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environmental justice
UN Treaty Could Mean Justice for Communities Affected by Corporate Power
As the United Nations Human Rights Council prepares for its 12th round of negotiations on a Binding Treaty on transnational corporations and human rights next week, a proposed pulp mill in Brazil offers a test of whether corporate accountability will finally extend beyond the factory gate.
Oct 09, 2026
In Guaíba, in southern Brazil, the effects of CMPC’s pulp mill enter people’s homes. Residents living nearby describe a rotten-egg smell from reduced sulfur compounds that irritates the eyes and nose and causes headaches and nausea. They live with noise and powerful vibrations, in some areas around the clock. Residents report cracks in their homes and disrupted sleep while sawdust and even foam from the mill’s effluent treatment plant fall on their houses. Soot and dust cover laundry hanging on clotheslines and cars parked in driveways, making it standard practice for the company to pay for the washing of neighborhood vehicles.
And then there are the accidents.
Workers have suffered poisoning and injuries, including fatal incidents. Chlorine leaks have affected residents living nearby, while communities still do not have an adequate emergency plan for a major accident.
Now CMPC Wants to Build Another Pulp Mill
Chilean pulp and paper company and monoculture tree plantation CMPC plans to build the so-called Natureza Project in Barra do Ribeiro, Rio Grande do Sul. The project isn’t simply a factory. It encompasses the expansion of massive eucalyptus monoculture plantations, roads, port infrastructure, dredging, transmission lines, and increased transportation, with production projected at millions of metric ton of pulp annually.
Indigenous and environmental organisations therefore question why the territorial, social, water-related, and ecological impacts of this tree monoculture expansion are not fully incorporated into the project’s assessment process.
And this is all happening as the industry continues to utilize an intense corporate lobby, leading to serious legal setbacks in corporate environmental regulation at the state and national levels. In 2023, environmental zoning regulations for forestry in Rio Grande do Sul were relaxed, allowing for the expansion of plantations from 1.2 million hectares to 4 million. And in 2024, forestry was excluded from the list of potentially polluting activities that consume environmental resources in Brazil, exempting tree monocultures from any type of environmental permit.
CMPC also actively greenwashes their activities, going as far as to fund local football tournaments. We see this as a broader scheme by corporations to mitigate pushback against their operations.
The Impact Assessment Can’t Stop at the Pulp Mill
The proposed mill would discharge industrial effluent into Lake Guaíba, a crucial water body near Porto Alegre and other municipalities with a population of around 1.3 million people. Among the issues raised publicly are water quality; cumulative effects on a watershed already under pressure; and impacts related to dredging and navigation, mining, and the discharge of wastewater and industrial effluents (including those from the company’s existing factory). The volume of water consumed by the company and the pollutants discharged into Lake Guaíba would be equivalent to the water consumption and wastewater production of the entire population of the region. Possible contaminants include dioxins, extremely toxic chemical compounds that can enter the food chain and reach humans through the consumption of fish.
Lake Guaíba also supports fishing communities, contributes to drinking-water supplies, and is already under enormous ecological pressure. Asking whether a new factory complies with the technical conditions of a permit is therefore a narrower question than asking whether the entire corporate project is compatible with the rights of the people and ecosystems that are forced to absorb its consequences.
The Natureza Project presents a practical test for a global principle: Corporate human rights regulation must reflect the reality of corporate power.
The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office says at least eight Mbyá Guarani villages fall within the project’s direct area of influence and 18 within its indirect area. As a result, its recommendations stress that consultation under International Labor Organization Convention 169 cannot be replaced by informal meetings or an Indigenous component study. Consultation must be free, prior, and informed and must respect the communities’ own protocols and decision-making processes. But the struggle goes beyond the consultation; it is about ensuring that communities have the right to say NO to the project.
That distinction is fundamental. Consultation is not a box to tick after the project has effectively been decided.
The proposed mill is also inseparable from a longer history. CMPC has been linked to the Laja-San Rosendo massacre, in which 19 people were murdered following Augusto Pinochet’s military coup. In 2021, the Concepción Court of Appeals convicted a former CMPC employee as an accomplice in the killings, finding coordination between state agents and company personnel. That history underscores why corporate accountability cannot be reduced to whether a company publishes sustainability reports or complies with a narrow administrative procedure.
The UN Binding Treaty
The proposed legally binding instrument is intended to address precisely the gaps that arise when corporate impacts cross borders, jurisdictions, and stages of production. A meaningful treaty should require companies to identify, prevent, mitigate, and address human rights risks associated with the entire chain of activities under its control or linked to its project.
For a project like Natureza, that would mean assessing the mill alongside plantations, roads, ports, dredging, water use, emissions, and affected communities. It would mean treating Indigenous consultation as a substantive right rather than a procedural obstacle. It would mean ensuring access to information, participation, justice, and effective remedy.
Most importantly, it would clarify that responsibility cannot disappear simply because an impact occurs several steps away from the factory itself. That is the accountability gap the UN negotiations must confront.
The Natureza Project presents a practical test for a global principle: Corporate human rights regulation must reflect the reality of corporate power.
If a company’s business model transforms land, water, livelihoods, and Indigenous territories across an entire region, then the law must be capable of seeing that whole picture.
Anything less leaves the people bearing the consequences to carry the burden of a business model they never designed.
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Why We Need a Carbon War Tax
What if every war came with a bill for the carbon it releases into the atmosphere?
Sep 25, 2026
When a bomb destroys a home, we see the rubble. When a factory burns, we see the smoke. When forests are set on fire, we see the devastation. But one consequence of war is almost impossible to see: the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.
And that carbon does not stay where the bombs fall. Once released, greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere and contribute to global warming far beyond the borders of the country at war. A war may begin in one place, but part of its climate cost is carried by the entire planet.
The smoke may clear. The carbon does not simply stay behind.
The Carbon War Tax is not simply about creating another tax. It is about changing the way we understand the price of war.
Yet when we talk about the cost of war, that climate cost is rarely part of the bill.
That gap in accountability led Saravana Kumar Nagarajan and his colleague Sean Xavier to develop the idea of a Carbon War Tax, documented in their 2021 master's thesis at Klaipėda University and the University of Bergen. The question behind it was simple: if industries are increasingly expected to measure and account for their carbon emissions, why should warfare be treated differently?
The Carbon War Tax proposes a new principle: Measure the greenhouse-gas emissions caused by war, assign responsibility, and attach a financial obligation to those emissions.
