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environmental justice
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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'This Is a Fight for Humanity': Meet the 2026 Winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize
“The 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress," one foundation leader said.
Apr 20, 2026
The Goldman Environmental Foundation announced the six winners of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday, honoring an all-female slate of advocates who protected wildlife, took on extractive industries, and won important legal victories in the movement to halt the climate crisis.
The announcement comes as world leaders have failed to make progress in addressing environmental challenges, and President Donald Trump, leader of the world's largest historical climate polluter, has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, rolled back climate and environmental regulations domestically, and made efforts to supercharge the extraction and use of fossil fuels.
“While we continue to fight uphill to protect the environment and implement lifesaving climate policies—in the US and globally—it is clear that true leaders can be found all around us,” John Goldman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. “The 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress."
The 2026 prize is notable because it marks the first time that all of the winners—Iroro Tanshi of Nigeria, Borim Kim of South Korea, Sarah Finch of the United Kingdom, Theonila Roka Matbob of Papau New Guinea, Alannah Acaq Hurley of the US, and Yuvelis Morales Blanco of Colombia—are women.
'There's lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been."
"I am especially thrilled to honor our first-ever cohort of six women, as this is a powerful reflection of the absolutely central role that women play in the environmental community globally,” Goldman said.
The winners also exemplify the prize's 2026 theme "Change Starts Where You Stand," as each of them began with a fight to protect a local community or ecosystem that has global implications for the climate, biodiversity, and environmental justice.
As US-based winner Alannah Acaq Hurley said, "At the end of the day, this is a fight for humanity, and, honestly, our ability to continue as humans on this planet."
Here is how six remarkable women waged this fight and won.
Iroro Tanshi
Iroro Tanshi is a Nigerian conservation ecologist who has worked successfully with local communities to protect endangered bats and their rainforest habitat from wildfires.
Tanshi was elated in 2016 when she discovered the short-tailed roundleaf bat, previously believed to be extinct in the area, living in Nigeria's Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. However, two weeks later, a devastating wildfire ignited, forcing Tanshi to evacuate and ultimately impacting around half of the park.
Tanshi then turned her attention to preventing wildfires, which are sparked by traditional farming practices rubbing against the climate crisis.
"The way people manage these farms is they use fire to clean the farms every year, but climate change has completely toppled the pattern of rainfall and people can no longer predict when to burn safely," she explained in a video.
Tanshi and her team worked with local communities on a Zero Wildfire Campaign, which includes educating farmers on when it is safe to burn and forming a team of "forest guardians" to patrol and fight fires on high-risk days. Due to her efforts, these guardians put out 74 fires between 2022 and 2025, preventing any of them from becoming major blazes.
"My hope for the future is that people would take these small-scale projects as signals for what the future should look like," she said. "Let's stay nimble. Let's try to work in our small communities and solve those problems there on the ground."
Borim Kim
Borim Kim helped win Asia's first successful youth climate lawsuit, inspiring people across the region to demand government action on climate.
Kim was first motivated to take collective action when a heatwave baked Seoul in 2018, killing 48 people including a woman near her mother's age, who died in her home.
"I realized that even home wasn't safe from the climate crisis," she said in a video. "I started looking for what I could do."
Inspired by the international youth climate movement, she founded Youth 4 Climate Action (Y4CA) and helped organize school strikes and walkouts. After her activism led to meetings with policymakers, she realized that national leaders had no real plans to address the climate crisis. In 2020, she and Y4CA mobilized 19 young people to sue the South Korean government for violating the constitutional rights of future generations. Once the case was launched, she also continued to build a social movement for climate action.
In August 2024, the country's Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the young people, mandating that South Korea reduce its emissions in line with the scientific consensus, a decision the environmental minister accepted. The ruling is projected to prevent between 1.6-2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere.
"Youth may be seen as having a lower position in society, but now this decision has affirmed our right to live safely and the state's duty to protect us," Kim said.
Sara Finch
On the other side of the world, Sarah Finch also secured a precedent-setting legal climate victory.
Finch lives in a part of southeastern England called the Weald. While it is currently a rural area, it hosts oil and gas reserves that were eyed for exploitation during the fracking boom of the 2010s. Finch helped form the Weald Action Group to push back against many potential wells, but they were not able to stop the Surrey County Council from approving the operation and expansion of a drilling site called Horse Hill in 2018.
