This week on CounterSpin: Forbes reports the Starbucks workers strike as you might expect: “The company claims it already offers the ‘best job in retail.’ … Yet the union is demanding….” “The company says, ‘We’re ready to return to the bargaining table whenever the union is.’ But as of yet, the union is holding out for the company to present a contract that meets demands….” You get the idea: One party is generous, the other is ornery. But even Forbes has to acknowledge that even as the strike “drags” into a second month, “global support grows.”
Derek Seidman has been following the strike. He’s a writer, researcher and historian who contributes to Little Sis and to Truthout, where he recently reported on the Starbucks strike and…what Walmart has to do with it?
Also on the show: Sen. Bernie Sanders is the latest to join a broad group of more than 200 environmental and economic justice advocates that just sent a letter to Congress, calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers, the energy sources powering the boom (and, as some would say, predictable bust) of artificial intelligence, until, as Sanders says, democracy “has a chance to catch up.”
Turns out as people learn more, opposition grows, and so, Politico notes, “The industry is taking out ads and funding campaigns to flip the narrative and put data centers in a positive light—spinning them as job creators and economic drivers rather than resource-hungry land hogs.”
The letter to Congress was spearheaded by Food & Water Watch. We’ll hear from the group’s deputy director, Mitch Jones.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Bondi Beach.
Gates of the Arctic National Park. Photo: Zach Richter, National Park Service.
Radical? Not me. In a House Natural Resources Committee hearing earlier this year, after one lawmaker finished complaining about “radical environmentalists” a second lawmaker bemusedly opined that no one is just an “environmentalist” anymore; nowadays all environmentalists are radical environmentalists.
Congressional members throwing “radical” around are definitely projecting. To “project” is to unconsciously attribute thoughts and motivations to another instead of acknowledging them as one’s own—often when it might be difficult to accept one’s own qualities, like hypocrisy, duplicity, or greed.
There have always been humans, like me, who appreciate nature-for-nature and not nature-for profit. The far-reaching, extreme action I see—the radical actors, if you will—are the lawmakers wielding the Congressional Review Act (CRA) so a greedy minority can plunder our public lands and leave us to deal with the consequences.
The CRA allows Congress to revoke a new agency regulation (aka a “rule”) with a joint resolution. Once Congress has revoked that regulation and the president has signed the resolution into law, the agency is prohibited from passing a substantially similar regulation to the one just revoked. Only future legislation can override this action.
Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act (CRA) as a negotiated rider to a 1996 budget bill. Senators Harry Reid (D-NV), Don Nickles (R-OK), and Ted Stevens (R-AK) noted in the Congressional record that they were motivated by “complaints” that Congress was passing progressively complex statutory schemes and delegating federal agencies too wide a latitude in enacting those statutes. Helpfully, they provided not even a single example of their concern manifest.
Since the CRA’s inception, however, we’ve only seen Congress wield it as a partisan sword. This is partly because the CRA requires introducing resolutions to revoke agency rules within 60 legislative or session days after agencies notify Congress about the rule, and there has to be the political clout to pass the resolution—including enough votes to override a veto if one political party doesn’t control Congress and the White House. This tends to happen within the first few months of new Congresses where political power has shifted and a new administration that wasn’t in charge when the agency created the rule.
Sword in hand, Congress cut down its first regulation in 2001, only months into the first George W. Bush administration. Voting largely along party lines, Republicans used the CRA to revoke a Clinton-era regulation designed to minimize on-the-job ergonomic risk factors and reduce preventable injuries. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration had studied the topic for 10 years before issuing a regulation—the House voted to extinguish the regulation after just an hour of debate.
The CRA next struck in 2017-2018, when the Republicans once again had unified control of the government. During the first Trump administration, Congress negated sixteen Obama-era regulations with the CRA, including U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulations that banned bear baiting and killing bears and wolves in their dens in national wildlife refuges in Alaska. And when the Democrats swept in with unified control in 2021-2022, they struck down three regulations from the previous administration.
The CRA doesn’t attempt to improve agency action—it is designed to destroy regulations with one final dagger through the heart. Congress can’t tweak a rule—it’s an up-or-down vote.
This year, with power once again unified under one party, Congress applied the CRA to kill three public-land management plans. Notably, Congress has not before this year considered land-management plans as rules or regulations. Applying the CRA to these is a novel application of the law, and also a novel interpretation of a “rule.”
Agencies manage our federal public lands with land-management plans. Agency employees spend years developing the plans and taking public comment on them. Longstanding statutes like the Federal Land and Policy Management Act (FLPMA) and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA), both passed in 1976, guide these plans with authorizations and restrictions. They mandate the agencies to manage land for multiple uses with more robust Congressional direction than the CRA’s “Well, we don’t like this” style. Unsurprisingly, land-management plans have many components to achieve multiple goals, permitting activities in certain places while prohibiting them elsewhere. Courts may review these plans to decide whether they comply with environmental laws or whether agencies exceeded their authority under FLPMA or NFMA. While the process certainly isn’t perfect, planning for millions of acres of public land across multiple ecosystems is now at the whim of lawmakers who dislike as little as one plan component.
One of the CRA joint resolutions that Congress has passed and is waiting for the President’s signature nullifies the Central Yukon land-management plan in Alaska, which would have governed over thirteen million acres of land in central and northern Alaska. Three million of those acres were designated as an area of critical environmental concern and overlapped with the Ambler Mining Road proposal, prohibiting it. The Ambler Mining Road would span 211 miles and run adjacent to the Gates of the Arctic Wilderness to connect a mining district to a highway for a private Canadian mining company. The Ambler Road would introduce motorized use to some of America’s wildest public lands. When the President signed H.J.Res. 106 into law on December 11, he removed the administrative hurdle preventing construction of the Ambler Road by obliterating the entire land-management plan. For all public lands, this new application of the CRA injects radical Congressional micro-meddling into agency land-management decisions.
There are lingering questions about how an agency moves forward after Congress strikes with its own extreme prerogative. What else will Congress consider to be “rules?” Can any uses be authorized? Can any uses be restricted? How many components of a plan must change for that plan to clear the CRA’s prohibition on creating a “substantially similar” regulation? Congress has launched us into a labyrinth of uncertainty. If discarding robust land-management plans that were developed with public participation under laws in existence for 50 years isn’t radical,then I don’t know what is.
He also directed federal agencies to “identify coal resources on Federal lands” and ease the process for leasing and mining coal on those lands. In addition, he issued orders to exclude coal-related projects from environmental reviews, promote coal exports and potentially subsidize the production of coal as a national security resource.
But there remain limits to the president’s power to slow the declining use of coal in the U.S. And while efforts continue to overcome these limits and prop up coal, mining coal remains an ongoing danger to workers: In 2025, there have been five coal-mining deaths in West Virginia and at least two others elsewhere in the U.S.
A long legacy
Until 2015, coal-fired power plants generated more electricity than any other type of fuel in the U.S. But with the rapid expansion of a new type of hydraulic fracturing, natural gas became a cheap and stable source for power generation. The prices of solar and wind power also dropped steadily. These alternatives ultimately overcame coal in the U.S. power supply.
Before this change, coal mining defined the economy and culture of many U.S. towns – and some states and regions, such as Wyoming and Appalachia – for decades. And in many small towns, coal-related businesses, including power plants, were key employers.
Coal has both benefits and drawbacks. It provides a reliable fuel source for electricity that can be piled up on-site at power plants without needing a tank or underground facility for storage.
But it’s dirty: Thousands of coal miners developed a disease called black lung. The federal government pays for medical care for some sick miners and makes monthly payments to family members of miners who die prematurely. Burning coal also emits multiple air pollutants, prematurely killing half a million people in the United States from 1999 through 2020.
Coal is dangerous for workers, too. Some coal-mining companies have had abysmal safety records, leading to miner deaths, such as the recent drowning of a miner in a sudden flood in a West Virginia mine. Safety reforms have been implemented since the Big Branch Mine explosion in 2010, and coal miner deaths in the U.S. have since declined. But coal mining remains a hazardous job.
A champion of coal
In both of his terms, Trump has championed the revival of coal. In 2017, for example, Trump’s Department of Energy asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to pay coal and nuclear plants higher rates than the competitive market would pay, saying they were key to keeping the U.S. electricity grid running. The commission declined.
So many data centers, desperate for 24/7 electricity, are relying on old coal-fired power plants – buying electricity from plants that otherwise would be shutting down.
Limits remain
Despite the Trump adminstration’s efforts to rapidly expand data centers and coal to power them, coal is more expensive than most other fuels for power generation, with costs still rising.
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s recent effort to follow Trump’s orders and lease more coal on federal lands received only one bid – at a historically low price of less than a penny per ton. But in fact, even if the government gave its coal away for free, it would still make more economic sense for utilities to build power plants that use other fuels. This is due to the high cost of running old coal plants as compared to new natural gas and renewable infrastructure.
Natural gas is cheaper – and, in some places, so are renewable energy and battery storage. Government efforts to prevent the retirement of coal-fired power plants and boost the demand for coal may slow coal’s decline in the short term. In the long term, however, coal faces a very uncertain future as a part of the U.S. electricity mix.
He also directed federal agencies to “identify coal resources on Federal lands” and ease the process for leasing and mining coal on those lands. In addition, he issued orders to exclude coal-related projects from environmental reviews, promote coal exports and potentially subsidize the production of coal as a national security resource.
But there remain limits to the president’s power to slow the declining use of coal in the U.S. And while efforts continue to overcome these limits and prop up coal, mining coal remains an ongoing danger to workers: In 2025, there have been five coal-mining deaths in West Virginia and at least two others elsewhere in the U.S.
A long legacy
Until 2015, coal-fired power plants generated more electricity than any other type of fuel in the U.S. But with the rapid expansion of a new type of hydraulic fracturing, natural gas became a cheap and stable source for power generation. The prices of solar and wind power also dropped steadily. These alternatives ultimately overcame coal in the U.S. power supply.
Before this change, coal mining defined the economy and culture of many U.S. towns – and some states and regions, such as Wyoming and Appalachia – for decades. And in many small towns, coal-related businesses, including power plants, were key employers.
Coal has both benefits and drawbacks. It provides a reliable fuel source for electricity that can be piled up on-site at power plants without needing a tank or underground facility for storage.
But it’s dirty: Thousands of coal miners developed a disease called black lung. The federal government pays for medical care for some sick miners and makes monthly payments to family members of miners who die prematurely. Burning coal also emits multiple air pollutants, prematurely killing half a million people in the United States from 1999 through 2020.
Coal is dangerous for workers, too. Some coal-mining companies have had abysmal safety records, leading to miner deaths, such as the recent drowning of a miner in a sudden flood in a West Virginia mine. Safety reforms have been implemented since the Big Branch Mine explosion in 2010, and coal miner deaths in the U.S. have since declined. But coal mining remains a hazardous job.
A champion of coal
In both of his terms, Trump has championed the revival of coal. In 2017, for example, Trump’s Department of Energy asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to pay coal and nuclear plants higher rates than the competitive market would pay, saying they were key to keeping the U.S. electricity grid running. The commission declined.
So many data centers, desperate for 24/7 electricity, are relying on old coal-fired power plants – buying electricity from plants that otherwise would be shutting down.
Limits remain
Despite the Trump adminstration’s efforts to rapidly expand data centers and coal to power them, coal is more expensive than most other fuels for power generation, with costs still rising.
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s recent effort to follow Trump’s orders and lease more coal on federal lands received only one bid – at a historically low price of less than a penny per ton. But in fact, even if the government gave its coal away for free, it would still make more economic sense for utilities to build power plants that use other fuels. This is due to the high cost of running old coal plants as compared to new natural gas and renewable infrastructure.
Natural gas is cheaper – and, in some places, so are renewable energy and battery storage. Government efforts to prevent the retirement of coal-fired power plants and boost the demand for coal may slow coal’s decline in the short term. In the long term, however, coal faces a very uncertain future as a part of the U.S. electricity mix.
Over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has become extremely popular in Silicon Valley and is widely regarded as the most transformative technology in the 21st century. In fact, it is already reshaping sectors like education, transportation, finance, health care, media, and telecommunications. Indeed, it is estimated that about 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies may be impacted by AI, which means that it could affect economic growth, employment, and wages. As a result, investment in AI is booming across industries, echoing the late-1990s dot-com era, with investors pouring billions into AI in the hope for a big payday.
Activists have crashed Drax’s head office in London demanding justice for communities suffering severe health consequences from the company’s pellet producing operations abroad. Activists unfurled a banner reading ‘Drax Kills’ and occupied the office lobby until security removed them.