Military fuel use, weapons production and transportation, fires, destroyed factories and power plants, damaged infrastructure, and burning forests can all create emissions. Scientific models, satellite imagery, and other data could help estimate them. The goal would not be perfect accounting overnight. It would be to make an invisible cost visible.
And then make someone responsible for it.
The money generated through such a system could support carbon capture and storage, environmental restoration, ecosystem recovery, pollution cleanup, and climate-resilient rebuilding in communities affected by war.
That creates a striking possibility: The environmental cost of destruction could help pay for restoration.
The Carbon War Tax is not a proposal to put a price on human suffering. No amount of money can compensate a family for a life lost or a community destroyed. It addresses one specific consequence of war—the carbon and environmental damage that reaches far beyond the battlefield.
Today, we count the cost of weapons. We count military spending. We count destroyed buildings and economic losses. We count refugees and reconstruction.
The Carbon War Tax asks us to add another question: How much carbon did this war release—and who is responsible for paying for it?
That question could also change the economics of war.
No tax will magically end conflict. Wars are driven by power, territory, security, ideology, and politics. But economic consequences influence decisions. If military escalation carried a measurable climate liability, governments would have one more cost to consider before choosing destruction over negotiation.
And there is a deeper question of justice.
Why should a community devastated by war inherit the environmental damage? Why should people who had no role in starting a conflict bear the climate consequences of the emissions it creates? And why should future generations inherit an atmospheric debt they never chose?
The Carbon War Tax is not presented as a finished international policy. It is a starting framework that needs to be tested, challenged, and developed.
Climate-policy researchers could determine how wartime emissions should be measured. Scientists could improve methods for calculating emissions from military operations and conflict-related destruction. Economists could study how a financial mechanism could work without creating unintended consequences. International-law experts could examine questions of responsibility and enforcement. Policymakers, diplomats, and peace organizations could explore how such a system might fit within existing international climate and legal frameworks.
In other words, the idea needs a global research effort to turn a powerful concept into a credible mechanism that could one day be implemented.
That work has not yet been done. And that is precisely why the conversation should begin.
The idea began as an academic question in 2021. It now deserves to move beyond the pages of a thesis and into the hands of the researchers, policymakers, and institutions capable of testing its possibilities.
Because if the world can develop systems to make industries accountable for their carbon, perhaps it can eventually develop a system to make war accountable for its carbon.
Imagine a future in which governments considering military escalation must confront not only the human and financial costs of war, but also the environmental debt it could create.
Imagine that debt helping restore forests, ecosystems, and communities damaged by conflict.
Imagine peace having not only a moral argument, but another economic one.
The Carbon War Tax is not simply about creating another tax.
It is about changing the way we understand the price of war.
War destroys lives. War destroys communities. And war can leave behind a carbon debt carried by the entire planet.
Perhaps it is time that debt became visible.
Perhaps it is time that the world studied how to make it accountable.
And perhaps, if developed into a workable international mechanism, the Carbon War Tax could give peace one more powerful reason to prevail.
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The Downstream Consequences
Many lakes and streams across the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over; this has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.
Sep 13, 2026
Water has always held a sacred place in Black life. Long before environmental policy debates filled congressional hearing rooms, water shaped our stories. Creeks, marshes, and wetlands provided both livelihood and refuge when access to land and opportunity was denied elsewhere. For many Black communities, water is not just a resource. It symbolizes memory, survival, and possibility.
Today, many Black neighborhoods are cut off from the waterways that sustained earlier generations. Despite their cultural and ecological importance, many lakes and streams across the Midwest and the country have been industrialized, polluted, or paved over. This has real consequences for community health and safety, from deadly flooding to toxic taps.
Until now, the rivers, lakes, and streams that flow through national parks and other federally protected landscapes have been spared this fate. Despite bipartisan support for protecting our nation’s most beloved lands and waters, their future is at risk. Some are losing long-standing safeguards, opening the door to mining, fracking, and data center development. We’re seeing this right now in the West, where the administration recently slashed Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by a staggering 91%.
These two landscapes are sacred to Tribal Nations that have called them home for millennia, carefully tending the cliffs, canyons, and plateaus as well as the rivers that run through them. They have fought tirelessly to close them to development. At Bears Ears, the administration abruptly dissolved an Inter-Tribal Coalition meant to co-manage the lands, ignoring the long history of stewardship by the Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and the Ute Indian Tribe, and jeopardizing their ability to hunt, fish, and collect plants and medicines. The Tribes are fighting this decision, backed up by a broad range of partners that understand the shared stakes for people and the planet.
Let’s make sure we’re electing leaders who will fight for the rights of communities that have borne the brunt of past injustice, and a future where we can all count on clean water and learn our shared history.
As a Black woman who works at the intersection of parks and water, I am watching the ongoing push to restore protections at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante closely. We know that access to the outdoors is already racialized in this country, much like access to clean air or safe drinking water.
When environmental and health protections get stripped away, Black and Indigenous communities are the first to suffer. But the impacts are not isolated. They cascade across communities, as pollution flows downstream, tainting streams where families boat and swim, and driving up drinking water treatment costs.
Fortunately, parks and clean water are two areas where people across the political spectrum agree: The public good must be put above corporate profit, keeping public lands in public hands, and preventing pollution at the source to ensure safe and affordable water in every home in America. And we’re seeing people rise up.
Black and brown leaders are stepping forward as champions for water protection and climate resilience. They are notching important victories, from restoring a federal environmental justice grants program to historic water funding in Texas and hyperlocal wins like a new well in Allensworth, California, to closing coal plants to build parks and gardens in Chicago.
These bright spots show what’s possible when ordinary people come together to defend our national heritage and demand basic needs like clean water and livable communities.
This fall, we’ll have a chance to make our voices heard at the ballot box. Let’s make sure we’re electing leaders who will fight for the rights of communities that have borne the brunt of past injustice, and a future where we can all count on clean water and learn our shared history by visiting parks and monuments that celebrate the beauty and diversity of this magnificent place we call home.
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The Time Has Come for a 'Right' to Clean Water
Green Amendments rely upon the highest legal authorities we have in the US–our state and federal constitutions–and use their placement within the Bill of Rights to make environmental rights an unquestionable, enforceable legal entitlement for everyone.
Sep 10, 2026
Sometimes defeat can be clarifying.
Last week, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit against the City of Jackson, Mississippi, in which the plaintiffs alleged that city officials knowingly allowed residents to drink water that was unsafe, tainted with lead and dangerous microbes.