In gearing up to challenge the decision, Finch discovered that the council's environmental impact statement had only considered emissions from direct drilling at the site, but not the emissions generated from the burning of the fuel once it was extracted, also known as Scope 3 emissions, which make up around 90% of oil and gas' contribution to the climate emergency.
"It became apparent that it was actually the norm that Scope 3 emissions were being emitted from these kinds of decisions, and we realized that actually it was happening everywhere and in much bigger developments than Horse Hill," Finch said in a video.
She and her team challenged the environmental impact statement over its failure to consider Scope 3 emissions, losing multiple times before finally securing a groundbreaking victory from the UK Supreme Court in 2024, which has come to be known as "the Finch ruling."
The UK government cited the "Finch ruling" when it revoked its backing of two North Sea oil developments. Overall, the projects canceled or delayed in 2024 due to the ruling would have generated enough Scope 3 emissions to equal the UK's domestic greenhouse gas emissions that year.
"It wasn't just a win on Horse Hill," Finch said. "It wasn't even just a win on a handful of sites. It was a win on the whole future of the UK oil and gas industry. And I feel like, there's lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been."
Theonila Roka Matbob
Theonila Roka Matbob was born into an environmental disaster. Rio Tinto's Panguna Mine had devastated the ecosystem of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARB), destabilized its society, and led to a civil war that killed 15,000-20,000 Bougainvilleans, including her father.
"Our environment was tortured, and then the land was tortured, and the third party that was tortured were my people," Roka Matbob said in a video.
Rio Tinto closed its copper, silver, and gold mine in 1989 due to the war, but had done nothing to clean up the 150,000 tons of tailings it had dumped into local rivers or take responsibility for the havoc the mine had caused. As an adult, Roka Matbob began to wonder why justice had not been done and to gather testimony from people impacted by the mine.
This led to a successful campaign that persuaded Rio Tinto first to fund an assessment of the mine's impacts and then to sign a memorandum of understanding in 2024 to act on the assessment's findings and develop a plan with local communities to remediate the area.
"It doesn't mean we will restore everything as it was, but at least the story that my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren can remember [is] that our grandparents fought," she said.
Alannah Acaq Hurley
As Theonila Roka Matbob secured justice for the impacts of one major mine, Alannah Acaq Hurley helped prevent another one from being dug in the first place.
Hurley grew up as a member of the Yup’ik Indigenous group in Alaska's Bristol Bay, a haven of biodiversity that also hosts the world's largest wild sockeye salmon run. But in 2001 a new danger emerged: Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals announced plans to construct the Pebble Mine, the largest open-pit mine in North America.
"The pit would be so big, you could literally see it from the moon," Hurley said in a video. "It didn't take long for us to understand the level of threat that this mine posed—acid mine drainage, toxic tailings left in perpetuity. It was not a matter of if something goes wrong, it was a matter of when."
Chosen to lead the United Tribes of Bristol Bay in 2013, Hurley built a coalition to oppose the mine, uniting tribes, commercial fishers, and environmentalists to make their cause to the US Environmental Protection Agency and push back against the company's multiple attempts to move forward with the copper-and-gold mining project. Finally, in 2023, the EPA canceled the project via its rarely used veto power.
"It's just really a testament to the power of the people," she said. "We just never stopped until we were heard."
Yuvelis Morales Blanco
Yuvelis Morales Blanco also defended her community from an extractive industry.
Blanco was born to subsistence fishers on Colombia's Magdalena River in the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches.
“We had nothing but the river—she was like a mother who took care of me," she said in a statement.
However, even as a child she saw the river was threatened by oil spills from Ecopetrol, Colombia's leading oil company headquartered nearby. The potential threat level was raised even further when she learned while attending college in 2019 that Ecopetrol planned to build two pilot fracking projects near Puerto Wilches.
"Man, I'm like, 'They're going to do that in Wilches?' No sir!'" she recalled in a video.
Blanco joined the Colombia Free from Fracking Alliance and began to raise awareness in her community about the plans. As the campaign's momentum grew, so did her reputation as a spokesperson. This ultimately led to threats of violence against her that forced her to seek asylum in France in 2022, yet she continued to mobilize against the fracking plans from abroad.