Drax in Mississippi
The occupation follows a damning report published yesterday in the Guardian, detailing the suffering experienced by residents of Gloster, Mississippi living under the shadow of Drax’s pellet mill.
As Drax celebrates its 10 year anniversary of operating its Gloster, Mississippi pellet plant, residents of Gloster are suing the company over air pollution and the associated severe health issues caused by wood pellet production.
Over the last 10 years Drax has paid nearly $3m in fines since the facility opened and racked up nearly $6m in violations for its operations in Mississippi and Louisiana over the past four years.
The company has been repeatedly accused of driving environmental racism by siting its pellet mills next to majority-Black communities with high poverty rates in Louisiana and Mississippi, where they have exceeded the legal emission limits for air pollutants linked to cancer, breathing difficulties, and other health effects.
In April 2025, after strong community resistance and powerful testimony residents of Gloster won a victory in getting the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to reject a permit application from Drax, which would have raised its pollution permit from a minor to a major source of Hazardous Air Pollutants. In October 2025 Drax appealed this decision and were ultimately successful in raising their permitted pollution levels.
Molly Brown, who took part in the occupation said:
I find it a complete disgrace that my energy bills are going to propping up Drax and their poisonous pollution. In Gloster children are suffering from asthma, unable to play outside while elderly residents rely on expensive medication to survive.
This community wouldn’t be suffering in this way if it wasn’t for Drax’s deadly operations. It doesn’t matter how much Drax spends on lobbying or PR, they can’t hide the fact that Drax kills.
Rosie Gloster said:
Drax’s claims of being a ‘good neighbour’ couldn’t be further from the truth. This is a company that’s sacrificing Black lives for profit, that’s sacrificing their own workers here in the UK – all to keep scamming the British public out of their hard earned money.
Rather than stopping their illegal pollution, Drax just lobbied to legalise their poison. Drax’s operations are killing people, and it’s past time they were shut down.
Climate activists from Insure Our Survival have driven a mobile video van through central London. It showed spoof disaster movie trailers starring the UK CEOs of Zurich, Allianz, Aviva, AXA, AIG and Lloyd’s of London, challenging them for continuing to insure new fossil fuelprojects even as climate impacts accelerate around the world.
The UK must prepare for climate crises
The action follows November’s National Emergency Briefing in Westminster, where hundreds of MPs, peers and leaders from business, faith, sport and culture gathered. They saw evidence showing that the UK must urgently prepare for cascading climate crises.
Representatives from the major publications heard warnings of extreme weather, food shortages, price shocks, economic instability and rising geopolitical risks.
Lucy Porter from Insure Our Survival said:
We don’t need fiction — we’re already living in a disaster movie. Jamaica was hit by a Category 5 hurricane. The Philippines has been devastated by typhoons. The UK’s leaders have been told bluntly: we are not safe. And yet these insurance CEOs keep the fossil fuel industry alive by underwriting new oil and gas expansion.
The briefing also highlighted the scale of fossil-fuel-funded disinformation that’s flooding Westminster and the media. And it called for an urgent televised national emergency briefing for the public. This could help people understand the risks to their safety, livelihoods and communities.
Porter added:
The public deserves the truth. These insurers could stop new fossil fuel projects tomorrow: no insurance means no drilling.
They have the power to save lives.
They are choosing profit instead.
If they refuse to act, our actions will escalate throughout 2026. We will not sit quietly while our futures burn.
The trailers end with a direct challenge to the CEOs:
For many Americans, proper sanitation and clean water seem like issues for developing countries. But much of rural America—and even parts of US cities—still struggles to provide the basics we all need to survive. And as infrastructure ages and strains under the threat of climate change, the problems will likely get worse. Environmental justice activist Catherine Coleman Flowers has been on the forefront of these issues for decades. And she says that while a lack of sanitation is often found in poor, Black regions, especially in the Deep South, these basic environmental issues cut across racial lines. On this week’s More To The Story, Flowers sits down with host Al Letson to talk about her years working to achieve “sanitation justice” in the South, how biblical lessons apply to climate offenders, and her book of personal essays, Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Fewer companies operating in Europe will be made to carry out due diligence on the societal harms they cause, in what green groups have called a “betrayal” of communities affected by corporate abuse.
The gutting of the EU’s sustainability reporting and due diligence rules, which was greenlit by MEPs on Tuesday, slashes the number of companies covered by laws to protect human and ecological rights, and removes provisions to harmonise access to justice across member states.
The following is an interview with Hans-Josef Fell. Fell is the drafter of the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), a law that came into force in Germany 25 years ago and has been copied over 100 times in more than 60 countries. Hans-Josef Fell was a member of the German Bundestag from 1998 to 2013. As a leading climate figure of the Green Party he helped to advance the energy transition in Germany. Today, he is president of the Energy Watch Group and, together with climate activists such as Bill McKibben, an ambassador for 100% renewable energy. Fell has received numerous awards.
David Goeßmann: While greenhouse gases continue to rise to record levels globally, the U.S. is still the second-largest emitter in absolute terms, but with much higher per capita consumption and historical emissions than China. President Donald Trump has reversed the steps toward energy transition initiated under the Biden administration, attacked all environmental protection measures, and issued over 300 new oil and gas drilling permits while U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are going up again. In the EU especially the German government under Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) watered down the EU’s climate targets and undermined the EU’s ban on combustion engines from 2035. In Europe we see a boom of fossil gas and gas-fired power plants while overall ambition on climate is in rollback. How do you assess climate protection in the industrialized world?
Hans-Josef Fell: There is no climate protection worthy of the name in the rich countries, nor globally. The Earth’s temperature is accelerating toward three degrees Celsius by 2050, as new calculations by the German Meteorological Society and the German Physical Society show. The Energy Watch Group has also clearly described this; one only has to extrapolate the current exponentially rising temperature increase path of the last 20 years.
This alarming result is also clear, because as early as 1990, the limit of 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is sustainable for human civilization was exceeded. Today, the atmosphere is already overloaded with almost 430 ppm. An effective climate protection target that could enable the planet, which is already overheated by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius in 2024, to cool down can therefore only be to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (not to be confused with annual emissions!) to below 350 ppm.
This can only be achieved if all emissions are stopped in about two decades and, at the same time, huge amounts of carbon are removed from the atmosphere. The measures mentioned above and many others are irresponsibly counterproductive, as they even reward new increased emissions with tax breaks and, with tax subsidies, even promote the expansion of highly climate-damaging natural gas power plants and natural gas infrastructure. At the same time, these tax breaks for climate polluters place a further burden on the already highly indebted national budget, which could lead to crises that we remember all too well from Greece’s national bankruptcy crisis in 2010.
David Goeßmann: We see in different developed countries that emissions are going down, even in the U.S. the trend since 2005 shows a slight decrease. The EU has a climate goal to be climate neutral by 2050 while the Biden administration at least committed to net zero emissions by mid-century (Trump revoked that). Is that enough, and if not, why not?
Hans-Josef Fell: Since we need to return to 350 ppm in a few decades, climate neutrality in 2045 is far too late and far too weak. In addition to achieving a zero-emission economy, we also need a strong carbon-reducing economy, which can be achieved through reforestation, regenerative agriculture, and marine algae farming.
A zero-emission economy with 100 percent renewable energies and an emission-free circular economy is possible; all the technologies are there. All that is needed is the declared political and social will and strong investment from the financial sector and private individuals. Building an emission-free industry would also boost the economy. However, only China is currently pursuing such a strategy aggressively. In the EU and the US, fossil fuel interests have regained the upper hand.
David Goeßmann: As far as the fossil fuel rollback is concerned, the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Agreement under President Donald Trump and did not send an official delegation to COP30, the climate conference in Belém, Brazil. The EU has undermined the so called Green New Deal. You’re often in China. How do you see developments there in terms of climate protection and the energy transition compared to Europe and the U.S.?
Hans-Josef Fell: A zero-emission economy is based on an energy supply that is 100 percent renewable. If we had that globally, about 60 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions would be stopped. China alone—currently still the largest emitter of greenhouse gases—is on an industrial growth path toward this goal. 62 percent of global photovoltaic growth, 71 percent of global wind energy, and about 60 percent of all batteries and electric vehicles were brought to market in China last year. In 2024, more than 90 percent of the solar cells installed worldwide and 70 percent of electric car batteries were produced in China. Investment in clean energy has been growing for years, while production capacities are being expanded. In 2023, investment increased by 40 percent compared to the previous year.
This is the key driver of China’s economic boom, which has been ongoing for years. Europe, with its half-hearted renewable energy policy, and the U.S. under Trump, with its anti-energy transition agenda, are threatening to go into industrial decline. The industry of the near future will be clean, renewable, and emission-free. Those who still insist on subsidizing natural gas, fossil fuel combustion engines, fossil fuel heating systems, and fossil fuel-based industrial production will ultimately lose entire industries to China and end up in the poorhouse.
David Goeßmann: At the moment, we are seeing a backlash against the green transformation in many societies, especially in the rich industrialized countries. Do you nevertheless see positive developments in the global energy transition?
Hans-Josef Fell: Yes, renewable energies are advancing massively worldwide. However, this is being driven primarily by China and increasingly also by BRICS countries other than Russia [the BRICS group includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa]. Those who, like the U.S. and the EU, want to protect their own dirty fossil fuel economy from Chinese dominance with tariffs on solar products or electric cars will only lose market share, as we are already seeing clearly today with the German car manufacturer VW, Daimler, and BMW, which are late to the game and still half-hearted in their commitment to e-mobility.
David Goeßmann: You say that an energy transition can be completed within ten years. Explain how such a rapid transition could take place. What solutions are there and what needs to be done?
Hans-Josef Fell: Until around 2012, we had in Germany about 30 percent annual growth in solar energy, and until 2017, similar growth in wind energy. Had these growth rates in solar expansion not been halted in 2012 in the wake of the devastating amendments to the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) by Federal Environment Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU), and then in wind energy from 2017 onwards by Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD), Germany could have achieved a full supply of 100 percent green electricity by around 2022 with the corresponding parallel expansion of storage facilities. The increases in natural gas prices as a result of Putin’s war against Ukraine would have had little impact on our economy, energy security would have been very high, the average 81 billion euros in import costs for fossil fuels would have fallen dramatically, and emissions would have been significantly lower.
Today, we must build on the success story of the EEG from 2000 with its basic principles of fixed feed-in tariffs, whereby a modern EEG should also be geared towards system integration into the electricity grid. Then, with the simultaneous expansion of electric heating, e-vehicles, and industrial production, a full supply of 100 percent green electricity can be achieved by 2030. Such a market ramp-up would also give the domestic renewable energy industry a chance and reduce dependence on China.
David Goeßmann: If a rapid transition is possible and even economically advantageous, why is it not being implemented politically? Who is continuing to put the brakes on this?
Hans-Josef Fell: The fossil fuel and nuclear industries have a firm grip on large parts of the media, both traditional and social, and thus also on the political debate. Fake news is constantly being produced, e.g., that renewable energies are driving up electricity prices or that there is a nuclear renaissance in the world. Bavarian prime minister Markus Söder (CSU) recently took the cake by claiming that Germany could support its economy by quickly building small nuclear power plants like those already in operation in Canada. A glance at Canada shows that there are no such small nuclear reactors there, not even under construction. There are only two in the planning stage, and their completion is still up in the air. So even a high ranking politician can lie to the public with impunity.
David Goeßmann: In the broader debate, climate protection is often portrayed as a burden and socially unjust. In your opinion, what is wrong with the way the energy, transport, and agricultural transitions to protect the environment are discussed in the media?
Hans-Josef Fell: From the outset, the fossil fuel industry has managed to defame climate protection as a burden on the economy. However, this only applies to the fossil fuel industry, which will of course have to completely cease its business activities involving oil, gas, and coal. But climate protection is a booster for the clean, emission-free economy, as China is now making abundantly clear.
But even many climate activists have adopted the fossil fuel industry’s framing and talked about burden sharing in climate protection. Spending on renewable energies is not a cost burden, but rather an investment that creates jobs and tax revenue while reducing the costs of damage to health care due to poor air quality or environmental and climate damage. Climate protection is therefore not a burden, but an improvement in prosperity for everyone, except for businesses in the fossil fuel-polluting economy.
David Goeßmann: In recent years, environmental movements and climate activists have developed various strategies to promote more climate protection in countries. At the moment, it has become difficult to put the issue on the agenda. The pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the rise of right-wing authoritarian parties have dominated the headlines. In your opinion, what strategies make sense to get governments to take climate action?