The facts are not in dispute. “The City’s public-water system is fraught with vexing shortcomings,” the court found. “In recent years, it produced water containing lead, E. Coli, and other bacteria, allegedly violated the Safe Drinking Water Act and EPA regulations, shut down and left residents without water for weeks, and necessitated the issuance of dozens of boil-water notices.”
Despite this, the court ruled that the lawsuit could not move forward. The problem for the plaintiffs, as the court found, was that these harms do not rise to the level of constitutional harm. “These deprivations, while grievous,” the court wrote, “do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.” And so the court rejected their arguments.
Green Amendments legally elevate our rights to a clean, safe, healthy, and quality environment to the same level as our rights to speech, religion, and a free press.
What are we to make of a situation where a city can neglect its responsibilities, knowingly expose its residents to dangerous and life-altering contamination, and get away with it because, in the eyes of our legal system, “mismanagement of the public-water system resulting in Plaintiffs’ lead exposure is wholly different” from “sexual assault by a police officer,” “forced surgical examination,” “forced stomach pumping for evidence,” “and medicating prisoners against their will”?
Is it truly all that different? Just because the law excuses it, should we truly accept injustices that contaminate our bodies, make us sick, and cause lifelong learning disabilities in children?
We don’t have to–there is another option. We regroup. We reorganize. And we fight back. And in this case, we have a solution.
“It is undisputed that the [US] Constitution does not guarantee clean water,” the court wrote. That’s true. But it's not the whole story.
In Mississippi and in most states across our nation there is no constitutional right to clean water. But in three states, with dozens more on the same path, there is.
In Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth’s Constitution guarantees the “right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment.” It adds: “Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come,” and requires all government officials–both state and local–to conserve and maintain the state's natural resources for the benefit of the people.
The State Constitution of Montana recognizes the inalienable right “to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities.”
And New York’s constitution declares, “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”
It’s called a Green Amendment, and it is explicitly designed to protect people from harm like that suffered by the residents of Jackson, Mississippi.
Green Amendments are self-executing provisions added to a state constitution’s Bill of Rights or Declaration of Rights that recognize, protect, and guarantee the inalienable rights of all people to an environment of quality, including pure water, clean air, a safe climate, and healthy environments.
Green Amendments legally elevate our rights to a clean, safe, healthy, and quality environment to the same level as our rights to speech, religion, and a free press. Green Amendments are clear in their protections, deriving their strength from plain and clear language, proven legal theories, and robust constitutional court precedent.
In short, Green Amendments rely upon the highest legal authorities we have in the US–our state and federal constitutions–and use their placement within the Bill of Rights to make environmental rights an unquestionable, enforceable legal entitlement for everyone.
When our rights to free speech or religion, to a free press or freedom of assembly are infringed upon by government action, we do not sit idly by and accept it. We rise up and demand our rights be protected, secure in the knowledge that we are backed by the clear and powerful language of our constitutions. Why should our right to pure water, clean air, or a healthy environment be any different? With Green Amendments they do not have to be.
Today pollution and environmental desecration are seen as entitlements of powerful industrial and political interests. Recall that in Sterling v. City of Jackson the court agreed that the city was poisoning its residents–but wouldn’t let the plaintiffs sue to rectify it with a remedy that protected all city residents from harm. Instead the court suggested that pursuit of tort claims, likely resulting in money damages for those who could document harm from the contaminated water, was good enough. That’s just the way it is, the court shrugged.
With Green Amendments, we transform this expectation. Our entitlement to a clean, safe, and healthy environment becomes the baseline government must responsibly protect.
Environmental issues are all around us these days: rising carbon emissions driving ever-hotter summers; PFAS, lead, mercury, and other toxic chemicals leaching into our drinking water; the hyperscaling of data centers slurping up ever growing amounts of land, water, and power.
With Green Amendments we may not always win when we experience environmental injustice, but they give us the constitutional ability to say, “No,” to push back, and to fight for our rights.
A Mississippi Green Amendment could have meant a very different outcome for communities living in the City of Jackson.
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Finding Hope in Community Pushback Against Data Centers
Despite billions of dollars put into trying to change individuals' opinions to fit the needs of corporations, people continue to hold onto values of health, well-being, community, mutual aid, and democracy. This is true power that can be harnessed.
Aug 30, 2026
This summer, over 100 community members gave public comments against Project Taurus, an AI data center proposed by the tech and real estate company, Raeden, near Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. Despite only 15 comments in favor of the project, the city planning commission voted 6-2 to move forward with the project.
As a youth environmental and social justice organizer who sat through hours of the hearing and spent much of my past week encouraging community members to join me, I left the hearing devastated by the commission’s decision. Building a data center at a site already facing a water crisis and next to a National Natural Landmark felt like just one more step toward a society that has lost all care and consideration for communities and nature.
But the next day, as I discussed the hearing with one of my roommates, I found myself trying to convey the energy, hope, empathy, and deep care that had filled the hearing room. I explained my admiration for the dozens of working-class community members who sat for hours in a windowless room just to give a two-minute comment or simply support the other speakers. By the end of the conversation, I realized that despite being upset about the decision, the experience left me with hope and faith in the goodness of humanity.
As America continues to throw billions into war, cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid funding, pull out of climate commitments, and move toward projects and systems that further harm people, we can begin to believe that Americans are not concerned with their neighbors’ well-being. What the hearing taught me, however, is that decisions—like whether to move forward with data center projects—and the current state of our county do not reflect our communities’ desires.
It is critical that decisions like the Colorado Springs Planning Commission’s don’t lead us to lose hope in one another and our collective power.
The committee’s decision is a reflection of money in politics. It is a reflection of desperately needing to change who our elected officials are. Of needing to address corporate consolidation that holds this power in opposition to people’s needs and not accountable to communities. Of needing to distribute power so that real people are better represented, and of needing to better support communities so that they have the time, resources, and energy to ensure their voices are taken into account in issues that affect them and their neighbors.
We are up against a political and economic system with such strong inertia that even if communities understand it isn’t working for them, only strategic coordinated action will bring about change. The more people are overworked, underfed, and under-resourced, the harder it is for them to advocate. They have less time to attend community meetings; to speak out about the meetings themselves being scheduled during the workday; to look into local candidates' positions; to turn out to vote. And they have less money to contribute to grassroots campaigns that refuse money from Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Big Tech.
Though Raeden claims to have people’s best interests in mind, it is structured to secure a profit, not to adhere to communities’ needs. A majority of Americans oppose local data center construction, and only 14% of Americans feel comfortable with a data center built nearby. This aligns with the 85% of public comments that were in opposition to Project Taurus.
