, which is owed a substantial share of Africa’s foreign debt. Such ideas dare not be mentioned by Manuel’s small-minded team, so perhaps his declaration’s sentence of greatest merit is this: “Over recent presidencies, the G20 has debated Multilateral Development Bank reform, debt sustainability, and climate finance, yet progress has been slow and credibility is waning.”

One feature of waning credibility is non-acknowledgment of conflicts of interest. For many months, debt activists have worried that if Manuel – as chair of this commission, and the most effective neoliberal politician in the country’s history – also runs institutions that have African sovereign financial instruments among their assets (e.g. Africa’s largest insurance company, and the local branch of the notorious Rothschilds), then there is little hope for South Africa’s G20 presidency.

Moving to the Leaders’ Declaration, “We continue to urge the international community to support vulnerable countries with a strong reform agenda whose debt is sustainable but are facing liquidity challenges and encourage the IMF and the World Bank to continue their work on feasible options to support these countries, which should be country-specific and voluntary.” Translation: Africa’s toughest neoliberal finance ministers – aiming to privatize and to cut social spending (i.e. that ‘strong reform agenda’) – need to load on yet more debt, to swamp current and future generations with permanent structural adjustment obligations.

Climate chaos confirmed

The Leaders’ Declaration was correct to brag about the COP30: “We highlight the successful outcomes of the 2025 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference COP30 in Belém.” After all, ruling classes from the G1, the other G7s and the BRICS have – since the 2009 Copenhagen Accord – resolutely lined up against everyone else, on three foundational positions:

1) do not agree to cut emissions or leave fossil fuels underground to the extent necessary to save us all from planetary catastrophe;

2) do not admit you emitted by acknowledging the ‘polluter pays’ principle because you’ll face liability claims, and have to pay ‘climate debt’ and reparations (as even the ICJ in July 2025 ruled is logical);

3) instead, do limit climate finance to loans, and ‘privatize the air’ through carbon markets, dubious offsets and other emissions-trading gimmickry.

From these three standpoints, COP30 was a roaring success for the G20 ultra-polluters. One obvious conclusion is that a ‘Global North’ (bad, villains) versus a ‘Global South’ (good, victims) is not an appropriate framing. Instead we have a configuration that allows the COP30 – like so many before it – to fuse imperial and subimperial interests. Speaking to the BBC, Li Shuo of the Asia Society remarked, “This partly reflects the power shift in the real world, the emerging power of the BASIC and BRICS countries, and the decline of the European Union.” (BASIC is Brazil, South Africa, India and China).

The BBC continued, “US President Donald Trump stayed away, but his stance emboldened his allies here. Russia, normally a relatively quiet participant, was to the fore in blocking efforts on roadmaps [to phase out oil, gas and coal]. And while Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers were predictably hostile to curbing fossil fuels, China stayed quiet and concentrated on doing deals.”

In addition to the U.S. – also absent from Belém due to Trump’s anti-science climate denialism – and Russia, the 24-member ‘Like Minded Group of Developing Countries’ is to blame for preventing fossil fuels from being left underground: Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mali, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Vietnam. Of these, 11 are BRICS members, partners and invitees. The London Overseas Development Institute named China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the main forces preventing even mention of a fossil fuel phase-out. The Financial Times reported that UN Secretary General António Guterres singled out the Saudis for most of the wrecking blame.

But Pretoria also helped foil COP30 climate-adaptation work because of a surreal personality battle within Ramaphosa’s centre-right co-governing party, the Democratic Alliance. The white-dominated 25%-supported party had won the right to name an environment minister in a Government of National Unity after the last election, in July 2024, and chose Dion George – whose background in corporate finance in the ultra-corrupt Sandton central business district of Johannesburg and his unashamed role as an apartheid-era soldier lowered expectations. George was sufficiently subimperialist in orientation that he was chosen as the UN’s COP29 co-chair on emissions mitigation in 2024 and COP30 co-chair of adaptation.

Those roles meant that when African delegations walked out of the COP29 in fury, he could stay behind and side with the rich climate vandals, so as not to spook the G20. Yet when it came to protecting lions and other big game from hunters, George’s traditional version of conservationism ran up against white game-farming and wildlife-trafficking interests, and so unceremoniously he was dumped as minister just as the COP30 began, replete with sleazy rumours of sexual harassment that he vows to take up in a libel suit.