Hans-Josef Fell: Climate activists must finally free themselves from the narratives of fossil fuel industry representatives and demonstrate that climate protection is an essential contribution to the economy, creates new jobs and industries, reduces the costs of disease and environmental damage, relieves private households of high energy costs, and ultimately slows down the galloping national debt. Furthermore, the lack of climate protection is one of the causes of the major problems that are weighing so heavily on us: increasing refugee movements, famines as a result of crop failures, wars over oil or natural gas, fossil fuels as a means of political blackmail, and much more.
Let us finally stop leaving the debate to the fossil fuel and nuclear climate destroyers, of which the oil and gas industry alone has been making around $2.8 billion in net profits every day for 50 years, ultimately leaving behind more and more poverty, suffering, disease, and a destroyed planet.
Wolf, Lamar Valley, Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
For grizzly bears, wolves, lynx, wolverine, and bison there is no “boundary” around Yellowstone National Park. The forests in this area — the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem — extend beyond Yellowstone Park’s boundaries and provide critical habitat for threatened and endangered species. Unfortunately, some of these areas are National Forests open to commercial logging and road construction.
Despite the immense value that these public lands have for wildlife, the government recently approved a large-scale clearcutting and road-building operation right next to Yellowstone Park, which was called the South Plateau Project. In response, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Center for Biological Diversity, Western Environmental Law Center, Native Ecosystems Council, and Council for Wildlife and Fish took the agency to court — and we won! Because of our hard work and determination, we now have a federal court order prohibiting this illegal logging from moving forward.
In the case, the federal court found in part that the agency was breaking federal environmental laws because the agency refused to provide details on precisely where and when it would bulldoze in 56.8 miles of new logging roads to clearcut 16,462 acres (26 square miles) of National Forest. The court found that the Forest Service’s decision violated the National Environmental Policy Act because the agency failed to provide enough information to consider the potential impacts of the roads and logging on species such as grizzlies before the action takes place, as the “look before you leap” law requires.
The court also found the project violated the National Forest Management Act. Since the agency refused to specify where the project activities would occur, it was impossible to tell if the project complied with mandatory habitat protections from the agency’s own governing land management plan, known as a “forest plan.” These mandatory protections are in place to ensure that the agency appropriately balances the private profit interests of clearcutting with the need to conserve enough habitat on public land to make sure that endangered species don’t go extinct.
Additionally, the court also found the project violated the Endangered Species Act because the project was not using science as required by law. As the Court wrote: “In relying on a 10-acre patch size to define grizzly bear secure habitat in the absence of any scientific evidence showing that such acreage provides adequate habitat, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s failed to use the ‘best available science’ in violation of the Endangered Species Act.” As the court further noted: “grizzly bears in other Ecosystems have been found to need upwards of 2,000 acres of secure habitat . . . .” A plan that not only has no scientific basis, but is also contrary to all known existing science, cannot and will not conserve endangered species.
There is no doubt that the majority of Americans view the Yellowstone region as a national, natural treasure that should be protected. Our legal victory in this case is cause for celebration, but it is bittersweet. This year, Dr. David Mattson, a world-renowned grizzly bear scientist, passed away. Dr. Mattson was instrumental in our victory in this case, thanks to his compelling scientific research that explains why 10-acre habitat patches for grizzly bears are not adequate for grizzly bear conservation. We are thankful for his wise counsel, even though he cannot be here to witness the fruits of his labors.
Finally, the government will likely appeal this court order. Please make a donation so that we can hire the best lawyers to defend our victory and make sure it sticks. In addition other national forests in grizzly habitat use the same illegal definition of secure grizzly habitat but they won’t change it unless we sue them which will cost more money.
PETA supporters stormed the Senate meeting at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) on 11 December. They held signs reading “QMUL: End Cruel Sepsis Experiments” and “Mice are not lab equipment! They are thinking, sensitive individuals.”
QMUL experimenters are puncturing the mice’s colons and letting sepsis ensue, causing suffering for useless experiments that have no benefit to human health.
PETA is calling on university leadership to end this torture and adopt state-of-the-art, human-relevant testing methods that can save human lives while leaving mice in peace.
PETA says that despite the well-documented failure in using mice to model human sepsis, QMUL experimenters are cutting open terrified mice and puncturing their intestines to leak faecal matter into their abdomens.
Experimenters noted that some mice experienced severe sepsis, which can include major organ failure.
Results from some of these experiments have been published in papers that were later retracted by the publisher because data and conclusions were deemed ‘unreliable’.
Mice are intelligent, complex, and social individuals with the capacity to experience a wide range of emotions. They become attached to each other, love their families, and easily bond with their human guardians—returning as much affection as is given to them.
PETA encourages everyone to urge Queen Mary to take heed of the scientific evidence, and join other institutions – including the University of Kent – that have committed to non-animal methods in sepsis research.
PETA’s motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”. It points out that “Every Animal Is Someone” and offers free Empathy Kits.
A group of over 100 Filipinos is seeking financial compensation from Shell. This is after the super typhoon Odette devastated their communities. The landmark case against the UK’s biggest oil company argues that it contributed to climate change. And they say this made typhoon Odette more likely and more severe.
The case could have a major impact on the fossil fuel industry.
The Philippine Movement for Climate Justice, Greenpeace Philippines and Fossil Free London staged a demonstration outside the Royal Courts of Justice on 11 December, to mark the filing of the case.
Super typhoon Odette
On 16 December 2021, Odette killed or severely injured over 1,800 people and destroyed over 2 million homes. It affected eight million people overall. At the time, marked as an off-the-scale event, it was the second costliest typhoon on record in the Philippines. It caused nearly $1bn worth of direct damage.
The survivors argue that Shell’s actions contributed to climate change, which made Odette significantly more likely and more severe. It is the first case to link death, injury and property destruction in the Global South directly to a fossil fuel giant in the Global North.
Odette destroyed Batasan fish vendor Trixy Elle’s home. She said:
Odette took everything from me and my family. We were forced to sell our precious belongings just so we could afford to rebuild our home.
We’ve done nothing to cause the climate crisis, but because companies like Shell chose profit over people, our lives have been turned upside down.
Tessa Khan, International Climate Change Lawyer and Executive Director at Uplift, added:
This kind of devastating weather event was anything but natural. It was a disaster born out of decades of extraction and profiteering.
The bravery demonstrated by the survivors makes clear that fossil fuel companies can no longer act with impunity.
This case strengthens the growing push by communities to hold fossil fuel giants to account for the harm they have caused.
Shell’s role in the climate crisis
The case draws on emerging science which can now directly attribute individual extreme weather events to climate change, and emissions to specific fossil fuel companies. In June, scientists found that the likelihood of a disaster like Odette in the Philippines has roughly doubled due to global warming.
Shell is one of the world’s largest emitters, accounting for 2.04% of historical global emissions. By contrast the Philippines, the country with the highest risk of climate hazards, has contributed just 0.2%.
The case also argues that Shell has known since 1965 that fossil fuels were the primary cause of climate change. Furthermore, that the company had been warned that failing to curb emissions would lead to major economic consequences by 2038, yet chose not to change course.
The claimants are seeking financial compensation in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle, as well as remedial measures consistent with their right to a healthy environment.
The claimants are seeking damages for severe losses including serious property damage, personal injury, bereavement, psychological trauma and loss of earnings.
They’re also seeking further relief in relation to the violation of their constitutional right to a balanced ecology.
The claim alleges that Shell’s actions materially contributed to anthropogenic climate change. And this significantly intensified the typhoon’s impact and likelihood, thereby increasing the damage suffered by the clients.
More climate impact cases
They join a growing list of communities using the courts to send a message that the era of consequence-free polluting is over.
As of September 2024 86 cases had been filed globally, with 33 relating to companies’ responsibilities for climate impacts. There are growing signs that the legal tides are turning.
In May, a German court delivered a precedent-setting verdict in the high-profile Saul vs RWE case. It ruled that major emitters can be held liable for climate-related damages abroad.
In July, the International Court of Justice advised that governments have a binding duty to protect people and the planet from the climate crisis.
So the potential liabilities for fossil fuel companies are substantial. Climate Analytics estimates that the climate damages attributable to the 25 largest oil and gas companies exceed $20tn.
Jefferson Chua, Greenpeace Philippines Climate Campaigner, said:
Carbon majors like Shell can no longer hide behind their corporate veil, far away from those who bear the heaviest costs because of the decisions they make in their board rooms. It’s not right for them to continue to profit at the expense of the death and hardship of communities. Survivors of Odette have had enough of the climate crisis and are bringing the fight to Shell’s doorstep.
And Aaron Pedrosa, legal team head of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ), summed up:
Our communities have suffered unimaginable losses. Their case shows that no corporation operates in a vacuum. When their actions materially worsen the impacts of climate disasters, the courts have a role in ensuring those responsible are held accountable. They cannot continue to contribute to climate harm with impunity.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox believes his state needs more power — a lot more. By some estimates, Utah will require as much electricity in the next five years as it generated all last century, to meet the demands of a growing population as well as chase data centers and AI developers to fuel its economy.
To that end, Cox announced Operation Gigawatt last year, declaring the state would double energy production in the next decade. Although the announcement was short on details, Cox, a Republican, promised his administration would take an “any of the above” approach, which aims to expand all sources of energy production.
Despite that goal, the Utah Legislature’s Republican supermajority, with Cox’s acquiescence, has taken a hard turn against solar power — which has been coming online faster than any other source in Utah and accounts for two-thirds of the new projects waiting to connect to the state’s power grid.
Cox signed a pair of bills passed this year that will make it more difficult and expensive to develop and produce solar energy in Utah by ending solar development tax credits and imposing a hefty new tax on solar generation. A third bill aimed at limiting solar development on farmland narrowly missed the deadline for passage but is expected to return next year.
While Operation Gigawatt emphasizes nuclear and geothermal as Cox’s preferred sources, the legislative broadside, and Cox’s willingness to go along with it, caught many in the solar industry off guard. The three bills, in their original form, could have brought solar development to a halt if not for solar industry lobbyists negotiating a lower tax rate and protecting existing projects as well as those under construction from the brunt of the impact.
“It took every dollar of political capital from all the major solar developers just to get to something tolerable, so that anything they have under development will get built and they can move on to greener pastures,” said one industry insider, indicating that solar developers will likely pursue projects in more politically friendly states. ProPublica spoke with three industry insiders — energy developers and lobbyists — all of whom asked to remain anonymous for fear of antagonizing lawmakers who, next month, will again consider legislation affecting the industry.
The Utah Legislature’s pivot away from solar mirrors President Donald Trump taking a more hostile approach to the industry than his predecessor. Trump has ordered the phaseout of lucrative federal tax incentives for solar and other renewable energy, which expanded under the Biden administration. The loss of federal incentives is a bigger hit to solar companies than the reductions to Utah’s tax incentives, industry insiders acknowledged. The administration has also canceled large wind and solar projects, which Trump has lamented as “the scam of the century.” He described solar as “farmer killing.”
Yet Cox criticized the Trump administration’s decision to kill a massive solar project in neighboring Nevada. Known as a governor who advocates for a return to more civil political discourse, Cox doesn’t often pick fights. But he didn’t pull punches with the decision to halt the Esmeralda 7 project planned on 62,300 acres of federal land. The central Nevada project was expected to produce 6.2 gigawatts of power — enough to supply nearly eight times the number of households in Las Vegas. (Although the Trump administration canceled the environmental review of the joint project proposed by multiple developers, it has the potential to move forward as individual projects.)
“This is how we lose the AI/energy arms race with China,” Cox wrote on X when news surfaced of the project’s cancellation. “Our country needs an all-of-the-above approach to energy (like Utah).”
But he didn’t take on his own Legislature, at least publicly.
Many of Utah’s Republican legislators have been skeptical of solar for years, criticizing its footprint on the landscape and viewing it as an unreliable energy source, while lamenting the retirement of coal-generated power plants. The economies of several rural counties rely on mining coal. But lawmakers’ skepticism hadn’t coalesced into successful anti-solar legislation — until this year. When Utah lawmakers convened at the start of 2025, they took advantage of the political moment to go after solar.
“This is a sentiment sweeping through red states, and it’s very disconcerting and very disturbing,” said Steve Handy, Utah director of The Western Way, which describes itself as a conservative organization advocating for an all-of-the-above approach to energy development.
The shift in sentiment against solar energy has created a difficult climate for an all-of-the-above approach. Solar projects can be built quickly on Utah’s vast, sun-drenched land, while nuclear is a long game with projects expected to take a decade or more to come online under optimistic scenarios.
Cox generally supports solar, “in the right places,” especially when the captured energy can be stored in large batteries for distribution on cloudy days and after the sun goes down.
Cox said that instead of vetoing the anti-solar bills, he spent his political capital to moderate the legislation’s impact. “I think you’ll see where our fingerprints were,” he told ProPublica. He didn’t detail specific changes for which he advocated but said the bills’ earlier iterations would have “been a lot worse.”