Community members spoke about the project's impact on neighborhood health, the environment, wildlife, water, and energy. They explained that the center’s infrasound can’t be blocked by Raeden’s proposed 30-foot sound wall; diesel backup generators pose severe health risks by emitting high levels of toxic particles that cause respiratory issues, worsen asthma, and increase long-term cancer risks; and although Raeden emphasizes its closed-loop cooling system to save water in an environment that is already in a major drought, the treatment chemicals used pose risks to the local environment and health of our water supply while the system as a whole significantly increases energy usage, which the company itself admits will likely be powered by fossil fuels and nuclear plants.
Furthermore, community members emphasized that data centers are not built for community needs. The energy itself powers mass surveillance and military AI programs for companies like Palantir and the world’s largest prisoner tracking company, BI, both of which are headquartered in Colorado.
Raeden tells the community that it will bring jobs and money to the Springs. However, while Raeden will immediately profit from the development, the long-term economic benefits for the community are much more dubious. Experts have increasingly been raising concerns about the longevity of AI investments, or what they refer to as the “AI bubble.” A recent MIT study found that 95% of AI companies have achieved zero return on investment, despite investments of $30 to $40 billion in the technology. The end of the AI bubble is predicted to be akin to the 2008 financial crisis but with more devastating effects. Similar to 2008, when banks got a $500 billion bailout while 6 million Americans lost their homes, tech companies will likely be protected while communities will suffer the costs. Raeden, for instance, will be protected because it is a real estate company and does not have roots in the community, unlike Colorado Springs residents.
As one community member emphasized, Raeden came into Colorado Springs not for the water or natural resources the city can provide, but to take advantage of the city's human desperation. Northwest Colorado Springs is in need of jobs and local investment.
Raeden came to the Springs expecting to be welcomed by a community too tired and worn out to push back, but the company has been met with a very different reality. Despite the minimal transparency from the city and Raeden, not only are a large majority of community members against data centers, but the community has also been able to spread awareness about the project and mobilize over 100 people to show up to speak out for nature, their neighbors’ health, and the fate of future generations.
I have built my worldview around a belief that if we all come together as regular people with human values, we will have the power to stand up against even the millions of dollars corporations throw at candidates, policy, or, in this case, data centers. The hearing was a realization of this working-class movement of the people that I spend much of my time striving for.
The hard part was supposed to be getting people to come together and to show up. We did that. People spoke eloquently, with knowledge, and heartfelt appeals. And still, they were denied.
Nevertheless, this past week has shown me that people are truly good. Despite billions of dollars put into trying to change individuals' opinions to fit the needs of corporations, people continue to hold onto values of health, well-being, community, mutual aid, and democracy. This is true power that can be harnessed.
It is critical that decisions like the Colorado Springs Planning Commission’s don’t lead us to lose hope in one another and our collective power. Corporations like Raeden would love nothing more than for us to be apathetic and divided. Instead, we must stay true to our demands for humanity. Stay true to these demands as we vote for candidates who prioritize human needs over corporate interests. As we increase our trust in one another, the conversations we have with our neighbors, and our faith in our power. We will continue to show up and prove that people have not given consent for our current systems.
There are now over 300 local bans and moratoriums on data centers across the US, including Denver, Jefferson County, Boulder, Longmont, and Monument, and a majority of Americans support pausing the construction of AI data centers for at least one year.
Colorado Springs proved that communities have not and will not accept a rise in corporate trickle-down projects as a replacement for government programs. We proved that communities will continue to show up for one another and stay grounded in human values. We proved that this fight is far from easy and anything but fair, but we will persist.
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Albany Is Moving the Climate Goalpost While our Communities Are Still Flooding
Instead of relying on numbers that make our progress appear better on paper, New York state leaders should focus on the investments that actually protect New Yorkers from the impacts of fossil fuels.
Jun 21, 2026
Back in 2012, over the course of two days, water, wind, and rain flooded my neighborhood.
At that time, I was living in the Baruch Houses on Manhattan's Lower East Side while working as a babysitter in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Unlike the families I was working for, my neighbors and I didn’t have the luxury of leaving our homes to seek refuge in a safe place. So we stayed.
That night I watched as a green flash cracked across the sky before everything went dark. I didn’t know it at the time, but I later came to find out the Con Edison plant just six minutes away from my building had exploded. The feeling of loss and fear that day didn’t just happen to me: Over 69,000 units were damaged and lost, thousands of New Yorkers were displaced.
Thirteen years later, these vulnerabilities revealed within our infrastructure still remain today, and with every major storm or heavy rainfall, our subways and homes continue to flood. Yet, with the new passage of the New York State Budget and the rollbacks on our climate goals, Albany has chosen to weaken key environmental commitments.
People that look like me pay for fossil fuels with our health, our safety, our democracy, and our children's right to a clean and healthy future.
While the budget still has some investments in clean energy, it also delays our committed climate benchmarks and measurements. Essentially, this budget moves us further away from the emissions goals we’ve legally bound ourselves to. Instead of focusing on meeting these goals already established under state law, Albany has chosen to move the goalposts.
Changing the ways in which we measure our emissions may make progress look better on paper, but it doesn't reduce the actual consequences of climate inaction.
For decades, communities that look like mine have felt the ramification of climate change more harshly. Oftentimes, these ramifications result in not just the physical terror like I and many experienced during Hurricane Sandy but can also manifest in poorer health outcomes.
The fossil fuel sector is literally choking us to death with no regard to how they contribute to the exacerbation of other conditions in my community. Fossil fuel consumption in New York City makes up for 70% of our local greenhouse gas emissions. It also causes around 2,400 premature deaths annually due to air pollution.
So, instead of moving the goalposts and relying on numbers that make our progress appear better on paper, Albany should focus on the investments that actually protect New Yorkers. And, even though with the recent announcement of the $100 million commitment for climate resiliency projects through the Environmental Bond Act is a step in the right direction, we still need to go even further by fully funding and accelerating the comprehensive flood protection plan. This includes the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency Program aimed at strengthening flood resilience, modernizing infrastructure, and safeguarding our communities.
While we associate fossil fuel costs with our utility bills, people that look like me pay for fossil fuels with our health, our safety, our democracy, and our children's right to a clean and healthy future. We can not afford to sacrifice any longer or delay any further the commitment we made to reduce emission. As storms become stronger, and infrastructures continue to decay, the greatest impacts will be on forgotten neighborhoods like mine. And whether I’m elected to represent this district in Albany or not, I will continue to push for the funding we need to no longer live in survival mode every time a storm occurs.