But overall, as climate advocacy groups argued, the firing of George “gives the perception that the South African government is not serious about climate change or its leadership in the negotiations, despite this being a crisis that threatens the fundamental social and economic aspirations of all in South Africa.” The perception is the reality, of course, with Pretoria seeking not only to keep coal-fired power plants open much longer than promised in its Just Energy Transition Partnership fundraising, but to initiate massive new methane gas processing investments from the World Bank to better import the $12 billion in promised purchases from Trump’s U.S. oil company mates, or from local digging by Shell and Total, joined recently even by Brazil’s Petrobras.

Johannesburg’s decorative but ineffective bottom-up counter power

South African society had not been particularly well mobilized to deal with the contradictions, compared, say, to the most intense G20 counter-summit and protest, which was in Hamburg in 2017. On Friday just before the leaders’ summit began, a national Women’s Shut Down was held in at least 15 cities, protesting gender based violence. In the centre of town from November 20-22, there was a ‘We the 99%’ festival with several thousand participants demanding global economic justice, drawing on ‘Fight Inequality Alliance’ advocacy and the local New Economy Hub.

And Johannesburg’s United Front movement mobilized 350 community activists to march nearly an hour from Soweto to the conference site on the final day. Most aesthetically appealing, was the way a small artivist network, Camp, decorated some of the city’s best-known skyline buildings with a political light show.

But two other forces of dissent made more of a dent in the local news. A few dozen rightwing populist xenophobes (‘Operation Dudula’) protested the very idea of regional solidarity, alongside former president Jacob Zuma’s MK Party, on November 22, and attracted police tear gas and arrests near the conference site. Second, the main municipal trade union traded off a $235 million back-pay settlement with the mayor of Johannesburg, in exchange for a promise not to disrupt the event (an earlier threat, later denied).

The latter deal may have solved a problem for Johannesburg authorities in the short term, but also has generated awareness of the flimsy nature of municipal management, especially in a wet period that, just days before the G20 summit began, witnessed severe flooding and inadequate stormwater drainage – again revealing the country’s and city’s notorious lack of attention to climate adaptation and resilience.

And the mayor’s promise that during the G20, water would flow uninterrupted to all parts of the city – a source of sustained protest – was also broken, as predicted by the city’s lead water activist, Ferial Adam: “The contrast could not be starker: our government is spending close to R1-billion for a global summit in Sandton while nearby informal settlements and suburban residents alike cannot get a single bucket of clean water.”

These were merely indications of the way such depraved ‘North-South’ partnerships are being generated through G20 cooptation of South African elites, and indeed also within the COP process as well, as Lula’s recent role confirmed. It’s all too reminiscent of what a white-supremacist Rhodesian leader, Godfrey Huggins, described as the preferred neo-colonial arrangements he foresaw in managing racist rule (from 1933-53), in what later became Zimbabwe, South Africa’s immediate northeastern neighbour: a “partnership between a rider and a horse.”

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Keith Hammer, somewhere in the Northern Rockies. Photo: Swan View Coalition.

Here’s a bold statement about Keith Hammer, the 2025 recipient of Fund for Wild Nature’s Activist of the Year award: no one knows more about the policies and practices of managing roads on National Forest lands in the U.S. Northern Rockies than Keith. The same could be said about Keith’s knowledge of the harm those roads cause to wildlife. Not anyone who works for the U.S. Forest Service, nor likely any of the activists working in the region’s conservation community. Keith, who is based in Kalispell, Montana, is the road scholar of the Northern Rockies.

As explained by the Swan View Coalition, the organization Keith co-founded, excessive roads on National Forest lands have severe consequences for wildlife, fragmenting critical habitats, disrupting migration corridors, and increasing human encroachment into previously undisturbed areas. An overabundance of roads on our public lands leads to increased human disturbance that forces animals to alter their natural behaviors, as well as greater human access to our public lands for poaching of our wildlife.

As Keith would tell you, roadless lands and wilderness areas are vital for ecosystem integrity and the well-being of wildlands-dependent species. Species such as grizzly bears, elk, and lynx are particularly vulnerable, as they require large, connected landscapes to thrive. Roads also degrade water quality by increasing sedimentation in streams, which harms native fish populations like bull trout. Additionally, roads introduce invasive species, alter predator-prey dynamics, and facilitate destructive activities such as illegal motorized use and logging, which further degrade the ecosystem.

Therefore, as Keith regularly points out, limiting roads and motorized vehicle use is essential to protecting water quality, fish, and wildlife. Ultimately, his message is that we need to minimize road densities, decommission unnecessary roads, and restore natural landscapes, thereby ensuring National Forest lands remain viable habitats for all our public wildlife.