“We will continue to see solar in Utah.”
Cox’s any-of-the-above approach to energy generation draws from a decades-old Republican push similarly titled “all of the above.” The GOP policy’s aim was as much about preserving and expanding reliance on fossil fuels (indeed, the phrase may have been coined by petroleum lobbyists) as it was turning to cleaner energy sources such as solar, wind and geothermal.
As governor of a coal-producing state, Cox hasn’t shown interest in reducing reliance on such legacy fuels. But as he slowly rolls out Operation Gigawatt, his focus has been on geothermal and nuclear power. Last month, he announced plans for a manufacturing hub for small modular reactors in the northern Utah community of Brigham City, which he hopes will become a nuclear supply chain for Utah and beyond. And on a recent trade mission to New Zealand, he signed an agreement to collaborate with the country on geothermal energy development.
Meanwhile, the bills Cox signed into law already appear to be slowing solar development in Utah. Since May, when the laws took effect, 51 planned solar projects withdrew their applications to connect to the state’s grid — representing more than a quarter of all projects in Utah’s transmission connection queue. Although projects drop out for many reasons, some industry insiders theorize the anti-solar legislation could be at play.
Caught in the political squeeze over power are Utah customers, who are footing higher electricity bills. Earlier this year, the state’s utility, Rocky Mountain Power, asked regulators to approve a 30% hike to fund increased fuel and wholesale energy costs, as well as upgrades to the grid. In response to outrage from lawmakers, the utility knocked the request down to 18%. Regulators eventually awarded the utility a 4.7% increase — a decision the utility promptly appealed to the state Supreme Court.
Juliet Carlisle, a University of Utah political science professor focusing on environmental policy, said the new solar tax could signal to large solar developers that Utah energy policy is “becoming more unpredictable,” prompting them to build elsewhere. This, in turn, could undermine Cox’s efforts to quickly double Utah’s electricity supply.
Operation Gigwatt “relies on rapid deployment across multiple energy sources, including renewables,” she said. “If renewable growth slows — especially utility-scale solar, which is currently the fastest-deploying resource — the state may face challenges meeting demand growth timelines.”
Utah’s Republican legislators have criticized solar’s footprint on the landscape and say it’s a less reliable energy source.Elliot Ross for ProPublica
Rep. Kay Christofferson, R-Lehi, had sponsored legislation to end the solar industry’s state tax credits for several legislative sessions, but this was the first time the proposal succeeded.
Christofferson agrees Utah is facing unprecedented demand for power, and he supports Cox’s any-of-the-above approach. But he doesn’t think solar deserves the advantages of tax credits. Despite improving battery technology, he still considers it an intermittent source and thinks overreliance on it would work against Utah’s energy goals.
In testimony on his bill, Christofferson said he believed the tax incentives had served their purpose of getting a new industry off the ground — 16% of Utah’s power generation now comes from solar, ranking it 16th in the nation for solar capacity.
Christofferson’s bill was the least concerning to the industry, largely because it negotiated a lengthy wind-down of the subsidies. Initially it would have ended the tax credit after Jan. 1, 2032. But after negotiations with the solar industry, he extended the deadline to 2035.
The bill passed the House, but when it reached the Senate floor, Sen. Brady Brammer, R-Pleasant Grove, moved the end of the incentives to 2028. He told ProPublica he believes solar is already established and no longer needs the subsidy. Christofferson tried to defend his compromise but ultimately voted with the legislative majority.
Unlike Christofferson’s bill, which wasn’t born of an antipathy for renewable energy, Rep. Casey Snider, R-Paradise, made it clear in public statements and behind closed doors to industry lobbyists that the goal of his bill was to make solar pay.
The bill imposes a tax on all solar production. The proceeds will substantially increase the state’s endangered species fund, which Utah paradoxically uses to fight federal efforts to list threatened animals for protection. Snider cast his bill as pro-environment, arguing the money could also go to habitat protection.
As initially written, the bill would have taxed not only future projects, but also those already producing power and, more worrisome for the industry, projects under construction or in development with financing in place. The margins on such projects are thin, and the unanticipated tax could kill projects already in the works, one solar industry executive testified.
“Companies like ours are being effectively punished for investing in the state,” testified another.
The pushback drew attacks from Snider, who accused solar companies of hypocrisy on the environment.
Industry lobbyists who spoke to ProPublica said Snider wasn’t as willing to negotiate as Christofferson. However, they succeeded in reducing the tax rate on future developments and negotiated a smaller, flat fee for existing projects.
“Everyone sort of decided collectively to save the existing projects and let it go for future projects,” said one lobbyist.
Snider told ProPublica, “My goal was never to run anybody out of business. If we wanted to make it more heavy-handed, we could have. Utah is a conservative state, and I would have had all the support.”
Snider said, like the governor, he favors an any-of-the-above approach to energy generation and doesn’t “want to take down any particular industry or source.” But he believes utility-scale solar farms need to pay to mitigate their impact on the environment. He likened his bill to federal law that requires royalties from oil and gas companies to be used for conservation. He hopes federal lawmakers will use his bill as a model for federal legislation that would apply to solar projects nationwide.
“This industry needs to give back to the environment that they claim very heavily they are going to protect,” he said. “I do believe there’s a tinge of hypocrisy to this whole movement. You can’t say you’re good for the environment and not offset your impacts.”
Landon Kesler’s family has leased land to solar companies for more than a decade, providing revenue for the family to almost double its land holdings for ranching.Elliot Ross for ProPublica
One of the more emotional debates over solar is set to return next year, after a bill that would end tax incentives for solar development on agricultural land failed to get a vote in the final minutes of this year’s session. Sponsored by Rep. Colin Jack, R-St. George, the bill has been fast-tracked in the next session, which begins in January.
Jack said he was driven to act by ranchers who were concerned that solar companies were outbidding them for land they had been leasing to graze cows. Solar companies pay substantially higher rates than ranchers can. His bill initially had a slew of land use restrictions — such as mandating the distance between projects and residential property and creeks, minimum lot sizes and 4-mile “green zones” between projects — that solar lobbyists said would have strangled their industry. After negotiating with solar developers, Jack eliminated the land use restrictions while preserving provisions to prohibit tax incentives for solar farms on private agricultural land and to create standards for decommissioning projects.
Many in rural Utah recoil at rows of black panels disrupting the landscape and fear solar farms will displace the ranching and farming way of life. Indeed, some wondered whether Cox, who grew up on a farm in central Utah, would have been as critical of Trump scuttling a 62,300-acre solar farm in his own state as he was of the Nevada project’s cancellation.
Peter Greathouse, a rancher in western Utah’s Millard County, said he is worried about solar farms taking up grazing land in his county. “Twelve and a half percent is privately owned, and a lot of that is not farmable. So if you bring in these solar places that start to eat up the farmland, it can’t be replaced,” he said.
Utah is losing about 500,000 acres of agricultural land every 10 years, most of it to housing. A report by The Western Way estimated solar farms use 0.1% of the United States’ total land mass. That number is expected to grow to 0.46% by 2050 — a tiny fraction of what is used by agriculture. Of the land managed by the Utah Trust Lands Administration, less than 3,000 of the 2.9 million acres devoted to grazing have been converted to solar farms.
Other ranchers told ProPublica they’ve been able to stay on their land and preserve their way of life by leasing to solar. Landon Kesler’s family, which raises cattle for team roping competitions, has leased land to solar for more than a decade. The revenue has allowed the family to almost double its land holdings, providing more room to ranch, Kesler said.
“I’m going to be quite honest, it’s absurd,” Kesler said of efforts to limit solar on agricultural land. “Solar very directly helped us tie up other property to be used for cattle and ranching. It didn’t run us out; it actually helped our agricultural business thrive.”
Solar lobbyists and executives have been working to bolster the industry’s image with lawmakers ahead of the next legislative session. They’re arguing solar is a good neighbor.
“We don’t use water, we don’t need sidewalks, we don’t create noise and we don’t create light,” said Amanda Smith, vice president of external affairs for AES, which has one solar project operating in Utah and a second in development. “So we just sort of sit out there and produce energy.”
Solar pays private landowners in Utah $17 million a year to lease their land. And, more important, solar developers argue, it’s critical to powering data centers the state is working to attract.
“We are eager to be part of a diversified electricity portfolio, and we think we bring a lot of values that will benefit communities, keep rates low and stable, and help keep the lights on,” Rikki Seguin, executive director of Interwest Energy Alliance, a western trade organization that advocates for utility-scale renewable energy projects, told an interim committee of lawmakers this summer.
The message didn’t get a positive reception from some lawmakers on the committee. Rep. Carl Albrecht, R-Richfield, who represents three rural Utah counties and was among solar’s critics last session, said the biggest complaint he hears from constituents is about “that ugly solar facility” in his district.
“Why, Rep. Albrecht, did you allow that solar field to be built? It’s black. It looks like the Dead Sea when you drive by it,” Albrecht said.
Indonesian labor activist Raraa Rahmawati at the We the 99% People’s Summit, Johannesburg, South Africa, November 21, 2025. Photo: Sarah Anderson.
Electric vehicle sales are rising rapidly around the world. But few people who purchase these cars know anything about the workers who produce them.
Labor activist Raraa Rahmawati is trying to change that for one group of e-vehicle supply chain workers: the more than 230,000 Indonesians who toil in the nickel mining and processing industry. Recently, she reported on the reality of these workers’ lives at an international “People’s Summit” held parallel to the G20 leaders meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Indonesia boasts the world’s largest reserves of nickel, a key component of the lithium batteries that power electric vehicles. To capture more of the value of this essential mineral, the national government banned raw nickel exports in 2020. This has triggered a boom in domestic nickel processing.
Who’s benefiting most from this boom? The Chinese firm Tsingshan ranks as the top investor in Indonesia’s nickel processing operations. The company has contracts to supply car-makers around the world, including a $5 billion deal with Tesla.
Tsingshan’s founder and chairman, Xiang Guangda, has accumulated a fortune worth an estimated $3.7 billion. Known as the “Nickel King,” the Chinese tycoon closely guards his privacy. But Bloomberg last year spilled one revealing tidbit: that Xiang had purchased a $62 million mansion for his daughter in Singapore.
The contrast between the living and working conditions for Xiang’s family and his employees could not be more extreme. Rahmawati works with an organization, Sembada Bersama, that is documenting the severe workplace hazards in this industry.
In a new report, Sembada Bersama reveals disturbing information about the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park, a massive nickel mining and smelting complex in a former rainforest in the northern part of the Maluku Islands. Tsingshan owns the largest share of the project.
The most disturbing finding: an apparent pattern of “sudden deaths” among the plant’s workers, who are mostly 25 to 35 years old. Nearly every worker Sembada Bersama interviewed was aware of these tragic incidents. Rahmawati said that while lack of transparency and oversight make it impossible to prove, these deaths are likely the result of cardiac arrests related to grueling working conditions.
Smelter operators typically work two 12-hour shifts over two days, often having to rotate between day and night shifts, with a third day off. To document additional hazards, Sembada Bersama collaborated with workers to take meter readings inside the smelters. The data they collected reveal workplace heat temperatures of as high as 108.5 degrees, excessive levels of inhalable dust particles that can cause respiratory disease and cancer, and noise levels high enough to cause permanent hearing loss.
These occupational health risks come on top of the Indonesian nickel industry’s devastating environmental costs and high accident rates. Two years ago, an explosion at a Tsingshan plant left 21 workers dead.
Tsingshan recently signed an agreement with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization to improve ecological practices and industrial skills training at its Indonesia operations. This suggests the firm is feeling some pressure. But with few alternative job opportunities, local communities and workers remain vulnerable to the enormous power of Tsingshan and other nickel corporations.
The Sembada Bersama report ends with detailed recommendations for the Indonesian government and corporations. Rahmawati also argues that the hazards in her country’s nickel industry are part of the broader problem of a global economy rigged to favor the wealthy. International solidarity and cooperation, she feels, will be key to unrigging the system.
“People who buy electric cars think they’re contributing to a ‘just transition’ away from fossil fuels,” she told the international crowd in Johannesburg. “But they should know this is really just another form of extractivism. We need a cross-border movement. It’s time for us to be united.”
In an executive order issued early last week, Trump took another swipe at Biden-era regulations, specifically changes to Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.
So what are CAFE standards? You have to go back to the 1970s, when Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. The legislation was enacted following an oil embargo set by Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) against the US, a direct retaliation for the US decision to support Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Due to shortages, oil prices skyrocketed, and voters were generally unhappy as they waited in long lines at gas stations. CAFE standards were introduced to reduce US dependence on oil by setting targets that compelled automakers to improve the miles-per-gallon (mpg) performance of their vehicles.