She and the alliance saw success in 2022, as a local court halted the permitting process, newly elected President Gustavo Petro pledged there would be no fracking during his administration, and Ecopetrol suspended its contracts. In 2024, the Colombian Constitutional Court further ruled that the fracking projects had violated the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches' right to free, prior, and informed consent.
Blanco continues to fight for a ban on fracking and for legal protections for environmental defenders—over 140 of whom were reported missing or killed in 2024, the most recent year for which Global Witness has a full tally. Colombia was also the most dangerous countries for defenders that year, with 48 deaths.
"I am very hopeful because I have a river that always accompanies me, and I know we're going to win," she said.
The Goldman Environmental Prize was founded in 1989 by Rhoda and Richard Goldman, and has since honored 239 winners in 37 years. The 2026 awards will be presented live in San Francisco on Monday evening at 8:30 pm ET. Watch it on YouTube here.
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AI Job Cuts, Plastic Pollution, and Experimental Nuclear: Why I Oppose Dow
We are building a new and sustainable economy on our terms. This is what Dow wants to take away from us; I refuse.
Apr 19, 2026
I’m a 77-year-old shrimper from the Texas Gulf Coast, and the AI revolution has reached my town. Early this year, Dow Chemical announced global cuts to 4,500 jobs as it moves toward artificial intelligence. News of the layoffs tore through our rural community of Seadrift–where some of the thousand people work at the local Dow facility–with the devastation of a hurricane. Replacing workers with robots might be Dow’s latest blow, but this toxic industry has wronged my hometown of Seadrift for 70 years.
I recently completed a 30-day hunger strike on the public property (ditch) outside of Dow Chemical, during which time the sheriff actually arrested me while I was attempting to deliver my letter of demands to a company representative here in my hometown.
For decades, Dow has illegally dumped plastic and chemical waste into the local bays and waterways, which have sustained this fishing community for more than 170 years. Now, the company wants government approval for a new permit that would legalize plastic pollution at the Seadrift plant, and allow the construction of experimental nuclear reactors to power it.
As a native Seadrifter, I say: No.
Industry promised us prosperity, but we lost our economy and our heritage.
Dow is planning massive job cuts right now, despite collecting $177 million in bank finance since 2019—which is more funding than any other petrochemical company currently expanding in the US, according to a new report, "Toxic Finance."
What lasting good have these toxic pollution factories ever done for this community?
My family made a living on the water for four generations, and I’ve been a shrimper all my life. I remember when Union Carbide (now Dow) and Formosa Plastics came to our communities with glossy pamphlets and slick presentations. Our elected officials made a devil’s bargain, and “a little pollution” turned into billions of plastic pellets and tons of chemicals in our water.
When the local bays got sick, the communities started dying with it. First, as in Formosa Plastic’s case, industry bought out the ranchers; then an elementary school; and finally, through a class action suit, bought out citizens and now own their homes. Local businesses have been boarded up throughout the county. As a young woman, I worked at Froggy’s fish house; now, it’s a concrete slab. Four more were bulldozed. A hundred boats used to launch from our docks at the start of shrimp season; today, we’re lucky if we have five. Industry promised us prosperity, but we lost our economy and our heritage. As the old saying goes, our downtown died by a thousand cuts.
I always knew it was a raw deal, but at least some of us got steady jobs… at least for a little while. Now, Dow can’t even deliver on that meager promise. Instead, Dow joins the likes of Amazon, UPS, and dozens of other multinational corporations looking to replace American workers with artificial intelligence.
Nobody from Dow has even responded to me after 30 days of fasting and living in a tent outside of their facility, despite acknowledging receipt of my demand letter to Dow's CEO. To be clear, I will not rest until this company:
- Commits to zero discharge of plastic pellets, powder, and flakes from its Seadrift facility and incorporates that commitment into its operating permit; and
- Cancels all plans to build nuclear reactors at the site and withdraws its construction permit application from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
On a bright note, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has confirmed that a public meeting about Dow’s proposed changes to the water discharge permit will be held at some unspecified time in the future… and so, the fight continues!
Believe me, dear folks, people still have power. I sued Formosa Plastics and won the largest citizen lawsuit settlement under the Clean Water Act in US history—$50 million plus additional fines because the company can’t stop polluting the bay—all of which has gone into a public trust designed to restore the fishing communities, the bays, and the local environment.