In 1990, by writing the groundbreaking primer “A Road Ripper’s Guide to the National Forests,” Keith helped pioneer the concept of local activist “road scholars” using field inventories and legal tools to prevent or repair the harm roads cause on our National Forests. To this day, Keith and his Swan View Coalition continue to stop bad Forest Service road projects.

Back in 1990, Keith authored “A Road Ripper’s Guide to the National Forests,” a groundbreaking primer on the effects and removal of National Forest roads. In writing this activist manual, Keith helped pioneer the concept of local “road scholars” using field inventories and legal tools to prevent or repair the harm roads cause on our National Forests. Keith’s premise then, as now based on a recent conversation I had with him, is:

“One doesn’t need an MS or PhD to find abandoned roads and photograph them, or to document blown-out culverts, or to inventory and assess whether road closure devices are actually stopping motor vehicles. They just need to be thorough, consistent, and either have their finger on the pulse of how such data helps win lawsuits or create that pulse themselves.”

Keith continues to reap the benefits of this important field inventory work. As recently as February, successful lawsuits filed by Keith’s organization and allies in 2019 and 2022 resulted in the federal government accepting a court decision to limit road building in grizzly bear and bull trout habitat on the Flathead National Forest in northwest Montana.

Birth of a Road Scholar

Although born in central New York, Keith has been a fixture in northwest Montana, specifically the Flathead Valley, since the early 1960s. Growing up in this environment, Keith developed an intimate connection with the outdoors, often accompanying his father on hunting and fishing expeditions. This upbringing instilled in him a strong appreciation for nature and laid the foundation for his future land and wildlife conservation endeavors.

Oddly enough, he started his career working for the Flathead National Forest as a “trail dog” (someone who builds and maintains trails on public lands) and then spent eight years as a logger in the region. These roles provided him with an understanding of forest management practices and the challenges facing public lands, firsthand experiences that would inform his advocacy work for the next forty years.

In the early 1980s, Keith learned of a proposed timber sale in an area of the Flathead National Forest near where he lived. As Keith explained in a 2014 article in the Flathead Beacon, “The neighborhood got ahold of me because they knew I’d worked logging and I’d worked for the Forest Service. I didn’t know anything about the laws and regulations. I just knew what good logging and bad logging looked like.”

Keith got involved in the campaign to stop this timber sale, which led to both the formation of the aforementioned Swan View Coalition and Keith’s now four decades of advocating on behalf of the land and critters of his backyard.

The Ripple Effect of a Road Ripper

I first met Keith in the late 1980s when I was just starting to get my bearings as a wildlife conservation activist. He was recommended as someone who could guide me as I learned the ropes of federal land and wildlife policies related to large carnivore conservation. As fate would have it, a few years later I saw an opportunity to “scale up” Keith’s road scholar inventory work across the Northern Rockies. Respecting his deep knowledge, experience, and presence in the region, I asked Keith if the organization I had co-founded in Bozeman, Montana could use the name Road Scholar Project for this expanded effort. Keith said yes and off I went to coordinate similar inventories on 5,000 miles of national forest roads from northwest Wyoming to eastern Washington.

But his influence extends well beyond the work I did with his tutelage and blessing. As Keith recently told me:

I’ve always tried to clearly explain my methodologies in my road closure reports, so others can duplicate or adapt my methods to their area. My 2023 Road Hunt report, for example, has a very clear section on methodology that uses state of the art smart phone apps and GPS capabilities.

Old school activism meets new school technologies.

Furthering his ripple effect, at the request of other public lands activists, Keith has given numerous workshops and advice on how to conduct these road closure surveys. Most recently, he mentored activists addressing similar issues on the Kootenai and Bitterroot National Forests in western Montana. Data from the road closure surveys these road scholars conducted on the Kootenai National Forest has been successfully used in legal challenges to that Forest’s management plans.

Proving the adage “there is strength in numbers,” those legal efforts helped build the case law Swan View Coalition used to win its above-mentioned lawsuit regarding the Flathead National Forest’s revised forest plan. For Keith, this is a great example of how local, grassroots activists can synergistically expand the field survey and legal knowledge that – collectively and over time – gets presented in various cases to the U.S. District Court in Missoula. Keith need not look any further than his mirror to know where all this got started.