The words “greenhouse gases,” “carbon,” or “global warming” don’t appear in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act’s text. This is because there are multiple benefits to improving mpg. Only in the last 20 years has the focus of CAFE standards shifted to emphasize reducing carbon emissions. During the Biden administration, the US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) set new goals of an average of 50.4 mpg for new cars and passenger trucks sold in 2031 and an average of 35 mpg for new heavy-duty pickup trucks and vans sold in 2035. The Environmental Defense Fund projected that the new standards would save vehicle owners money on fuel over the vehicle’s lifespan: $600 for owners of cars and standard pickup trucks, and $700 for owners of heavy-duty pickup trucks and vans. The organization also projected that the new standards would save over 70 billion gallons of gasoline by 2050.
But in his executive order, Trump proclaimed that the new standards were impossible to meet, and the NHTSA is proposing drastic reductions (Table 1). In the following table, the percentages represent year-over-year reductions in gallons/mile (the inverse of mpg), indicating that the vehicle consumes less fuel over a given distance.
Source: NHTSA notice of proposed rulemaking.
Here’s the thing: there are vehicles on the market that already achieve the “impossible” Biden-era standards. For reference, according to Consumer Reports, the majority of hybrid electric and gas SUVs in 2025 achieve fuel economy exceeding 35 mpg, and most hybrid sedans surpass 45 mpg. And electric vehicles have fuel efficiency, measured in miles per gallon equivalent (mpge), ranging from 53 to 140 mpge, according to the Department of Energy. Even the Tesla Cybertruck, a model popular with Trump supporters following the president’s appointment of Elon Musk to make the government “more efficient,” achieves 79 mpge.
Were the Biden-era standards an EV mandate, as Trump has claimed? It does appear the Biden administration was promoting cleaner technologies to move the country toward reduced reliance on oil. That is not outside the scope of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, despite Trump’s arguments. And we’ve been moving in that direction with the help of the standards. The Environmental Protection Agency’s 2024 Automotive Trends Report noted that for model year 2023, new vehicle fuel economy increased to a record 27.1 miles mpg. In 1975, it was at 13.1 mpg. The report also notes that between the 2004 model year and 2024, fuel economy rose by 40 percent (7.8 mpg), accompanied by a 31 percent reduction in CO2 emissions.
A Bogus “Affordability” Argument
But Trump is attempting to center his message on affordability. He argues that EV technology increases manufacturers’ costs, which are passed on to consumers. Specifically, under the proposed rule, NHTSA estimates that automakers would save $37.1 billion over the lifetime of the total vehicles produced through 2031 by no longer being required to implement fuel-saving technologies to comply with current standards. That is true: Most new technologies entail increased costs associated with research, development, and implementation. But in the very near future, that won’t be the case. Some analysts have already predicted EVs will be cheaper to manufacture than gas cars by 2027, some of this based on innovations introduced by Trump’s former buddy over at Tesla. We’re already seeing the effect of technological manufacturing innovations on prices. In China, the cost of EVs has been significantly reduced, with some models priced as low as $8,000.
On the other hand, maintaining reliance on oil increases costs for Americans in various ways. From the fluctuating prices at the pump to the environmental costs of extraction and the climate effects of emissions, oil is by far the more expensive option in the long run. Yes, there are costs associated with electricity, but the administration doesn’t appear to be interested in addressing those issues either.
By easing CAFE requirements, the Trump administration is not only slowing the clean energy transition but is also betting against the long-term economic interests of the American people. Stricter CAFE standards have historically driven innovation, prompting manufacturers to invest in and adopt fuel-saving technologies, including hybrid and electric technologies we see today. By relaxing these standards, the administration removes a critical incentive for this progress, potentially leaving American automakers less competitive globally as other nations continue to adopt and legislate for higher efficiency and the deployment of electric technology.
In the end, easing up on CAFE rules gives some parts of the auto industry a quick win on regulations, but it totally misses the bigger picture: we’re losing ground on securing our energy future, protecting the environment, and helping consumers save money. If affordability is the goal, this is the wrong approach.
States that have slashed funding for environmental regulation over the last 15 years have put themselves in a tough position to handle the fallout of the Trump administration’s pro-polluter agenda, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). Since 2010, 27 states have slashed budgets and 31 have cut staff at their own public health and environmental agencies…
Since the start of 2025, eight UK universities have committed to excluding oil, gas and mining companies from their careers and recruitment activities. This brings the total number of those that have made such a commitment to 18.
These commitments come after years of pressure from students organising as part of Fossil Free Careers. This was a nationwide campaign that People & Planet coordinated.
The campaign demands university careers services adopt an Ethical Careers Policy. This would exclude oil, gas and mining companies from recruitment relationships, in order to “end recruitment pipelines” into extractive industries.
The latest eight universities to ban fossil fuel industry recruitment are: the University of Bradford, Bath Spa University, the University of South Wales, York St John University, the University of Roehampton, Norwich University of the Arts, the Royal College of Music, and Arts University Bournemouth.
Many have made additional commitments that they will no longer collaborate with arms, mining and tobacco companies.
“Stop funnelling graduates into dead-end jobs”
Josie Mizen, Co-Director of Climate Justice at People & Planet, says:
We’re delighted to see a huge increase in the number of universities ending their recruitment relationships with the fossil fuel industry.
As the impacts of the climate crisis become ever more severe, it’s clear that the companies destroying whole communities and ecosystems for the sake of profit have no place in our educational institutions, and that their systematic funnelling of graduates into dead-end jobs has to stop immediately.
Students standing in solidarity with workers and frontline communities have made this progress possible – we look forward to many more universities banning fossil fuel recruiters next year.
Fossil Free Careers campaign victories prior to 2025 have included the University of Swansea, the University of Bedfordshire, and Aberystwyth University. The campaign has endorsements from the National Union of Students (NUS) and the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), as well as from 29 campus-based Students’ and Worker Union branches.
Emma Adamson, Director of Student Life at the University of South Wales, said, regarding recruitment relationships:
Our commitment is informed by the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act; and we have chosen to exclude fossil fuel and mining organisations from our employability activities.
This decision reflects our responsibility to champion opportunities that contribute positively to society, the environment, and the wellbeing of future generations.
Neoliberal talking heads have been wrongly mocking Zack Polanski’s economic policies. But capitalism was always going to create something that made itself irrelevant. And it has: automation, robotics and AI.
Technology has now transcended the economic debate and a new system based on an equitable share of the yields of robots should be delivered.
The thing is, technology is largely absent from discourse on the left — in both the Green Party and Your Party. Instead, it should be a central feature of a campaign that capitalism has largely offered its replacement through automation.
Automated farming in pursuit of food self-sufficiency
Bringing about publicly owned vertical and automated farming systems could deliver the infrastructure capable of producing enough food for everyone in the UK with zero labour cost. This could also reduce the amount of food the UK imports (currently at 46%).
The appeal of vertical farming is that it creates the conditions to grow almost anything, anywhere. A University of Surrey study found that vertical farms offer 20 times the yield of traditional farms. It also found that changing the materials used could drop vertical farming emissions by 95%.
Elsewhere, people are already delivering automated farming. In China, there are unmanned farms with smart management systems, along with aerial and ground robots.
In the UK, the government does offer grants for AI development. And the previous Conservative government offered £12.5m to be shared among companies delivering automated farming innovation.
When the prize is labourless production, these funding models are a drop in the ocean. Instead, an administration should bring robotics and AI companies into public ownership through issuing government bonds at their market rate. It should then dramatically increase salaries and bonuses to become the leading country in robotics and AI development, and for public good.
Renewables driving progress and change
Turning the UK into a manufacturing hub again would also decrease its large trade deficit in goods, freeing up its currency for more investment.
The thing about automated systems and innovations like vertical farms is that they are energy intensive.
Although, in a clear indication of capitalism making itself irrelevant, Tribe Impact Capital calculated that just 1.2% of Sahara Desert would need to be covered in solar panels to power the entire globe’s energy requirements.
Scale this up and it could power progress in automation. Furthermore in 2023, Oxford University found that wind and solar could power Britain’s total energy needs.
What else could be on offer? A People’s Uber, powered by automated electric vehicles? The possibilities go on.
Capitalism is totally outdated, yet the left is living in the past as well.
The county health worker scanned the Omaha, Nebraska, home with an X-ray gun, searching for the poison.
It was 2022, and doctors had recently found high levels of lead in the blood of Crystalyn Prine’s 2-year-old son, prompting the Health Department to investigate. The worker said it didn’t seem to come from the walls, where any lead would be buried under layers of smooth paint. The lead assessor swabbed the floors for dust but didn’t find answers as to how Prine’s son had been exposed.
A danger did lurk outside, the worker told her. For more than a century, a smelter and other factories had spewed lead-laced smoke across the city’s east side, leading the federal government to declare a huge swath of Omaha a Superfund site and to dig up and replace nearly 14,000 yards — including about a third of the east side’s residential properties — since 1999.
Prine looked up the soil tests for her home online and discovered her yard contained potentially harmful levels of lead. But when she called the city, officials told her that her home didn’t qualify for government-funded cleanup under the standard in place from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Prine didn’t want to move out of the home that had been in her husband’s family for generations. So she followed the county’s advice to keep her five kids safe. They washed their hands frequently and took off their shoes when they came inside.
Then, Prine heard some news at the clinic where she worked as a nurse that gave her hope: In January 2024, the EPA under President Joe Biden lowered the lead levels that could trigger cleanup. Her home was above the new threshold.
That didn’t automatically mean her yard would be cleaned up, local officials told her, but last year, the EPA began to study the possibility of cleaning up tens of thousands of more yards in Omaha, according to emails and other records obtained by Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. The agency was also discussing with local officials whether to expand the cleanup area to other parts of Omaha and its surrounding suburbs.
Then, this October, the Trump administration rolled back the Biden administration’s guidance. In doing so, it tripled the amount of lead that had to be in the soil to warrant a potential cleanup, meaning that Prine and other families might again be out of luck.
Prine’s son Jack, now 5, struggles to speak. He talks less than his 2-year-old brother and stumbles over five-word sentences.
On a recent Sunday morning, 5-year-old Jack Prine, left, plays with his 2-year-old brother at home. Tests showed lead in the blood of both children.Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica
“You would think that if lead is this impactful on a small child, that you would definitely want to be fixing it,” she said. “What do you do as a parent? I don’t want to keep my kid from playing outside. He loves playing outside, and I should be able to do that in my own yard.”
Scientists have long agreed about the dangers of lead. The toxic metal can get into kids’ brains and nervous systems, causing IQ loss and developmental delays. Experts say the Trump administration’s guidance runs counter to decades of research: In the 26 years since the government began to clean up east Omaha — the largest residential lead Superfund site in the country — scientists have found harm at ever lower levels of exposure.
Yet what gets cleaned up is often not just a matter of science but also money and government priorities, according to experts who have studied the Superfund program.
Prine’s block illustrates how widespread Omaha’s lead problem is and how many people who might have benefited from the Biden guidance may no longer get relief. Of the 11 homes on her block, four were cleaned up by the EPA. Six others tested below the original cleanup standard but above the levels in the Biden guidance and were never remediated.
Every Home on This Block Tested High for Lead. Only Four Were Cleaned Up.
Under current cleanup standards, homes in Omaha need 400 parts per million of lead in their soil to qualify for remediation. Four of the 11 homes on this block qualified. The remaining seven had levels from 100 to 400 parts per million.
Note: An EPA risk model predicts that lead-soil levels below 100 ppm would generally protect kids from developing a blood-lead level the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds concerning.Photos by Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica
Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica are embarking on a yearlong project about Omaha’s lead legacy, including testing soil to find out how effective the cleanup has been. If you live in or near the affected area, you can sign up for free lead testing of your soil.
Despite the changing guidance, Omaha still follows a cleanup standard set in 2009: Properties qualify for cleanup if parts of the yard have more than 400 parts per million of lead in the soil — the equivalent of a marble in a 10-pound bucket of dirt. The Biden administration lowered the guidance for so-called removal management levels to 200 parts per million.
The Trump administration has said its new guidance, which raised them to 600 parts per million, would speed cleanups by providing clearer direction and streamlining investigations of contaminated sites. But environmental advocates said it only accelerates project completion by cleaning up fewer properties.
The EPA disputed that. “Protecting communities from lead exposure at contaminated sites is EPA’s statutory responsibility and a top priority for the Trump EPA,” the agency said in a statement. “The criticism that our Residential Soil Lead Directive will result in EPA doing less is false.”