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Hands Off Our Bodies, Hands Off Our Future
I’m a climate justice organizer. Here's why I’m fighting for reproductive justice.
May 24, 2026
Earlier this year, in a horrific conversation with white supremacist podcaster Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook to rank women’s appearances in 2004, argued that the tech world needs more masculine energy.
Any serious look at the tech world and it’s clear it’s a space already overrun by the male ultra-wealthy class: 88.92% of IT CEOs alone are white men. This is the same cultural demographic and argument now overtaking our governmental systems as well. It’s an arrogance that demands control of all, from the bodies of women, trans folks, queer folks, and young people, to violent control of our environment, the plants, animals, landscapes, and non-human bodies that provide the world’s strength.
Days after serial-sexual-assaulter and white supremacist Donald Trump won the 2024 US presidential election, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes tweeted, “Your body; my choice.” At his inauguration, Trump proclaimed (insert characteristic Trump voice), “We’re going to drill, baby, drill.”
These two statements are deeply related, echoing the same narratives of control, extraction, exploitation, and domination over our bodies, relatives, and communities.
Our movements must understand the intuitive reality that the attacks on reproductive rights, on reproductive access, and on our bodily autonomy are the same attacks as those on our environment.
All of this is why I found myself outside the Philadelphia Women’s Center near my college on February 8. With dozens of local community members from the grassroots organization Abortion Rights Philadelphia, we chanted, “Abortion is a human right, not just for the rich and white.” Together, we sang Chappell Roan and Beyoncé, building a wall of joy between the clinic’s patients and the masses of anti-abortion protesters, by and large older white men, who had gathered with dramatized pictures of fetuses, attempting to dox and scare patients from accessing their healthcare.
Attacks on the Environment are Attacks on Reproductive Rights
Our movements must understand the intuitive reality that the attacks on reproductive rights, on reproductive access, and on our bodily autonomy are the same attacks as those on our environment. And we must understand the inverse as well.
As New York City-based Afro-Puerto Rican reproductive and climate justice activist Hennessy García points out, “Where we see environmental injustice, we see reproductive injustice as well.” They go hand in hand.
For example, breathing in polluted air increases the likelihood for pregnant people to give birth prematurely. The same is true for exposure to water pollution, toxins from superfund sites and brownfields, proximity to fossil fuel infrastructure, and the effects of extreme heat. All of these environmental hazards are, by and large, located in communities of color, especially low-income communities, across the country. This means that when Trump chants, “Drill, baby, drill” and loosens our already weak environmental protections, he’s putting pregnant people of color at risk of both climate and environmental injustices and harms.
This is also the case for women and transgender or non-binary (TGNB), intersex, and LGBTQIA+ people, independent of pregnancy, and for disabled people as well, due to societal structure, gendered roles, discrimination, and resource inequity. It is also true that sexual violence rates for women and TGNB folks increase significantly in the aftermath of climate disasters.
The clear takeaway here: Women and TGNB people’s lives and sexual and reproductive health are being threatened by Trump, fossil fuel companies, and their Democratic allies, worsening climate and environmental crises.
The Goal is Domination
This is all intentional. While Trump bars the words “environmental justice,” “gender,” “female,” “women,” and “pregnancy” from federal agencies and refers to Gaza and Palestine as “demolition site[s],” he also pushes a proposal of a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery. The Trump administration wants women, on one hand, to reproduce endlessly, and on the other hand, it condemns women in Black and brown communities to death, displacement, and genocide. Whether those be Black and brown communities overburdened by fossil fuels and extractive infrastructure, by police brutality and deportation, or whether they be like in Gaza, by incessant deadly bombardment.
Look at Elon Musk and his 14 children with four different younger women. In November, he tweeted, “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.” As Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian argues, “It’s easy for Musk, who will never have to carry any of the children he’s so keen on having, to be blasé about pregnancy risks: He can outsource them all,” pointing to one of his partners, Grimes, who almost died during the pregnancy of their son X Æ A-12.
As Garcia says, “People with the ability to get pregnant are not machines.” But that’s exactly what the Trump-Musk administration wants.
It’s all, ultimately, about building logics for masculine control across every area of our lives, bodies, and world.
They want those who fit into their racialized view of “America” to reproduce endlessly, and they want those who don’t to be oppressed, to work as capital creators, and to, in many cases, die.
There’s a deep, contradictory nature to this logic. On one hand, Trump is trying to stop people of color from accessing abortion or contraceptive care, and on the other, he is trying to literally facilitate their deaths. And for white women, he’s encouraging them to give birth as much as possible, yet still not offering childcare or maternal care—instead, he scrubs the word “pregnancy” from the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s offering $5,000 to women who give birth—a measly sum compared to the $237,482 it takes to raise a child in the US—and simultaneously plans to limit childcare and eliminate Head Start. Ultimately, it’s not just about eugenic-reminiscent reproductive policy; it’s about control. It’s about strategic destabilization, whether it’s control of land—from Black, brown, and Indigenous communities to Gaza, Panama, and Greenland—or control of bodies and reproductive, life-making capacities, from Nick Fuentes’ “Your body; my choice” to the aforementioned actions of the administration. It’s also about exploitation, whether it’s mass deportations or labor exploitation, like the forms of slavery and exploitation for incarcerated individuals appearing across the country, from Louisiana to California.
Layer in the climate crisis and mass inaffordability, and this image of control becomes an even more frightening picture.
These same narratives of masculine control are what propel anti-climate, pro-fossil fuel policy in this current administration. Trump’s stated goal with his Department of Energy, now led by fracking CEO Chris Wright, is to “unleash [a] aolden era of American energy dominance.” He’s also created the National Energy Dominance Council to bolster fossil fuel exploitation of our climate, of indigenous lands, and of communities of color. The through line is that these men are trying to dominate.
We see this also in popular narratives against climate action. Professional misogynist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate wrote in a now-infamous Twitter exchange, ultimately leading to his arrest, “@GretaThunberg, please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” attaching an image of his collection of over 33 sports cars.
Writing about the exchange, author Rebecca Solnit wrote: “There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference—individualism taken to its extremes—are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.”
Flaunting dominance over people and nature is deemed manly, whilst care is deemed as unmanly. And, taking action with respect to justice, the environment, or our collective future—as epitomized by Greta Thunberg—is deemed as womanly.
It’s all, ultimately, about building logics for masculine control across every area of our lives, bodies, and world.
To Fight This, Our Movements Must Be Deeply Cross-Sectional
These dynamics don’t care for separations between environment and climate or climate and reproduction—it’s all a question of exploitation and increased power and domination for the white male ultra-wealthy few. To face this, our movements for justice, too, must be just as deeply intersectional.