Back at Swan View Coalition’s headquarters, such information (and tenacity) has led Keith’s team to file approximately two dozen lawsuits challenging the Flathead National Forest’s management plans and practices during the organization’s forty-year history. By Keith’s calculations, Swan View Coalition has won close to three-quarters of those legal challenges.

Better yet, Keith told me his group has filed a similar number of “60-Day Notice of Intent to File Suit,” a requirement in the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that states individuals must give the federal government 60 days’ notice before filing a lawsuit alleging violations of the ESA. Based on Swan View Coalition’s well-researched and well-reasoned 60-day notices, the group didn’t need to file a lawsuit because in each case the government either cancelled or substantially altered the project based on the notice alone.

Logging road landslide into Sullivan Creek, which provides critical habitat for bull trout, a threatened species. Photo: Keith Hammer.

Leaving a Legacy Worthy of the 2025 Grassroots Activist of the Year Award

To me and many others that know him and his work, Keith is an old growth tree – by his preference a Western hemlock – with his roots planted deep into the ground that is his home. He has become this elder by doing this work, with the same organization he co-founded, working on the same conservation issues, to protect the same expanse of public land, since the 1980’s. He is a defender of his homeland; someone who takes care of the land because he cares greatly about the land (which, notably, is the land of all Americans).

When I asked Keith about his legacy, in true humble grassroots activist style he simply stated, “I’d hope my legacy is that a citizen who is committed to a cause can have substantial influence by being steadfast, consistent, and accurate with their advocacy and any data they collect for use in administrative and legal challenges.”

Then, Keith offered this final perspective:

Inherent in this is to also remember the importance of getting out into the field often, not just to collect data, but to maintain one’s sanity and connection to the land they are fighting for. I’d like to think that my advocacy and example have made people question the wisdom of being involved in extreme sports and wreckreation, rather than a slower-paced contemplative recreation of their relationship to the Earth.

The Fund for Wild Nature selected Keith as the Fund’s 2025 Grassroots Activist of the Year. The Fund was created by grassroots activists to get more resources to other bold grassroots activists working to protect wildlife and wild places. We recognize how even a small amount of money for these advocates can lead to big results. The Fund for Wild Nature depends entirely on annual contributions from the public, which it then redistributes to support worthy grassroots groups throughout North America. In addition to providing grants, the Fund sponsors the Grassroots Activist of the Year Award as another way to promote bold activism.

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Zabriskie Point, Death Valley National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Doomscrolling, an addictive habit, can be destructive if not managed – the way an alcoholic, say, manages drinking herself to death. It must be done with care, with binges considered for the long haul. “Overindulging…may be detrimental to your mental health,” warns the doomscrolling subreddit r/Collapse. “Anxiety and depression are common reactions when studying collapse…If you are considering suicide….” (If you are considering suicide: this may end up one of the mantras of the era of modern civilizational crack-up.)

“Maybe typing the whole thing out will be therapeutic,” writes an r/Collapse commenter in a post titled How I think the future will play out, which he/she intended as a prediction of events unfolding in the worst of all possible futures. It was one of the doomiest posts I found in months hanging around r/Collapse. I reproduce it here only slightly edited and with its lousy grammar intact.

First off, writes the doomer, “There will be crop failures which will get worse and worse, food prices will soar….Because of crop failures and water shortages, there will be more mass migrations, which will make the 2010s migrations look tame. It’ll be like the Syrian refugee crisis but MUCH worse.”

“But, the world hasn’t ended yet, we’re still in the 2020s…Wars over resources, rise of nationalism, rampant polarization, rampant criminality, martial law, civil wars, the loss of basic human rights…I guess you could say that society [is] in a state of crisis.”

The writer offers a funeral oration for each of the decades to come. “If society doesn’t collapse in the 2030s, the surviving nations will be horrible places to live and are barely getting by or rather slowly rotting from the inside and out, failed nations will be warzones and the people who still live there (those who have not migrated) would live a life similar to Mad Max.”

By the 2040s, “If any civilization still exists in the north it is hanging on by a thread. Feedback loops like hot oceans, burning forests, rotting soil [huh? – ed’s note], thawing permafrost and others are increasing temperatures at an increasingly fast rate, the situation is like a rock rolling off the cliff but now it is falling and nothing can be done to stop it.”

By the 2050s, “best case scenario there could be a few hundred million people in total left living in the tip of south america and in the arctic north. But as time goes on, many if not all will die of starvation and violence.”