Our trust funded a cooperative of 250 fisherfolk working together to revitalize our seafood industry, which now has its own office, a processing plant, and a 60-acre oyster farm that will grow to become the largest in the Gulf. We are building a new and sustainable economy on our terms.
This is what Dow wants to take away from us. I refuse.
Will you join me in fighting back against corporate greed?
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Sinners: Real Monsters of Greed and Racism Still Stalk the Gulf South
The Riverplex Megapark planned for Louisiana's Ascension Parish threatens both the history and future of the community with the destruction of former slave cabins and the construction of a polluting ammonia plant.
Apr 12, 2026
I was pleased to see Sinners have a good night at the Oscars, picking up four trophies. It didn’t win Best Picture, but to my mind, it is the movie of the year. Sinners had far and away the greatest cultural impact, especially among Black people.
Sinners is the rare blockbuster film that explores Black history from the perspective of Black people, but I believe the reason the film has touched such a nerve is that it’s much more than a period piece. When I watched Sinners, I didn’t just see a movie about the past. I saw a mirror. The horror in the film isn’t history; the blood-sucking vampires of racism, white supremacy, and cultural erasure still haunt us today.
For me, Sinners hit literally close to home. Although it is set in Mississippi, it was filmed entirely in southeastern Louisiana, where my roots trace back to a small community called Donaldsonville. The film reminded me of my childhood when grandpa and I walked the avenue to shop. We’d walk from Smoke Bend, up the avenue, to a warehouse on the edge of town to get syrup in a yellow can—perfect for eating with fry bread. What’s funny about the movie is that Michael B. Jordan’s characters’ names were Smoke and Stack. And my grandpa told me that Smoke Bend got its name from the Indian campfires travelers saw when they came around the river bend. The scenes where Smoke and Stack go to Clarksdale to buy supplies were shot on Railroad Avenue in Donaldsonville, where I live and work. Folks from around here remember hearing the alarm and radio announcements from Ascension Parish Barn on Church street as they shopped along the Avenue.
The Jim Crow era depicted in Sinners has ended, but here in Ascension Parish, we are in a struggle to protect Black lives and preserve Black heritage. In the name of economic growth, the Parish government is planning to create a massive, 17,000-acre industrial complex—the so-called Riverplex Megapark—featuring a Hyundai plant and other pollution-producing factories. The complex will decimate the historic predominantly Black community of Modeste and part of Donaldsonville, displacing as many as 800 people.
We will not be able to protect our communities unless more should-be allies come to recognize that environmental justice is a major civil rights issue of our time.
In October, Modeste residents reported that heavy machinery had demolished some of the slave cabins on the site of the former Germania and Mulberry Plantations. The purpose of the destruction was to make way for the Hyundai facility, which could destroy both plantations as well as the neighboring Zeringue Plantation.
Those cabins hold the stories of their enslaved ancestors, the people whose labor built this land and whose spirit still breathes through it. Among the destroyed cabins was one of deep significance to me: My uncle, Cloveste, was born in one of them. Like the juke joint in Sinners, those cabins are a sacred space; they are bloodline, legacy, and love—and they were bulldozed to make room for corporate profit.
While erasing our past, this industrial complex also threatens our future. Located in the heart of “Cancer Alley,” Ascension Parish is one of the most polluted counties in the United States. Less than 3 miles from my house is the world’s largest ammonia plant, the single worst polluting factory in the country. I am a breast cancer survivor. All three of my children were born prematurely, and one of them has had respiratory problems his whole life. These kinds of sicknesses are commonplace around here. Yet plans for the complex include another ammonia plant that will spew out thousands of tons of pollution.
Down here, corporate executives don’t wear hoods or burn crosses, but their greed can kill us just the same.
We are all for development, but we want economic growth that strengthens our communities, not that erases and endangers them while creating generational wealth for others. Rural Roots Louisiana, the organization I founded, is leading an effort to block the “megapark,” and a judge recently ruled in our favor, ordering the front group behind the project to turn over relevant public records.
But we are up against forces with bottomless resources, which they are using to try to buy out and pay off people in the community. This presents people with hard choices, but as we see in Sinners, there is a cost to accommodating your oppressor. As Director Ryan Coogler said, his film explores “the deals people in oppressive situations must rationalize.”