The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a storied reproductive justice organization, defines “Reproductive Justice [as] the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities” (italics added).
There is no reproductive justice without ending fossil fuel expansion. There is no reproductive justice without a just, Indigenous, and worker-led societal transformation to renewable, community-controlled energy.
It means placing bodily autonomy at the center of our fight for climate justice, and breaking down the divides between our movements.
It’s time for us to incorporate reproductive justice just as deeply into our fight for climate justice. That means for us in the climate space to show up at our local abortion clinic to protect patients; it means connecting with and learning from local reproductive justice organizers in our area; and it means bringing in a reproductive justice platform into our climate policy. It doesn’t just mean supporting Planned Parenthood; it means listening to the Reproductive Justice movement and finding the local fights, whether legislative or practical, near you, and getting involved. It means funding local abortion funds that are always in need of donations, like those affiliated with the grassroots National Network of Abortion Funds.
It means placing bodily autonomy at the center of our fight for climate justice, and breaking down the divides between our movements. It means rejecting centrist politicians like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who claim leadership on reproductive rights and climate justice, while vetoing legislation to protect those seeking reproductive and gender-affirming care and fast-tracking new fossil fuel pipelines.
There is no other way to face the capitalist fossil-fueled heteropatriarchical oligarchy that has now overtaken our government and seeks to dominate us all.
Climate justice is reproductive justice.
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GOP Gerrymanders Make the South’s Black Communities More Vulnerable To Data Centers
The South’s Black communities are being disenfranchised by their state legislators and poisoned by AI data centers—a lethal combination that strips them of their political voice, while subjecting them to a slow death.
May 19, 2026
On May 7, the Republican-controlled Tennessee legislature passed new redistricting maps that dismantled the Memphis-based 9th District and split the city’s 63% Black population across three conservative, white-majority districts:
This hyper-partisan and blatantly racist gerrymander will have devastating effects for Memphians. Here, I’ll focus on one: the city’s struggles against AI data centers.
Memphis serves as the headquarters of xAI’s “Colossus” facilities. The Elon Musk-owned company brags that Colossus 1 is “the world’s biggest AI supercomputer.” It is the power source behind X-Twitter’s Grok, the deep-fake generating, misinformation superspreading chatbot.
The massive data center lies one mile away from Boxtown—a neighborhood in South Memphis founded by formerly enslaved Black people in the aftermath of the Civil War. Today, 95% of its residents are Black, the median income is less than $37,000, and the poverty rate is more than 31%. Like many Black communities in the South, Boxtown has been subject to decades of environmental racism. This refers to the disproportionate exposure of communities of colors to toxic waste, pollution, and other environmental hazards.
That is, of course, the entire point of this gerrymander: to render Memphis’ Black vote politically irrelevant; to undermine the power of Black communities to band together to fight against a common struggle.
Including Colossus 1, more than 17 polluting facilities are in or near Boxtown. This includes: an oil refinery, a steel mill, a wastewater treatment center, a gas-burning power plant (which burned coal from 1959 to 2018), and an abandoned military base designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a contaminated site.
This has had devastating effects on the health and well-being of Boxtown’s residents. Cancer rates are four times higher than the national advantage. Shelby county, which includes Boxtown, has an “F” rating in air quality for ground-level ozone (smog) from the American Lung Association. It also has the highest rate of children hospitalized for asthma across the entire state.
Colossus 1 worsens these problems. The Southern Environmental Law Center reports that xAI is deploying at least 35 methane gas turbines to power the data center. This is “far more than previously known and more than the company has submitted permit applications for.” These turbines emit enormous quantities of smog-forming pollutants, soot, nitrogen oxides (NOx), and formaldehyde, which are tied to increases in asthma, respiratory diseases, health problems, and various kinds of cancer.
Under Tennessee’s new congressional map, Boxtown is shoved into the state’s 5th Congressional District. This is Rep. Andrew Ogles’ (R-Tenn.) district. Ogles decries “climate tyranny” and the “woke energy elitists.” He advocates for returning “to producing and exporting American oil and natural gas, restoring the drilling and pipeline developments that [President] Biden blocked, and pursuing rational, common sense energy policies.”
Such policies include repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest federal investment in clean energy and climate action, as well as dismantling the Electric Vehicle Working Group, which offers recommendations regarding the development, adoption, and integration of electric vehicles (EVs) into the country’s transportation and energy systems. He also co-sponsored a joint resolution challenging the Biden administration’s “Clean Power Plan 2.0,” which sought to significantly cut emissions from coal and gas-burning power plants.
With regards to AI and data centers, his concerns are solely about national security. Ogles remarks, “If a major data center is attacked, disrupted, or taken offline, the consequences can reach far beyond one company or one sector.” In a hearing on advanced technologies and cybersecurity, he notes that AI is “now woven into how Federal, State, and local governments operate, how intelligence is collected and analyzed, how critical infrastructure functions, and how American companies compete in a global economy.” He continues, protecting these technologies and crucial infrastructure is vital for ensuring America’s “prosperity for years to come” and “our role as the, quite frankly, sole superpower.”
Ogles’s anti-environmentalist, pro-AI politics does not represent the interests and desires of the people of Boxtown. Yet, unfortunately, he is the representative that Tennessee state legislators elected for them. To make matters worse, because of the Supreme Court, Boxtown’s situation will be far from unique.
xAI’s Colossus 2 became fully operational in 2026. This data center, which is larger than Colossus 1, is located in Whitehaven—another predominately Black and poor South Memphis neighborhood.
Like Boxtown, Whitehaven is in Shelby County. However, under the new gerrymandered map, it is part of the state’s newly reconfigured 9th District. Its current representative, Steven Cohen (D-Tenn.), is among the most consistent advocates for protecting the environment and public health. However, in light of the state’s efforts to disenfranchise Memphians, Cohen has decided not to run for reelection.
Whitehaven’s future is in serious jeopardy. Minutes after the Tennessee General Assembly approved the state’s gerrymander, Tennessee state Sen. Brent Taylor (R-31) announced his candidacy for the representative seat.
Taylor praises xAI as “a great asset for Memphis.” When asked about the environmental concerns raised by residents, he responded: Tthose “environmental concerns predate xAI’s arrival in Memphis and the efforts to address them thus far seem to be misguided.” He explains: “The way I would address the concerns is not to attempt to close xAI or browbeat them to leave Memphis, but I would engage with them and local government to enter into conversations about potential buyout of nearby homes… This would seem to be a much more constructive way to address the environmental concerns of the neighbors.”