By the 2070s, my teen-aged daughter will be in her mid-60s. I am told at r/Collapse that by then she will be reduced to a dispersed ash in Plasticene soil. “The oceans are boiling, the air is toxic and unbreathable…It is now too hot for humans to survive, there is no food left…no fresh water to sustain you…There will be nothing left of us…we will all become part of the layers of plastic and everything else compressed into the dirt…For the price of apathy, inertia, and carelessness, hell will ultimately be realized.”

The stuff of apocalyptic prophecy, a wiping clean of the slate, the end of all humanity, but a tale that doesn’t have the benefit of Revelation, because in the end there will be no redemption.

The writer talks about “typing the whole thing out” as a form of soothing. Collapsitarian culture is an outpouring of grief, an expression of existential distress over ecological disorder. Psychologists have come up with a term for this type of grief: solastalgia, a mourning for the perceived disappearance of the “normal,” “stable,” “healthy” natural world. The precise definition is “the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.” Nostalgia we know well: it is the pain when we are away from the familiar, uprooted from home ground. Solastalgia is the pain when home collapses around us, home being all earth, a total falling apart the thing we most fear.

It may be that solastalgia, a hypersensitivity to the threat of collapse of the only home we know or will ever know, is a necessary condition for humanity’s longterm survival. Collapsitarians are ahead of the curve in feeling deeply the pain of ecological crisis and seeing with not entirely clear eyes, but with eyes wide enough, the existential nature of the crisis. If the most extreme among them sound like mad prophets, then we who deny the seriousness of the crisis, who think everything’s going to be alright by our embrace of an unfounded optimism, are the deceivers.

From the actual scientists on the doomscroll (as opposed to the prognosticators in the desert of Mad Max), one gets the sense that the end – an end – of business-as-usual is built into our current trajectory. The late Will Steffen, who was one of Australia’s top climate scientists until his death in 2023, at age 75, remarked that as industrial society has already passed 9 of 15 Earth system tipping points, this could set into a motion a process at the end of which “collapse of civilization is the most likely outcome.”

Have a look at a small sample of the scroll for the months of October and November. Australian oceans face an “uncharted future,” two of three corals in its world-heritage listed Ningaloo reef now dead, while the country’s possums show some of the highest levels of PFAS chemicals to be found in small mammals. Two iconic coral species off the Florida coast were discovered to be “functionally extinct,” as the planet’s first “catastrophic climate tipping point” has been reached as coral reefs across the oceans suffer “widespread dieback.” A third of British farmers made no profit in the past year, facing “extreme floods and droughts that have led to some of the worst harvests on record.” There were deadly floods in Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam, where 100,000 people were driven from their homes. Overarching all this, carbon emissions from fossil fuels in 2025 hit a record high. Scientists writing in the journal BioScience report “We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet’s vital signs are flashing red….This unfolding emergency stems from failed foresight, political inaction, unsustainable economic systems, and misinformation. Almost every corner of the biosphere is reeling from intensifying heat, storms, floods, droughts, or fires. The window to prevent the worst outcomes is rapidly closing.”

The doomscroll is also a historical recordkeeping. It reminds us, for example, to read a report from 2017 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (co-authored by the legendary Paul Ehrlich) about how massive biodiversity loss, unprecedented in human history and accelerating every minute, amounts to “annihilation” and portends “a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life.” We are urged to remember the landmark 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, considered the most comprehensive global environmental review ever conducted, which found that “human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.” We are asked to recall Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical. “Doomsday predictions,” said the pope,” can no longer be met with irony or disdain.” We are directed to Chris Hedges, who as a New York Times correspondent reported on the implosion of the Soviet Union and civil wars globally, who tells us that “you have to have lived in societies that have collapsed to realize how quickly they go down and how fragile they are. There’s an emotional incapacity to understand collapse, even when it’s facing you.”

From Hedges to a crash course in r/Collapse history, in which the diligent reader learns about the Classic Maya collapse, the collapse of the Roman Empire, the collapse of the Chaco Puebloans in the American southwest, the collapse of Easter Island, and so on — the monstrous historical failures of “civilized” people on parade.

**

The depth of the extreme risk humanity now faces was made clear by actuaries and climate scientists partnered at the University of Exeter in a report issued this year. The members of the university’s school of actuaries included advisors to governments, corporations, and pension and sovereign wealth funds. “Traditional risk management techniques,” they wrote, “typically [miss] network effects and interconnections.” As a consequence, policymakers are “likely to significantly understate the potential impact of climate and nature risks” on an environmentally “insolvent” Earth.