In this struggle, as in all my work, I take heart in the example of our ancestors, who persevered in the face of even steeper odds. Their efforts and sacrifices ended American apartheid, and it is important to remember how far the country has come. Sinners itself, the fact that it got made, is a form of progress. It serves as a rebuke to those trying to erase Black history.
I also draw inspiration from activists and organizers throughout southeast Louisiana. A few years ago, in Plaquemines Parish—where most of Sinners was shot—community members blocked an oil terminal that would have destroyed a cemetery where their enslaved ancestors were buried. In St. James Parish, community groups have made headway in their lawsuit seeking a landmark moratorium on petrochemical facilities, while in St. John Parish, a historic Black community waged a heroic battle against a proposed grain elevator.
Still, we will not be able to protect our communities unless more should-be allies come to recognize that environmental justice is a major civil rights issue of our time. Put another way, environmental racism might not seem like the scariest vampire—it dresses in suits and wears nice shoes—but none have more blood on their teeth.
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We Must Fight Fossil Fuel Oligarchs to Save Democracy
It’s no coincidence the fossil fuel industry has lined up behind racist, belligerent, and authoritarian leaders like Trump.
Apr 10, 2026
The second Trump administration has been an unrelenting assault on democracy.
Basic democratic rights are disappearing. Unarmed people have been executed in the streets and smeared as “terrorists” by the government. Entire families are being kidnapped and denied basic rights in inhumane detention centers. And journalists are being arrested for doing their jobs.
Against this backdrop, working for climate justice might seem like a distraction.
But a clear-headed look at how we ended up in this grim situation in the first place shows that the movement for climate justice, far from being a distraction, is an essential part of the fight to defend and deepen democracy.
We cannot defeat authoritarianism without breaking the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry on our economy and our political system.
The Trump administration has received major political backing from fossil fuel oligarchs—in response, in fact, to Trump’s open solicitation to trade favors for their support. The government has subsequently followed an energy and environmental policy agenda that benefits the industry.
The administration has expanded the industry’s access to resources at home through leases and permits for drilling in public lands and waters. It has attacked Venezuela, kidnapped its president, and is attempting to open up the country’s oil reserves to US corporations.
And of course it launched an unprovoked war on Iran, sending the price of oil skyrocketing—and leading to genocidal threats from the president against Iran unless the country reopens the Strait of Hormuz, through which Gulf oil passes.
Meanwhile at home, the Trump administration has weakened environmental standards, including mercury pollution standards for power plants. By attacking motor vehicle fuel economy standards, it has effectively grown the captive market for the industry’s products. And it has abused the federal permitting process to try to kill the fossil fuel industry’s main competitors, wind and solar energy.
This is not merely a case of an administration that supports the fossil fuel industry and also happens to be authoritarian. The industry directly supports and benefits from an authoritarian government that curtails democratic rights and silences dissent. It also benefits from a government that upholds white supremacy and enforces racial hierarchy.
Several years ago, a report I worked on for the Institute for Policy Studies documented how the fossil fuel industry has used its money and influence to push for state-level legislation to criminalize protest against fossil fuel infrastructure projects. These so-called “critical infrastructure laws” are now on the books in 19 states. The industry has also used strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) to intimidate and silence critics.
This is a predictable response of a powerful, politically connected industry that is under assault on two fronts.
First, competition from cheap, widely available wind and solar energy poses a serious economic threat to the industry. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels in most of the world, and new generation capacity is dominated by renewables.
Simultaneously, the industry faces serious political and reputational threats. Growing numbers of people worldwide are experiencing extreme heat, wildfires, storms, floods, and toxic air and water pollution attributable to the industry’s activities. Many of them are connecting the dots, and refusing to be passive victims of a powerful industry and its political backers.
Social movements against particular fossil fuel projects, or against the industry more broadly, have multiplied on every continent. What’s more, they are already winning. The industry faces restrictions in several political jurisdictions, and likely recognizes that it could even be expropriated in the not so distant future.
Faced with these twin crises, the fossil fuel industry is increasingly resorting to relying on the repressive apparatus of state violence to crush dissenting voices and maintain its dominance.