The new guidance doesn’t necessarily scrap the hopes of Omaha homeowners or the conversations that were happening around the Biden recommendations. That’s because the Trump administration continues to allow EPA managers to study properties with lower levels of lead, depending on how widespread the contamination is and how likely people are to be harmed. What actually gets cleaned up is decided by local EPA officials, who can set remediation levels higher or lower based on the circumstances of specific sites.
More than 25 years after the EPA declared Omaha’s east side a Superfund site, the city is still working to clean up lead-contaminated properties, including this vacant lot.Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica
Regional EPA spokesperson Kellen Ashford said the agency is continuing to assess the Omaha site and will meet with local and state leaders to “chart a path forward with how the updated residential lead directive may apply.”
Gabriel Filippelli, executive director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, has studied lead and Superfund sites for decades and said he is doubtful the EPA will spend the money to clean up more yards in Omaha. The EPA doesn’t act if “you don’t have local people raising alarm bells,” he said.
Yet in Omaha, many are unaware of the debate — or even the presence of lead in their yards. Most of the cleanup happened more than a decade ago. As years passed, new people moved in, and younger residents never learned about the site. Others who did know assumed the lead problem was solved. The dustup around lead has mostly settled even if much of the toxic metal in the city’s dirt never left.
“Mass Poison”
When Prine moved into Omaha’s Field Club neighborhood in 2018, she loved the Queen Anne and Victorian-style homes that lined shady boulevards and how her neighbors decorated heavily for Halloween and Christmas.
While she had visited the home previously to see her husband’s family, Prine had no idea her neighborhood was in the middle of a massive environmental cleanup.
“The first time I heard about it was when my son had an elevated blood-lead level,” she said.
From 1870 to 1997, the American Smelting and Refining Company sat on the Missouri River in downtown Omaha, melting and refining so much lead to make batteries, cover cables and enrich gasoline that it was once the largest operation in the country, according to a 1949 newspaper article.
By the 1970s, researchers had proven lead was poisoning American children. Doctors in Omaha noticed kids with elevated blood-lead levels and published findings connecting the toxic metal in their bodies to the smoke pouring out of ASARCO and other polluters.
The view of Omaha’s riverfront in 1968. Omaha factories, primarily a lead smelter, deposited 400 million pounds of the toxic metal across the city over more than a century.Omaha World-Herald
In the late 1990s, when city leaders wanted to demolish ASARCO and redevelop the site into a riverfront park, they had to figure out how to clean up Omaha’s lead legacy. They turned to the EPA, which declared a 27-square-mile swath of east Omaha a Superfund site, a federal designation that would allow the agency to clean up the contamination and try to hold the polluters responsible to pay for it.
The agency estimated the smelter, along with other polluters, had spewed about 400 million pounds of lead dust over an area, where 125,000 people, including 14,000 young children, lived.
The EPA won $246 million in settlements from ASARCO and others to fund the cleanup.
By 2015, most of the yards that tested above 400 parts per million had their soil replaced, and the EPA handed the remaining work to the city. The old smelter site was redeveloped into a science museum with a playground outside.
The project seemed like a success. The number of kids testing high for lead has dropped dramatically since the 1990s, though similar patterns exist nationwide and fewer than half the kids in the site are tested annually, according to data from the Health Department in Douglas County, where Omaha is located.
But evidence had already been emerging that the cleanup levels the EPA had set in Omaha “may not protect children,” which the agency acknowledged in 2019, during the first Trump administration. Managers wrote in a site review that “increasing evidence supports a lower blood-lead level of concern” than the 1994 health guidance that informed the cleanup plan.
Lead, even in incredibly small amounts, can build up in the brains, bones or organs of children as well as adults, said Bruce Lanphear, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada who has studied lead for decades.
“Lead represents the largest mass poison in human history,” he said.
The former American Smelting and Refining Company site is now home to a science museum and playground.Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica
After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lowered its blood-lead level standard, the EPA’s Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation began working on new lead cleanup guidance for the EPA regions in 2012, said James Woolford, director of the office from 2006 to 2020. The EPA took a “cautious, studied” approach to how much lead in dirt is acceptable.
“Zero was obviously the preference. But what could you do given what’s in the environment?” he asked. “And so we were kind of stuck there.”
Then, in 2024, Biden stepped in.
If regional EPA officials applied the administration’s guidance to the Omaha site, over 13,000 more properties in Omaha could have qualified, a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica analysis of EPA and city of Omaha soil tests found.
The number could have been even higher, records show. Nearly 27,000 properties, including those that never received cleanup and those that received partial cleanup, would have been eligible for further evaluation, EPA manager Preston Law wrote to a state environmental official in March 2024.
The EPA had also been discussing with city and state officials whether to expand the cleanup area: A map that an EPA contractor created with a computer model to simulate the smelter’s plume shows that it likely stretched 23 miles north to south across five counties in Nebraska and Iowa.
A computer-simulated map shows the smelter’s plume stretching 23 miles north to south across five counties in Nebraska and Iowa. The model was created by an EPA contractor in 2024 as part of a new assessment of the site.Obtained by Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica
But cleaning up all the properties to the Biden levels could cost more than $800 million, the then-interim director of the Nebraska Department of Energy and Environment, Thaddeus Fineran, wrote to the EPA’s administrator in May 2024.
If cleanup costs exceeded the funds set aside from Omaha’s settlements, the EPA would have to dip into the federal Superfund trust fund, which generally requires a 10% match from the state, said Ashford, the EPA spokesperson.
That could mean a contribution of $80 million or more from Nebraska, which is already facing a $471 million budget deficit. In the letter, Fineran wrote that the state would “reserve the right to challenge the Updated Lead Soil Guidance and any actions taken in furtherance thereof.”
The Nebraska Department of Water, Energy, and Environment, as the agency is now called, declined an interview, referring questions to the EPA.
Researchers and decision-makers are likely taking a cautious approach toward what they agree to clean up in Omaha, Woolford said. Given its size, it could carry weight elsewhere.
“It will set the baseline for sites across the country,” he said.
“Hollow” Claims
The Trump administration may upend any plans to expand the cleanup.
In March, the EPA announced what it called the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” By July, about 1 in 5 employees who worked for the EPA when Trump took office were gone. The administration proposed slashing the EPA’s budget in half.
The administration promised to prioritize Superfund cleanups. But in October, it changed the lead guidance. As a result, more people will be at risk of absorbing damaging amounts of lead into their bodies, said Tom Neltner, national director for the advocacy organization Unleaded Kids.
“It signals that the claims that lead is a priority for them are hollow,” he said.
The Trump administration said Biden’s approach had “inconsistencies and inefficiencies” that led to “analysis paralysis” and slowed projects down.
“Children can’t wait years for us to put a shovel in the dirt to clean up the areas where they live and play,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement.
To avoid the lead-contaminated soil in their yard, the Prine children play only on the back patio and sidewalk.Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica
Under the guidance, the EPA could issue a lower standard for the Omaha site. But Robert Weinstock, director of Northwestern University’s Environmental Advocacy Center, said that’s unlikely unless the state sets a lower state standard than the EPA.
Trump’s guidance has some advantages in being more clear, said Filippelli of Indiana University. The Biden guidance seemed overly ambitious: Filippelli and other researchers estimated 1 in 4 American homes could have qualified for cleanup with an estimated cost of $290 billion to $1.2 trillion.
Steve Zivny, program manager of Omaha’s Lead Information OfficeRebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica
While Omaha could be the litmus test for how low the Trump EPA is willing to set cleanup standards, the new guidelines don’t inspire confidence that the administration will do more to clean up old sites where work is nearly finished.
“I imagine the inertia would be just to say, ‘Oh, we’re done with Omaha,’” he said.
The city has received no timeline from the EPA, said Steve Zivny, program manager of Omaha’s Lead Information Office. He’s guessing money will play a big part in the decision over whether to clean up at a lower lead level, though. About $90 million of the Omaha Superfund settlement remains.
“If the data is there and the science is there and the money’s there, I think we would expect it to be lowered,” Zivny said. “But there’s just so many factors that are not really in our control.”
If cleanup levels aren’t lowered in Omaha, advocates will have more work to do, said Kiley Petersmith, an assistant professor at Nebraska Methodist College who until recently oversaw a statewide blood-lead testing program.
“I think we’re just gonna have to rally together to do more to prevent it from getting from our environment into our kids,” she said.
A Buried Issue
Despite the cleanup efforts, Omahans are still exposed at higher rates compared with the national average, said Dr. Egg Qin, an epidemiologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who has studied the Superfund site. Yet the city seems to be moving on, he said.
“Somebody needs to take the responsibility,” Qin said, “to make sure the community knows lead poisoning still exists significantly in Omaha.”
About 40% of the 398 people who have already signed up to have their soil tested by Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica said they did not feel knowledgeable about the history of lead contamination in Omaha.
Like the Prines, Omaha resident Vanessa Ballard takes care to not wear shoes in her home to avoid high levels of lead-contaminated soil.Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica
That may in part be due to disclosure rules. When a person sells a home, state and federal law requires them to share any knowledge about lead hazards. The EPA’s original cleanup plan from 2009 says that should include providing buyers with soil test results.
But in most cases, there can be very little disclosure, said Tim Reeder, a real estate agent who works in the Superfund site. Omaha’s association of real estate agents provides a map of the Superfund site to give to buyers, along with some basic information, if the home is within the boundaries.
City and local health officials spread the word about lead through neighborhood meetings, local TV interviews and billboards. But most people don’t take it seriously until someone they know tests high, Petersmith said.
“Unfortunately, once it affects them personally, like if their child or grandchild or cousin has lead exposure, then it’s too late,” she said.
When Omaha pediatrician Katie MacKrell moved into a house in the Dundee neighborhood, she thought her kids were fine to play in the yard. Her son sucked his thumb. Her daughter dropped her pacifier and put it back in.
When their kids both tested high for lead, MacKrell and her husband went to work fixing lead paint issues in the house. When it came to the yard, her property tested for lead levels above the Biden guidance but didn’t qualify under the original cleanup threshold. And without government help, it could cost the couple more than $10,000 to pay for the remediation themselves.
Ballard sits with her 19-month-old son, DiVine Cronin, as he plays with a new toy at home.Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublicaBallard covers the windows in her home with plastic to keep DiVine and her 5-year-old, MJ Collins, pictured, from touching the lead paint and to prevent lead-contaminated dust from blowing inside.Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica
The lead also caught Vanessa Ballard, a high school teacher and mom of two young boys, by surprise. She had imagined growing fruit trees in her backyard until she discovered lead levels high enough to potentially clean up under the Biden guidelines. Now, no one goes in the backyard. Her oldest son splashes in soapy water after making tracks for his Hot Wheels cars in the dirt, and she mixes droplets of iron with the kids’ juice every night to help their bodies repel lead.
“I have no hand in the cause of this, but I have all the responsibility in the prevention of it harming me and my family,” she said.
Prine will never know whether lead stunted Jack’s speech development, but she worries about it every day.
Starting kindergarten helped. But her son is still behind other kids. Prine said she tries to put on a brave face, to believe one day he’ll catch up. If he doesn’t, it’s hard not to suspect the culprit could be in her soil.
It seemed the government, at least for a short while, agreed. Now she, and so many others in Omaha, don’t know when, if ever, to expect a solution.
“Why does it take so long, when they say it’s not safe, to then come in and say, ‘We’re gonna take this seriously?’” Prine asked. “‘That we’re gonna help these kids and protect them?’”
Crystalyn Prine holds hands with her 6-month-old daughter. Tests found lead in the blood of two of her other children.Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica
For more than a century, a smelting plant in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, spewed lead-laced smoke across the city. As the toxic metal drifted toward the ground, approximately 400 million pounds of it — nearly the weight of Chicago’s Willis Tower — settled into the soil and bodies of countless Omahans. Since 1999, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the city of Omaha have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to clean it up.
Flatwater Free Press is partnering with ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom, to find out how effective they’ve been and see what questions are still out there about one of the largest residential environmental cleanups in America.
Sign up to have your soil tested for lead by filling out our form. If you live in one of the affected areas listed below, a member of our team may come collect a soil sample from your yard. Once it’s tested, we will inform you of your results. (You may opt out of receiving the test results if you prefer.)
If you have any questions, please contact Flatwater Free Press reporter Chris Bowling at cbowling@flatwaterfreepress.org or 402-302-0066, Ext. 5. We invite you to share this form with your neighbors and community so they can sign up to have their soil tested for lead, too.
Omaha Lead Superfund Site Map
This map shows the Omaha Lead Superfund Site. Flatwater Free Press is interested in testing properties within the site as well as those in surrounding areas like Bellevue; neighborhoods east of 72nd Street; Carter Lake, Iowa; and Council Bluffs, Iowa. We will prioritize collecting soil from within these neighborhoods.
Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade has taken a Christmas shopping message to the heart of consumerist London. On Saturday 6 December, Red Rebels silently marched towards Westfield in White City, West London. They had a warning about the potentially disastrous impact of the uncontrolled growth of human activity on our children and on future generations.
“No Shopping on a Dead Planet”
Eleven Red Rebels moved through White City towards the shopping centre in slow, silent formation. The rebels carried banners reading “No Shopping on a Dead Planet” and “A Better World is Possible”. Their intention was simple: to invite shoppers to pause and reflect on whether the habit of over-buying is the gift we want to pass on to the next generation.
Westfield security were quick to close the door on the message. Around ten security officers surrounded the group and intercepted their entrance to the shopping centre by shutting the doors to the west side. They even brought a dog out. The officer in charge repeatedly threatened to forcibly remove the Red Rebels if they did not leave. He claimed the silent performers were “intimidating” his guards. Security closed the main entrance of the centre for around an hour.
Rebels gave their message on a small megaphone:
We are here today to say this obsession with growth cannot continue. Each year, billions of tonnes of waste are created globally, with vast amounts still being dumped in landfill or burned.
We don’t need to be constantly sold new things. We have this one beautiful planet. There is no Planet B. There can’t be infinite growth on a finite planet.
Westfield is complicit, say the Rebels, because it tried to silence the message. Security staff demanded that Rebels put the megaphone away, citing the presence of children. Yet young people around the shopping centre were not upset and instead approached the Red Rebels with curiosity and excitement, taking stickers and information from outreachers. For many families, these gentle moments of connection stood in stark contrast to the aggressive response from security.
An activist from Fashion Rebellion noted:
Fast Fashion produces enough discarded garments every second to fill an Olympic swimming pool. Our discarded clothes end up in places like Ghana’s “fast fashion graveyard” where 15 million items of discarded garments arrive each week. We now have enough garments to clothe the next 6 generations.
Stuck in a consumption loop
This peaceful, nonviolent action spoke to Westfield and its shoppers as people like all of us, caught inside a system that pushes constant consumption as the measure of happiness and success.
The Red Rebels’ presence asked a question: who benefits from all this shopping, and who pays the price?
Jen Massey, a mother and community worker from Brighton, said:
We came to offer a message of care, not confrontation. Another way of living is possible for us all.
This action forms part of XRUK’s winter creative work reflecting on what has been lost, what is broken, and what might still be rebuilt.
As the year draws to a close, it’s a time traditionally associated with generosity, reflection, and spending time with loved ones. XRUK is calling on people to recognise that leaving a habitable world would be the most meaningful gift of all.
Just last week the National Emergency Briefing saw 1,250 people come together, including MPs and business, faith and media leaders. They heard a stark, united warning that the climate and ecological crisis now threatens food security, health, and national security across the UK.
As well as confronting the reality of the crisis, the National Emergency Briefing illuminated countless examples of regeneration, repair, and human creativity already taking root. Groups are uniting to achieve the better world that remains within reach.
The shopping centre action sends the message that similarly, the crisis directly affects all of our everyday lives. And our choices around consumption, solidarity and care matter now more than ever. Extinction Rebellion urges shoppers to resolve to help repair the environment in the New Year. A better world is possible and we will build it together. A healthy environment in which to flourish is the best gift that we can give to our children.
Lake Shasta Dam, Sacramento River, near Redding, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The Trump administration yesterday released a draconian plan to divert more Delta water that will go into effect today, posing an extreme threat to already imperiled salmon, steelhead and other fish populations and Delta and tribal communities in California.
The plan released by the federal Bureau of Reclamation follows through on a federal order issued in January aimed at increasing agribusiness water deliveries to the valley south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest and most significant estuary on the West Coast.
The Bureau of Reclamation Record of Decision for Action 5 updates the long-term operations of both the federal Central Valley Project (CVP) and State Water Project (SWP).
“With the signing of this Record of Decision, we are delivering on the promise of Executive Order 14181 to strengthen California’s water resilience,” gushed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “This updated operations plan reflects our commitment to using the best available science to increase water deliveries while safeguarding the environment and honoring the legacy of the Central Valley Project’s 90 years of service.”
Under this plan, the CVP may increase annual water deliveries by between 130 to 180 thousand acre-feet, and the State Water Project by 120 to 220 thousand acre-feet, “depending on hydrologic conditions and subject to the State’s adoption of Action 5,” according to Reclamation.
The Westlands Water District and other agribusiness interests celebrated the signing of the plan, while California officials, environmental groups and fishing groups condemned the move, warning it could jeopardize water supplies for millions of residents and accelerate the collapse of salmon, steelhead, sturgeon and other endangered species in the Delta.
In a statement, Allison Febbo, General Manager of Westlands Water District, applauded the action.
“These changes will help ensure that our growers have the water they need to support local communities and the nation’s food supply, while also protecting California’s wildlife,” Febbo said. “Action 5 is a testament to what can be accomplished with a data-driven, results-focused adaptation to water supply operations.”
She also claimed that Trump’s Executive Order 14181, directing federal agencies to maximize water deliveries, adheres to Executive Order 14303, implementing the “Gold Standard of Science.” In addition, she claimed that Action 5 is “also consistent with the direction in Executive Order N-16-25, issued by Governor Newsom to state agencies to maximize water supplies.”
For CVP South-of-Delta agricultural contractors like Westlands, Action 5 is expected to deliver an average of 85,000 acre-feet per year of “additional water,” according to Febbo.
California officials called foul on the move by Trump’s Bureau of Reclamation, calling it “putting politics over people.”
“As per usual, the emperor is left with no clothes, pushing for an outcome that disregards science and undermines our ability to protect the water supply for people, farms, and the environment,” Newsom Administration spokesperson Tara Gallegos said in a statement in an AP News article.
Delta advocates noted that increased pumping from the Delta would kill more Delta smelt and juvenile salmon, degrade water quality, and promote harmful algae blooms with severe ecological and economic consequences, according to a statement from Restore the Delta.
Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, underscored the stakes involved in Trump’s plan.
“When you destroy water quality and divorce it from land, you are also destroying property values. Nobody wants to live near a fetid, polluted backwater swamp,” said Barrigan-Parrilla.
She also discussed the impact of Action 5 on current state and federal operations in the Delta.
“Action 5 disrupts the coordinating operating agreement between the state and federal governments for the CVP and SWP and increases fish entrainment in the Delta pumping facilities. It has a real bearing on the Delta Conveyance Project (DCP) water permit hearing by the State Water Resources Control Board because voluntary agreements are part of the operations plan for the DCP,” she stated.
“The state no longer has a reliable federal partner,” added Barrigan-Parrilla. “This strengthens the case against the Delta Tunnel. I believe it’s a case of either death by a thousand cuts now or soon with the voluntary agreements. If the Newsom Administration really cares about the estuary and not just water exports for the State Water Project, then they need to get busy in litigation to reinstate protections for the Delta.”
Vance Staplin, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Association (GSSA), is urging Governor Gavin Newsom to file a lawsuit against Reclamation’s plan.
“This administration’s rollback of already weak protections for salmon, steelhead and other imperiled species is disastrous, especially in dry years,” said Staplin. “As a result of past attacks on salmon protections, several salmon runs that depend on this water are close to extinction.
“When people talk about job loss, we must remember that a healthy salmon industry generates $1.4 billion and 23,000 jobs annually in California,” Staplin observed. “The state’s commercial salmon fishery has already been shut down for three straight years. Weakening protections even further would be devastating.”
“In fact, this decision is so reckless that the state Department of Water Resources has concluded that it could reduce water supply for 23 million Southern Californians – all to steer more water to a handful of rich Central Valley growers. We urge Gov. Newsom to file a lawsuit to challenge this unlawful federal move,” he stated.
Caleen Sisk, Chief and Spiritual Leader for the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, also condemned the Trump plan, noting that the plan slashes protections for Winter Run Chinook Salmon.
“Our Tribe is working hard to restore healthy Central Valley salmon runs and return salmon to the McCloud River, the Tribe’s homeland,” said Sisk. “This new decision by the Bureau of Reclamation to cut protections for Winter Run Chinook salmon threatens a salmon run that is at the heart of the Tribe’s history, religion and culture.
“The State of California has worked hard to help us find a way to return salmon to the McCloud River. We urge the State to fight this federal decision that threatens salmon in the Sacramento River and in the Delta. We can’t successfully return salmon to our river above Shasta Dam if the federal government kills those same salmon below Shasta Dam,” Sisk concluded.
Action 5 includes an assortment of actions that environmental and fishing groups say will harm Bay-Delta fish populations.
+ Removal of the Delta Smelt Summer and Fall Habitat Action (Fall X2)
+ Elimination of Early Implementation Measures for Healthy Rivers and Landscapes/Voluntary Agreements
+ Updated Delta Operating Criteria
+ Revised Governance Structure.
The release of the plan takes place at a time when the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta ecosystem is in its worst-ever crisis. No Delta smelt have been found in the Delta in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater Trawl Survey for seven years. Other species, including longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail, green sturgeon, white sturgeon, striped bass and threadfin shad, are in a state of collapse, due to massive water exports out of the Delta, toxics, pollution, invasive species and other factors.
While there was a very limited recreational salmon fishing season this year on the ocean and a restricted recreational salmon on the American, Feather and Mokelumne rivers, the Sacramento River was closed to sport salmon fishing and California ocean waters were closed to commercial salmon fishing for the third year in a row.
While I applaud the Newsom Administration’s opposition to Trump’s plan to export more water south from the Delta, the Governor is at the same time promoting the Delta Tunnel, a project that would also take more water out of the estuary to benefit his Big Ag donors like the Resnicks. Newsom is also pushing the voluntary agreements, along with the construction of the Sites Reservoir, that would greatly hurt struggling salmon and other fish populations.
In September 2025, I log into social media. My algorithm advertises a $137 Iberia Airlines flight from the US to Spain. The fare is crazy cheap. I can’t even fly to visit my family within the continental US for $137. I know I’m not the only one whose hand is twitching to click.
But $137 is also conspicuously cheap. It is an obvious effort to keep encouraging international travel (and capital) in the turbulent contrails of a Spanish summer boiling hot with both a record number of foreign tourists and domestic-led anti-tourism movements. Sitting in the middle of this stand-off are these mass cheap flights, like those of Iberia, that are funding, fueling, and accelerating profound consequences on the peninsula.
The Crown Prosecution Service has dropped charges against two activists who scaled the historic insurance marketplace the Royal Exchange. Police arrested the pair on suspicion of criminal damage after they climbed a 10 metre column and dropped a banner calling to boycott “the insurers of death”.
Boycott Bloody Insurance
Kelly’s solicitors led the successful defence and the Crown Prosecution Service dismissed all charges for lack of evidence. It followed the action in the heart of the City of London to mark the launch of Boycott Bloody Insurance. This national campaign exposes how major UK insurers underwrite companies complicit in genocide, fossil fuel destruction, and the violent border regime.
Poppy, a 40 year old environmental educator from Wolverhampton, was one of the climbers at the Royal Exchange. She said:
This dismissal is a reminder that it is not a crime to stand up against imperialist institutions backing fossil fuel devastation, the machinery of genocide and migrant detention. The real crime is insurers like Allianz, Aviva, AXA and AIG shielding deadly corporations from accountability while withdrawing support from affected communities. We took action because the public deserves to know who is underwriting the destruction of our world.
Since the launch on 25 March, campaigners have taken the message to hundreds of organisations across the country. In November, activists in Somerset scaled the Glastonbury Festival Pyramid Stage and dropped banners at Glastonbury Tor. These called on local institutions, including the festival, to cut ties with insurance companies profiting from death and destruction.
The second climber, Oliver, a 52 year old university employee from South London, said:
We climbed the Royal Exchange because the insurance industry hides in plain sight. Without insurers, deadly corporations can’t operate; no oil giants, no arms dealers, no detention centres. The crown’s decision only strengthens our commitment. Across the country, people are realising they don’t have to buy insurance from companies funding harm.
Insurers Financing Imperialism
Research by Boycott Bloody Insurance has uncovered which companies provide Employers’ Liability cover to some of the world’s most destructive corporations:
Allianz underwrites Elbit Systems, the main supplier of weapons to Israel.
Aviva underwrites PetroChina, the world’s third-largest fossil fuel company by revenue, as well as G4S and Serco, corporations running migrant detention centres across the UK.
AXA provides cover to Drax, the UK’s single largest carbon emitter.