What did the actuaries say about our current trajectory? A 2C rise by 2050 — which is now credibly forecast — could see a 25 percent drop in world GDP, an economic depression the likes of which the world has never seen, as global trade crashes to a halt and national economies shatter. For context, world GDP fell during the Great Depression by an estimated 15 percent between 1929 and 1932.

They projected a catastrophic disruption of food supply, as large parts of Earth become uncultivable and uninhabitable, with the result that some two billion people could die on a 2C-warmed planet. “Mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic contraction and conflict” – the expected new normal at 2C, according to the Exeter team.

If the course toward 3C is unchanged, our civilization risks suffering and death on an unprecedented scale: four billion dead between 2060 and 2090, along with a 50 percent drop in world GDP. The actuaries noted that “no realistic plan [is] in place to avoid this scenario.”

Which is all to say that the mad prophets are not so far off from a plausible vision of what’s to come.

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Photo: George Wuerthner.

I frequently read anecdotes and even research suggesting that “active forest management” can successfully slow or stop wildfires. In my experience, many of these claims ignore the role of changing weather conditions in fire control. For instance, despite the efforts of over 10,000 firefighters, the 1988 Yellowstone fire was only extinguished by snowfall on September 11, which finally enabled control of the fire.

The Milli Fire on Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest is a more recent example of how changing weather led to false claims that active forest management “saved” the community of Sisters, Oregon, from the wildfire.

In 2017, the Milli Fire charred approximately 24,000 acres. It burned within 4 miles of Sisters, Oregon, where proponents of active forest management, including the Deschutes Collaborative and Forest Service, claim fuel reductions slowed the fire’s advance and “saved” the community.

Local politicians, county commissioners, and even Oregon Senator Merkley now refer to the Milli Fire to justify increased federal spending on fuel-reduction projects.

But, like so much happy talk from agencies and other organizations, there is more nuance to the explanation than is readily admitted. The details tell a different story from the one promoted by fuel reduction advocates.

A bit of history. A lightning strike on August 11, 2017, within the Three Sisters Wilderness near Black Crater Lake ignited the flames. The fire took a month to contain fully, and at its peak, 675 firefighters were engaged in suppressing the blaze.

By August 18, the Milli Fire was burning through the pathway of two previous fires—the Black Crater and Pole Creek blazes. According to the incident reports, “high winds and hot dry weather” made containment difficult.

Keep in mind that by this time, the Milli Fire was under active suppression efforts, with hundreds of firefighters, bulldozers, air tankers, and helicopters working to contain it. Crews cleared heavy fuels along the fire line using bulldozers and other heavy equipment while ground crews continue to burnout areas within the fire line to strengthen containment.

The August 18^th Incident report provides details: “Abundant sunshine will lead to another warm and dry day across the fire on Friday. Highs are forecast to climb into the 70s and 80s, with relative humidity lowering to the teens and 20s. Winds are forecast to increase with gust potential from the west at 25 mph or greater. The Haines index will remain a 5 due to the dry and unstable conditions.” Red flag conditions prevailed.

The extreme weather conditions persisted into the next day, August 19. As the Central Oregon Dispatch Fire Information for August 19 reported, “strong winds caused the fire to spot across the containment line this afternoon, pushing the fire 2-3 miles east and southeast towards subdivisions on the edge of the city of Sisters.”

By August 20, the weather began to change, and cooler temperatures and higher humidity slowed the fire. However, as during the previous day, the Incident Report declared that “Weather is expected to continue to be a challenge, with the possibility of wind-driven embers igniting spot fires ahead of the main fire.”

By August 21, the blaze had grown to 10,496 acres, with 644 firefighters on scene. However, that evening of August 21, the Incident Report noted a shift in wind direction from the Southeast, which pushed the fire back west and north into the Three Sisters Wilderness away from Sisters.

By September 8, rain and the fact that the fire was burning through lava flows helped slow the fire’s advance, aided firefighters in containing the blaze, and led to a reduction in the number of firefighters to 59.

How to interpret the fire’s progress. First, note that the Milli Fire initially burned through two previous blazes. Both of these fires resulted in a “fuel reduction,” which apparently did not slow the blaze. The Milli Fire also burned through recent “hazardous fuel reductions,” meaning past thinning projects. Again, with no effect on the fire’s progress.

During these early days of the fire, the weather, dominated by hot, dry conditions (low humidity) and gusty winds, drove the blaze towards Sisters, Oregon.