He praises how “xAI has worked to overcome every environmental concern raised.” This includes using “water that has been trucked in” to cool its systems (which is contributing to more pollution), and “purchasing a decommissioned energy plant in nearby Mississippi to generate a portion of their own energy.”
That Mississippi site is in Southaven, 5 miles away from Whitehaven. It is currently the subject of a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawsuit alleging that xAI is violating the Clean Air Act by operating 27 gas turbines without any permits.
If Taylor replaces Cohen, it is clear he would put xAI over Memphians. Given that the new 9th District spans nearly 300 miles from southern Memphis to the suburbs of Nashville, their diluted votes would be easy to ignore. That is, of course, the entire point of this gerrymander: to render Memphis’ Black vote politically irrelevant; to undermine the power of Black communities to band together to fight against a common struggle. Importantly, Boxtown and Whitehaven—communities that are less than six miles apart—are now burdened with having to secure two congressional seats to have their voices and interests represented.
Similar redistricting efforts are being pushed by Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. Like Memphis, Black and poor communities in those states are also under threat by AI data centers. This includes: the recently green-lit Project Marvel in Bessemer, Alabama; the 20 data centers being planned across southern Fulton County in Georgia; a $27 billion data center being built by Meta in Richland Parish in Louisiana; and a proposed data center complex the size of 1,200 football fields being planned for the Walterboro area in South Carolina. These are just a few of the more than 3,000 operational data centers across the US.
The South’s Black communities are being disenfranchised by their state legislators and poisoned by AI data centers—a lethal combination that strips them of their political voice, while subjecting them to a slow death.
In both instances, their rights, health, and livelihoods are jeopardized by bad faith appeals to “progress.” On the one hand, the Supreme Court justifies dismantling the Voting Right Act because of the “great strides [made] in ending entrenched racial discrimination” across the US and “particularly in the South.” Here, decades of hard-won social progress become the pretext for erasing the Black vote.
On the other hand, Elon Musk touts that, as AI and robotics develop, “Everyone will have access to medical care that is better than what the president receives right now.” Here, the promise of progress and a richer, healthier future becomes the pretext for callously exposing the most vulnerable communities to the most harmful toxins.
The path forward will be difficult, but two things are clear: We must put an end to these partisan and racist gerrymanderings. We must put a moratorium on AI data centers. Just as we cannot allow elected officials to steal our votes, we cannot permit a handful of tech companies to sacrifice our bodies for their profits. Now is the time to fight back—to defend the progress that we have made as a nation; to defend the vulnerable and give voice to those who are being silenced; and to bring about the future that we desire for ourselves.
As the Memphis-born civil rights leader Dr. Benjamin Hooks put it: “If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.”
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Virginia's Data Center Alley Reveals Big Tech's Vision for America
Their behavior reveals an air of entitlement to turn any community they choose into another noisy, polluting data center hub, extracting massive resources and tax breaks in the process.
May 09, 2026
Even if you’ve never stood next to a data center, you’ve probably felt its impacts. For instance, if you’re one of the 65 million people served by regional transmission giant PJM in the eastern United States, a huge spike in projected demand for electricity, driven almost entirely by proposed data centers, has raised your electric bills. But standing next to a data center—or worse, living next to one—is where you can really feel the totality of its impact. I didn’t fully realize this until I spent time in the belly of the beast.
In January, I took a trip to Loudoun County, Virginia, home of the notorious Data Center Alley, to do research for my new podcast project for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance called “The Data Centers Are Coming.” I wanted to learn about how ever-expanding data center facilities impact their neighbors. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw as I crested a rise on the freeway: 199 operational data centers laid out before me and around 100 more under construction, densely packed together and sprawling to the horizon. So much digging and building left everything covered in red dust, giving the whole scene an eerie, Martian feel. The noise was unbelievable, clanking metal and chugging diesel engines all atop a deep industrial hum.
The people that live here are experiencing negative health effects stemming from pollution and chronic severe noise exposure. I talked to people in neighborhoods where folks no longer hang out in their yards because of the noise, in turn becoming isolated from their neighbors. I heard about people spending thousands on renovations just so they can sleep through the noise. One Loudoun County resident measured the noise at 70 decibels on his front porch—equivalent to a vacuum cleaner that never turns off.
People die here, too. I visited Tippets Hill Cemetery, a historic Black burial ground dating to before the Civil War, now surrounded on three sides by monumental, noisy data centers. It was like nothing I’d ever seen or heard.
As West Virginia advocate and researcher Cathy Cunkel told me, the data center issue “isn’t about Left vs. Right, it’s about Up vs. Down.”
This is Big Tech’s vision for America. Their behavior reveals an air of entitlement to turn any community they choose into another Data Center Alley, extracting massive resources and tax breaks in the process. Elon Musk built what he called the world’s biggest supercomputer next to the Boxtown neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. Dismayed at the idea of waiting for a grid connection to power his massive electricity needs, he plopped more than 30 huge generators in the parking lots next to his Colossus data center, essentially building an unregulated gas power plant himself. This, of course, circumvented any regulatory processes, spewing dangerous pollution into adjacent Boxtown.
It’s worth noting that Boxtown is a historically Black neighborhood, founded by freedmen after the Civil War. But according to the logic of data center proponents, the land was already a lost cause. One podcast guest said, “Elon, what he did with Memphis is objectively somewhat dirty, but he’s also doing it in an area where there’s like, a bigger natural gas plant right next door and like, a wastewater treatment and a garbage dump nearby, right?” By this logic, the presence of other polluting facilities somehow gives data centers permission to pollute more. Industry has already colonized these communities, so what’s a bit more colonization?
My research travels also took me to remote, mountainous Tucker County, West Virginia, home to a few idyllic small towns and a thriving outdoor recreation economy. A mysterious shell company, Fundamental Data, is trying to build a data center and power plant next to the landfill between the towns of Davis and Thomas. Many residents there have concluded that Fundamental Data saw old strip-mined land behind a landfill and considered it theirs to extract from.
Nikki Forrester is one such resident refusing to accept this data center land grab. An organizer with Tucker United, she argues that thinking the only use for old strip-mined land is industrial development is a failure of imagination: “You could do a lot of restoration and trail development and all sorts of stuff on old strip mine land. We bike on awesome bike trails through old strip mines all the time.” Restoring this land for outdoor recreation would keep with what people love about Tucker County, not to mention what drives much of the local economy. Building a data center on that land threatens all of that.