AIG underwrites BP, the world’s 8th-largest fossil fuel corporation and a key supplier of oil to Israel during the genocide. AIG also insures Airbus, whose subsidiary Ariane Group produces the M51 nuclear-capable missile.
The campaign calls on organisations of all sizes – charities, festivals, universities, community groups and businesses – to refuse insurance contracts with these firms and adopt ethical alternatives.
Featured image by Crispin Hughes via Boycott Bloody Insurance
Industry lobbyists have long pushed the federal government to adopt a less stringent approach to gauging the cancer risk from chemicals, one that would help ease regulations on companies that make or use them.
Last week, in a highly unusual move, the Environmental Protection Agency embraced that approach in announcing that it is revising an assessment of the health dangers posed by formaldehyde, a widespread pollutant that causes far more cancer than any other chemical in the air. Working on that effort were two of those former industry insiders, who are now top EPA officials.
The proposed revisions to the assessment, released Wednesday, nearly double the amount of formaldehyde considered safe to inhale compared with the version that was finalized in the last weeks of the Biden administration. Even that older assessment significantly underestimated the dangers posed by formaldehyde, a ProPublica investigation published last year found.
Under previous Republican and Democratic administrations, EPA scientists were instructed to assume that chemicals that cause cancer by damaging DNA — the largest group of carcinogens, which includes formaldehyde — pose a “linear” risk, meaning that even small exposures can be dangerous. The agency adopted the approach almost 40 years ago to protect against the multitude of low-level cancer threats the public faces daily. But the industry’s favored method assumes that certain carcinogens pose no risk at lower levels and that the danger should only be considered once exposure reaches a certain threshold.
The Trump administration has already criticized the use of the linear model for calculating the risk of cancer from radiation and could scrap its use in examining other chemicals.
The EPA’s adoption of this threshold model for formaldehyde might come as little surprise given that some of the scientists who have promoted the approach on behalf of companies are now running the agency.
Among them are Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, who both previously worked for the chemical industry’s main trade group, the American Chemistry Council, which represents more than 190 companies and has vigorously pushed back against the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde. As recently as 2022, Dekleva, then senior director of the trade group’s chemical products and technology division, wrote to an EPA scientist to advocate using the threshold approach in assessing the chemical. The EPA subsequently explored — and dismissed — the suggestion; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine independently examined the decision and supported it.
Today Dekleva serves as the deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, which conducted the formaldehyde assessment. Beck, a principal deputy assistant administrator who runs the office, signed off on the official agency memo that described the changes.
According to federal conflict of interest rules, EPA employees are prohibited for a year from working on specific issues in which their former employer is a party or represents one, unless they first obtain written permission from the agency’s ethics office. Beck and Dekleva did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked about Dekleva and Beck’s involvement in the recent decision to change the agency’s approach to the risks of formaldehyde, an EPA spokesperson wrote in an email to ProPublica that Beck and Dekleva had obtained ethics advice from the agency that approved their work on the issue. “Because formaldehyde is produced by many manufacturers and is used across many industrial sectors, this risk evaluation is not a specific party matter that raises concerns for them under the federal ethics rules,” the spokesperson wrote.
The spokesperson described the changes to the formaldehyde assessment as corrections of past scientific mistakes. “Through a rigorous peer review process, we determined the Biden Administration used flawed analyses in its risk assessment of formaldehyde,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are correcting the record to reflect the best available science and our core statutory obligations.”
The assessment released under Biden found 58 situations in which workers or consumers face an unreasonable risk to health from formaldehyde — a designation that requires the agency to mitigate it. Among the items that can emit dangerous levels of the chemical are automotive-care products like car waxes, along with crafting supplies, ink and toner, photographic supplies and fabrics, building materials, textiles and leather goods. The EPA is reversing the finding that formaldehyde presents an unreasonable risk to health in five situations while leaving dozens more standing. One of those five involves the manufacturing of wood products.
The agency contends that the level of formaldehyde the EPA now says is acceptable under the revised assessment will protect people from cancer and the other harmful effects, which include asthma, miscarriage and fertility problems.
But environmental advocates see the Trump administration’s reversal on cancer risk as a reflection of industry’s influence over the agency.
“The science on formaldehyde hasn’t changed; these are the same arguments that the chemical industry’s been peddling for the last decade,” said Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, an attorney at Earthjustice, the country’s biggest public interest environmental law firm. “The only difference is that they’ve finally found an administration willing to ignore the findings of its own scientists.”
For decades, formaldehyde has been at the center of bitter battles between industry and regulators. Sometimes described as the backbone of American commerce, the chemical is used in everything from binding particleboards in furniture to serving as a building block in plastic and preserving bodies — and has fierce defenders in many sectors.
Our investigation identified significant levels of formaldehyde inside cars, stores and our own homes. ProPublica’s analysis of EPA data also determined that, in every census block throughout the country, the risk of getting cancer from exposure to formaldehyde in outdoor air over a lifetime is higher than the limit of one incidence of cancer in a million people, the agency’s goal for air pollutants. According to our analysis, some 320 million people — nearly all Americans — live in areas of the U.S. where the lifetime cancer risk from outdoor exposure to formaldehyde is 10 times higher than the agency’s ideal.
As of last year, official EPA estimates put the average risk from formaldehyde in the air at 20 times higher than the limit. But, as our investigation found, that number does not reflect the risk of myeloid leukemia, a potentially fatal blood cancer. (EPA scientists calculated that risk but, because of internal disputes about its certainty, left it out of their final number.) When myeloid leukemia is included, the cancer risk from formaldehyde jumps to 77 times higher than the limit.
Former EPA veterans fear that the threshold approach to evaluating cancer risk could be applied to ease health-based protections on other carcinogens. “This will open the floodgates,” said Tracey Woodruff, a scientist at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine who worked at the EPA for 13 years. “Chemical companies want every carcinogen to be considered a threshold carcinogen, which would allow them to say that their chemicals are safe when we know that is not true.”
The agency is in the process of producing risk evaluations for several other potentially cancer-causing chemicals, including 1,2-dichloroethane and 1,3-butadiene, which are used in plastics manufacturing. These decisions are especially consequential because, after the EPA finalizes a rule based on the assessment, states are prohibited from issuing their own protections on the same chemical.
The EPA can finalize its proposed changes to its formaldehyde assessment after the public comment period ends on Feb. 2. Then it must issue a rule that addresses any unreasonable risk posed by the chemical.
The Trump administration is also taking aim at the use of the linear approach to cancer risk from radiation. An executive order issued in May deemed the method of assessing a chemical’s cancer risk to be flawed and directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to consider adopting new radiation exposure limits. Project 2025, the blueprint for the Trump presidency, similarly urges the EPA office that handles radiation to reassess the linear approach it has taken to cancer risk from radiation in the past. The EPA press office did not respond to a question about whether this work is underway.
The new revision to the formaldehyde assessment also marks a stark break with the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, an EPA program that quantified the health risks from formaldehyde last year. Previously, reports like the formaldehyde assessment, which was conducted under the federal chemicals law known as the Toxic Substances Control Act, have relied on values calculated by IRIS. But, in what appears to be an agency first, the EPA rejected the levels that the program calculated for the chemical last year.
The sidelining of IRIS was another item on the chemical industry’s wishlist and, with the EPA’s latest changes on formaldehyde, also appears to be near complete. Project 2025 called for the elimination of the program. Of 55 scientists who worked on its recent assessments, only eight remain in their jobs after a reorganization of the agency, ProPublica found in October. The EPA has still not published the most recent IRIS report, an assessment of the toxicity of the forever chemical PFNA, which was finalized in April.
The EPA did not respond to questions about when it plans to publish the PFNA assessment or the status of the program.
During the closing plenaries of the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30) in Belém do Pará in the Brazilian Amazon, United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell gave a rousing speech. Stiell, from Grenada, came to his post after a long career in the corporate sector and then as his country’s environment and climate resilience minister under the pro-corporate New National Party. In his speech he said that ‘denial, division, and geopolitics [have] dealt international cooperation some heavy blows this year’.
Six Just Stop Oil supporters who were denied all legal defences during their trial were today given sentences of up to 30 months at Southwark Crown Court for peacefully climbing gantries on the M25 in 2022, to demand an end to new fossil fuel projects.
Just Stop Oil M25 action
Cosmo Cattell, Adelheid Russenberger, Jane Touil, Andrew Dames, Clara O’Callaghan and Michael Dunk took action on the M25 on 8 November 2022.
The six were among scores of Just Stop Oil supporters who climbed on gantries that week. They were sounding the alarm about the government’s plan to license over 100 new oil and gas projects against all expert advice.
They were found guilty of intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance in October 2025 in an 8 day trial before Judge Perrins, during which they were denied all legal defences.
Additionally, in a break with every previous Just Stop Oil trial for gantry actions on the M25, the prosecution refused to accept any agreed facts on the climate crisis as part of the evidence.
Sentences
Today, Judge Perrins handed down prison sentences of between 20 and 30 months to Adelheid Russenberger, Jane Touil, Andrew Dames and Michael Dunk. Cosmo Cattell and Clara O’Callaghan were given suspended sentences.
Adelheid Russenberger was sentenced to 30 months and Jane Touil to 20 months, with no costs. Each will serve 40% in custody. Andrew Dames and Michael Dunk will each serve 40% of 26 months and must pay £2,480 and £4,380 in costs respectively. Cosmo Catterall and Clara O’Callaghan were each sentenced to 20 months suspended for 2 years with 200 hours of unpaid work and £750 prosecution costs.
Three of the Just Stop Oil group had already spent time on remand in 2022 following the action. Adelheid Russenberger and Jane Touil spent 42 days and 5 days respectively in Bronzefield prison. Michael Dunk was remanded for 8 days. Whilst on bail in 2022, Cosmo Cattell spent 94 days living under a curfew and Michael Dunk 187 days. The Judge indicated that previous time on remand would be deducted from these sentences.
Mitigation
Speaking in mitigation today, Adelheid Russenberger, 34, a history PhD student from London said:
I believe that I acted morally and according to my conscience.
There is no justice in climate breakdown and without a stable climate no-one can live, let alone thrive.
I climbed onto the gantry to try and prevent the government’s disastrous plans to license more North Sea Oil and gas extraction – oil and gas that would have pushed us closer to lethal irreversible tipping points.
I climbed on a gantry because I refused to ignore that basic moral principle of acting to protect life.
Also speaking in mitigation, Jane Touil, 59, a visually impaired former crown servant from Rochdale, said:
We are in an unprecedented situation. Yet the law says our protest was not justified. Not necessary. Not reasonable or proportionate.
Disruption from flooding, extreme heat, extreme weather and wildfires is not a public nuisance. I am.
The law will not save us. I have always tried to live and act according to my conscience. I call on everyone in this courtroom and in this country to do the same.
Politicians will not make the change we need, but we can.
The judge’s position
In his sentencing remarks, Judge Perrins said that it would be wholly wrong to take the individual actions of each defendant in isolation. He said each knowingly took part in a much broader plan to cause as much disruption as possible.
Together the Just Stop Oil protests had eventually affected approximately 228,000 vehicles and caused 18,000 hours of vehicle delays. They affected nearly a quarter of a million people who were trying to go about their daily lives.
He said he was satisfied having heard the evidence that not one of the defendants took seriously the impact they had caused.
However, he noted that the defendants had acted on their conscience which would lessen their culpability.
No regrets
Speaking ahead of the sentencing, Clara O’Callaghan, 21, a recent graduate from Edinburgh said:
I have no regrets. I took action because I felt I had no choice.
By planning to license new oil and gas, our government was prepared to recklessly destroy my future and drive us even faster towards mass crop failure, starvation, water scarcity and war.
Civil resistance and mass disruption gave us a chance of forcing them to change. I was willing to risk prison because it is nothing compared to what is coming down the road.
I could not sit by and do nothing whilst this horror unfolds.
Touil added:
I am at peace with all the decisions I have made and the actions I have taken in support of love, life, humanity and a liveable future.
In the worst crisis humanity has ever faced, the government chose to legislate to silence dissent, rather than implementing policies to avert disaster.
People of conscience are imprisoned, while others remain free to continue destroying our life support systems.
Andrew Dames, 63, a Quaker, engineer and father of four from Cambridge, said:
Our government’s continued commitment to No New Oil that we and the country asked for – that is all that matters.
And a Just Stop Oil spokesperson summed up:
In 2024 Just Stop Oil successfully won its original demand of ‘no new oil and gas’ and on March 27th 2025 announced an end to the campaign of action.
However, our supporters will continue to tell the truth in court, to speak out for our political prisoners and to help build what comes next.
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, approximately1,700 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’sUndammed: 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.
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, approximately1,700 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’sUndammed: 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.