Then, as reported above, by August 19, the fire was approaching Sisters, driven by winds. However, on August 20, the weather began to change. Cooler temperatures and higher humidity, combined with reduced wind, slowed the fire’s progress. Without high winds, the fire dropped to the ground. And this, when the Forest Service and Deschutes Collaborative assert, miraculously, that a prescribed burn slowed and halted the fire’s progress towards Sisters.

By August 21, the change in weather (and wind) was driving the fire westward and upslope into the higher elevations and lava fields of the Three Sisters Wilderness. This change in the wind and rain on September 8 finally allowed the Forest Service to contain the fire.

Apparently, it does not occur to the people promoting the Milli Fire as an example of how “fuel reductions” saved Sisters that perhaps the change in weather, particularly wind direction, had more to do with “saving” Sisters than the prescribed burn. After all, if two previous fires, hazardous fuel reductions, and a massive firefighting effort could not slow the fire, maybe something else—like a change in wind direction—was responsible for extinguishing the blaze.

Keep in mind that wind negates fuel reductions. Wind-driven wildfires regularly blow embers miles ahead of the fire front, and easily go over, around, and through thinning projects, previous burns, and natural barriers.

For example, embers from the Eagle Fire that charred the Columbia Gorge were blown across the mile-wide Columbia River to ignite blazes on the Washington side of the waterway. If a mile-wide area without a stitch of fuel can’t stop a wind-driven fire, it’s delusional to think traditional fuel reductions will be effective under extreme weather conditions.

Nevertheless, like so many wildfires, the Forest Service was quick to take credit for suppressing the blaze and celebrated its efforts. Watch this video that applauds the firefighters.

Notice how in several segments of the video, the wind is blowing hard. A couple of photos showing the smoke path being pushed across the horizon from the mountains towards the East (and Sisters. These images are one indication that wind was a significant factor in fire spread.

The Milli Fire eventually charred 24,000 acres, but some of that acreage resulted from back burns set to remove fuel from an advancing fire.

Advocates of active management suggest that forests east of the Cascades were historically open and park-like, and that, due to the alleged success of fire suppression, they are now “unhealthy” and naturally prone to extreme wildfires. However, other interpretations find that forests were more diverse and often naturally dense. They neglected to mention that most of the heavy growth at higher elevations was lodgepole pine, which tends to form impenetrable tangles. Lodgepole pine also tends to burn at high severity with long intervals between blazes.

I can’t definitively say the prescribed burn near Sisters didn’t help firefighters stop the blaze from advancing toward the community. Still, I suggest a much better explanation is likely that changing weather conditions, and thus Nature, did a great job of reversing the fire’s advance and “saved Sisters.”

The Forest Service is desperate to prove that its logging and burning fuel reduction program is effective, so it tends to ignore how much weather ultimately determines fire severity and spread. A far more efficient focus should be on reducing the flammability of communities.

As Forest Service researcher Jack Cohan has declared: “We’re spending huge amounts of money and not being very effective. In the wildfire world, we have this control attitude that’s dominated by people obsessed with a failed approach of control. We’re trying to control what we can’t control, and can’t be bothered to focus on what we can control. We will never be able to scale up wildfire policy for fire-adapted ecosystems as long as we have vulnerable communities.”

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Image by Getty and Unsplash+.

China is leading the green energy transition for the world as the United States tries to force countries to buy US oil and gas. Last year China installed more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. Meanwhile, the US committed $625 million in taxpayer funds to save and revive the coal industry. Yes, US taxpayers are subsidizing coal production. It should be noted that “clean coal” is so misleading that it reeks of malodorous sulfur.

China is upstaging the United States across the world by tackling climate change head on. According to a brilliant article in YaleEnvironment360 by Isabel Hilton, As U.S. and E.U. Retreat on Climate, China Takes the Leadership Role, November 10, 2025, “China today produces about 80 percent of all solar panels and more than 70 percent of all electric vehicles.” China has reduced the cost barrier for “the rest of the world” by bringing down costs of solar panels by 90% and reducing the overall expenses for renewables by 70%. Furthermore, as the world’s biggest clean energy juggernaut, it builds clean energy factories abroad investing in 54 countries over the past three years alone. This is tackling climate with gusto while the US reverts to the dark ages of grinding away drill bits and steam shovels blackening the atmosphere.

“If history is any guide, the country that dominates energy usually dominates economics and politics, which is why it is not just old war allies that are cozying up to Beijing. Narendra Modi, the president of longtime rival India, visited China for the biggest ever meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization along with dozens of other regional leaders.” (There is Only One Player: Why China is Becoming a World Leader in Green Energy, The Guardian, September 7,2025).