The story of companies seeing community resources and assuming that they can easily extract them because “nobody is using them anyway” is not new. Indeed, such thinking runs beneath America’s 250-year history and beyond, from the seizure of Indigenous lands to highway expansion, from industrial agriculture to today’s data center boom. But another undercurrent of American history is localized resistance to corporate power and extraction, from the Boston Tea Party to the West Virginia Mine Wars, from the Great Railroad Strike to the successful unionization at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island.
We see that resistance today as vibrant and fearless coalitions form across the country to resist the corporate extraction of data center construction. These coalitions are so strong in part because people of all stripes, across the political spectrum, resent the idea of tech corporations feeling entitled to their local resources. As West Virginia advocate and researcher Cathy Cunkel told me, the data center issue “isn’t about Left vs. Right, it’s about Up vs. Down.”
When framed this way—the powerful and rich vs. the people they’re trying to extract resources from— the data center fight becomes another chapter in a long American history of resisting corporate extraction enabled by feckless, unimaginative politicians.
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The Climate Reckoning That the Nuclear Arms Control Can’t Ignore
Climate change and nuclear weapons reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
May 07, 2026
At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, a 9,000-pound atomic bomb detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing another 40,000.
The sheer scale of destruction—that humans could annihilate each other by means as violent as a nuclear blast—ensured that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would become the defining images of nuclear weapons in the American imagination. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 83% of Americans reported knowing at least something about the use of nuclear weapons in Japan. However, increasingly large numbers of younger Americans don’t know enough about nuclear weapons today to give an opinion on their role in national security.
What is often remembered as the only detonation of nuclear weapons in history remains the sole use of nuclear weapons in warfare. While Americans looked overseas at the devastation in Japan, fewer recognized that nuclear weapons were also transforming the American environment at home.
For decades after World War II, nuclear weapons reshaped landscapes and communities across the United States. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,030 nuclear tests, while producing tens of thousands of warheads during the Cold War. At its height, the US nuclear stockpile comprised 31,255 warheads, with the last fully functional nuclear weapon being produced in 1989. The environmental and human consequences of this effort extended far beyond test sites and production facilities. Yet, the US government kept the public in the dark, leaving a generation born in the 21st century to bear the consequences of its obfuscated proliferation campaign.
The Nuclear Transformation of Marginalized America
Consider that the plutonium used in the first nuclear test in New Mexico and in the Nagasaki bomb was produced at the Hanford Site in Washington State. Between 1945 and 1970, Hanford’s reactors discharged roughly 444 billion gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Columbia River basin, a watershed that today supports over 8 million residents.
Other sites tell similar stories. In South Carolina and Georgia, rural communities were displaced to make way for the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons facility, where millions of gallons of radioactive waste were stored in underground tanks.
Make no mistake, the United States federal government was calculated in its targeting of marginalized communities to isolate radioactive material from the general population. These facilities were often located in rural or economically disadvantaged areas, where political resistance was limited and land was cheaper.
Nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Currently the only permanent waste site for nuclear material in the United States, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, collects plutonium-contaminated waste to be buried over 2,000 feet underground a salt flat formation. Framed as a barren wasteland far from major population centers, WIPP is in Eddy County, New Mexico—home to a population of over 61,000 people, of which 64% identify as people of color. Many communities face contaminated water supplies and elevated rates of respiratory illness, kidney disease, and cancer: a pattern sometimes described as “radioactive colonialism.”
Despite the government’s efforts to isolate nuclear activities and waste disposal, radioactive contamination did not respect geographic boundaries. Research released in 2023 found that nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1962 distributed radioactive fallout across 46 of the lower 48 contiguous states in the United States, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico. As a result of nuclear tests conducted by both the United States and other nuclear-armed powers, radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere spread throughout the world in communities far from test sites. By the 1960s, “there was no place on Earth where the signature of atmospheric nuclear testing could not be found in soil, water, and even polar ice.” Radioactive isotopes entered the food chain through plants and animals, creating pathways of exposure far from any test site.
For most people living far from testing areas, these exposures were small. But they illustrate a fundamental reality of nuclear weapons: Even carefully controlled programs produce global environmental consequences. Even when the government attempted to isolate radioactivity and testing in supposedly remote communities, contamination from weapons production, testing, and disposal still spread far beyond those sites, affecting environments across the world.
The Renewed Nuclear Arms Race
While the United States has not conducted a full-scale nuclear test since 1992, nuclear competition is accelerating again.
China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, with estimates suggesting that its stockpile could exceed 1,000 warheads by the early 2030s. At the same time, arms control agreements that once constrained the world’s largest nuclear powers are eroding. The expiration of the New START treaty in February 2026 removed the last formal limits on US and Russian strategic nuclear forces.
Even if informal limits remain in place, the collapse of binding agreements signals a shift toward a less regulated nuclear environment. Some policymakers have suggested that renewed nuclear testing may be necessary in response to foreign advances, which would risk repeating many of the mistakes of the Cold War.
Consider that for the first time in history, the new nuclear proliferation environment includes a three-way standoff between three major armed powers: the United States, China, and Russia.
Mutually Assured Climate Destruction
A global nuclear war alone would be enough to trigger catastrophic climatic effects. Even a limited nuclear exchange could inject vast quantities of smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and lowering global temperatures. The use of a mere 2% of the world’s current arsenal could trigger severe cooling and agricultural disruption, leaving 2 billion people at risk of starvation in just the following two years. If nuclear winter renders any use of nuclear weapons as unsurvivable, then deterrence may be an inadequate strategy, since the consequences of a miscalculation or accidental launch would increase dramatically.
This erosion of international nonproliferation channels comes as climate change fuels geopolitical instability by intensifying resource competition, migration pressures, and regional conflicts, increasing the risk of confrontation among nuclear-armed states. Climate change and nuclear weapons therefore reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
Bridging the Gap: Building the Next Generation of Advocates
Despite these connections, environmental and social justice concerns remain peripheral in most nuclear policy debates. Discussions of deterrence and arms control typically focus on military balance and strategic stability, while the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons receives far less attention.
This gap may help explain why nuclear policy often struggles to engage younger generations.
Surveys consistently show that climate change is one of the defining concerns of younger voters. Roughly 70% of young people report deep anxiety about environmental degradation and say they are likely to support candidates who prioritize climate policy. Nuclear weapons policy rarely speaks to these concerns directly. Yet nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Reframing nuclear policy to include environmental and social justice considerations would not only reflect historical reality, but also make nuclear policy more relevant to the challenges of the 21st century.
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