China’s renewable effort is well ahead of expectations. The country has installed capacity of 1,200GW six years ahead of schedule, which is enough to power approximately 1.2 million homes.

Yet, China is still heavily addicted to coal: “Scientists and campaigners say the climate will not be stabilized solely by selling more photovoltaic cells or windmill blades; it is also necessary to phase out fossil fuels. On this half of the balance sheet, China’s record remains ‘highly insufficient’ and its current policies would, if continued, push the planet towards 4C of heating, according to Climate Action Tracker, an independent initiative assessing countries’ compliance with the Paris agreement. It points out that China is off course from the commitments it previously made to ‘strictly limit’ coal use and to reduce energy and carbon intensity by 2025,” Ibid.

The pushback has been most evident in China’s coal sector, where there has been a surge of investment in the past two years to the highest level in a decade. Major domestic coal companies, such as CHN Energy, Jinneng and Shaanxi Coal and Chemical, have considerable political influence. Thus, China, similar to the US, is beholden to rightward leaning politics that override green technology policies, making it nearly impossible to meet nation/state emissions targets set at Paris 2015 to hold global warming to under 2C. This ridiculously dangerous course has, in fact, become a bad joke, not a laughing matter, as the world’s whipsaw climate system thrashes civilization at every turn. The 2020-decade ia the most expressive decade of a worldwide maniac climate system of all time with ocean heat content dangerously hitting all-time records. A major study claims an ocean regime change. This is a serious threat to the entire planetary climate system equivalent to an emergency.

Coal Kills Climate and People

“Despite claims of ‘clean coal’ made by the industry and administration officials, coal is the dirtiest and most polluting fuel on the planet. Every terawatt-hour of electricity from coal emits about 950,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the primary driver of climate change. Even fracked gas emits only about 57 percent as much CO2. Both the mining and burning of coal also create huge quantities of other pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulates, heavy metals, and fly ash. A 2023 study in the journal Science found that coal particulates are more than twice as deadly as the same-size particulates from other sources and traced over 450,000 deaths to coal pollution since 1999.”(The Real Reason the Feds Want to Revive Coal, Sierra, October 15, 2025)

AI Greets Coal

The real push for coal is coming from another industry with close ties to the Trump administration. Technology companies investing heavily in AI are fostering a boom in data centers nationwide. Data centers took up about 2 percent of the nation’s electrical power pre-2020. By 2023, that share more than doubled to 176 terawatt-hours of power, more than the total power for the State of Illinois. By 2028, data centers are projected to use up to 12 percent of the entire US electrical grid. This spike in power requirements is impacting electrical bills for consumers, and along with Trump policies slowing down or shutting down new renewable power projects, it will require a ramp up in coal and gas. Trump is preying upon this sudden surge in power requirements to endorse coal. The EPA has proposed delays and gutting regulations for wastewater from coal-fired power plants and pledged to gut the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze Rule as the DOI intends to open 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal mine leasing.

In the biggest step backwards in modern US history, the Trump administration is spoiling both the atmosphere and the nation’s waterways “Expanding mining and spending taxpayer money on burning coal, while rolling back vital health protections, will only exacerbate the deadly pollution and rising electricity bills that communities are facing across the country,” (Earthjustice Responds to Trump Administration Coal Industry Giveaways, Earthjustice, Sept. 26, 2025).

Red States suffer much more from these policies than any other states. They are double-clobbered (1) by loss of Biden Inflation Reduction Aet jobs, e.g. wind and solar, that Trump cancels, decimating climate mitigation policies, axing climate science, firing leading scientists (the “brain drain”) and (2) suffer the biggest impact of deadly pollution as their blackened coal operations revive. They elected Trump and got what he promised to do, destroy renewables and pollute the atmosphere. “Clean coal” is the biggest con in the history of the planet.

Headlines: “Republicans Sell Out Constituents, Vote to Cut Jobs and Raise Energy Costs Nationwide,” Climate Power, May 27, 2025. “About 80 percent of manufacturing investments spurred by a Biden-era climate law have flowed to Republican districts.” (The New York Times, Feb. 11, 2025) Anything with Biden’s name attached is destroyed.

Project 2025 hit the green economy like a tsunami of mass destruction but Red States take the biggest hits; beware of Midterms vomiting up a lame duck presidency.

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