The industry has also historically benefited from a racially and economically unequal society. The lack of political power of Indigenous, Black, and other racially marginalized communities, and of poor communities of every race, has enabled the industry to locate polluting infrastructure in these communities, treating them as sacrifice zones. This has let the industry avoid the protracted zoning and legal battles they would have to contend with if they tried to locate their infrastructure in more privileged communities, greatly reducing the cost and lead time for their projects.
In recent years, the growing strength of the environmental justice movement has threatened the ability of the industry to continue to reap the benefits of racial and economic stratification. It is therefore no surprise that the industry is supporting an openly white supremacist political agenda that seeks to bring old racial hierarchies back and eliminate the very concept of environmental justice.
In sum, the far-right agenda in the US is deeply intertwined with the political and economic objectives of the fossil fuel industry that is at the root of climate change. We cannot defeat authoritarianism without breaking the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry on our economy and our political system.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that these observations are mainly based on US politics, but are applicable to many parts of the world. Fossil fueled fascism has become a global phenomenon, and our resistance to the fossil fuel industry must be similarly global in scale.
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Esencia No Va: Protesting Neocolonial Capitalist Development in Puerto Rico
A movement is forming to defend the community and island against a project that would turn over a significant piece of Puerto Rico’s land to foreign billionaires, to serve their needs, not the needs of the Puerto Rican people.
Apr 08, 2026
On Saturday, March 28—No Kings Day in the US—an estimated 50,000 people marched in the streets of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico to protest plans for “Esencia,” a proposed huge, gated, luxury ocean-side development in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. The protest was spear-headed by Defiende a Cabo Rojo, a coalition of community, scientific, and cultural organizations, and was joined by 66 co-sponsoring groups from all over the island. A retired US professor of (radical) economics, I attended the protest with my friend Dimaris Acosta-Mercado, an activist in the anti-Esencia movement and professor of ecology at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez.
The $2.5 billion Esencia project, first proposed in May 2024, is a quintessential example of neocolonial capitalist development. It would create a tropical enclave for super-rich foreigners on 2,000 acres of land along a 3-mile stretch of beach in the southwest of the island, including 1,200 homes, 500 hotel accommodations, two golf courses, its own school, and an airport. Although it does not yet have building permits, the proposed project has already received generous tax credits and exemptions.
The Movement to Stop Esencia
The movement to stop Esencia views this issue in both class and territorial terms. Its goal is to defend the community and island against a project that would turn over a significant piece of Puerto Rico’s land to foreign billionaires, to serve their needs, not the needs of the Puerto Rican people. It builds on a history of successful struggles against previous development projects such as the Northern Corridor, mining in Adjuntas, and beachside construction in Rincon.
One of the movement’s core critiques of Esencia is the loss of public access to the beaches, which has happened with previous developments such as Dorado Beach and Palmas del Mar. Bad Bunny’s song, “What Happened to Hawaii,” has become a theme song for the movement, with its powerful chorus:
Thеy want to take my river and my beach too
They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave
No, don't let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai
'Cause I don't want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii
A second set of criticisms of the project focus on its negative ecological and environmental impact. As part of a team of academic researchers involved in the movement, my friend Dimaris’ critique focuses on the harm Esencia will do to endangered species, including birds, reptiles, snails, and plants that exist only in Puerto Rico, and to the critical habitat system that supports them. Other movement researchers predict that Esencia will cause shortages in the region’s water, already in short supply. A third critique emphasizes the area’s importance as an archaeological site.
The March Against Esencia: A Celebration of Life and Love
The march began at El Escambron, another public beach threatened with privatization. From there we marched along the coast of Old San Juan, stopping to rally at the Capitol Building, where the Puerto Rican Senate and House of Representatives meet, and then marched to the Governor’s mansion, La Fortaleza, for more protesting.
It is hard to capture in words the powerful anti-Esencia presence and statement that the march created. At the front of the protest were huge flags of Puerto Rico and Cabo Rojo. Soon after came a large paper mache model of a guabairo, a rare bird endangered by the project, carried overhead for the length of the protest, wings flapping. Marchers carried and wore a variety of printed and homemade posters denouncing the proposed project. Percussion—including drums, folding fans, kitchen pots, guiros—was omnipresent. The call and response chant of “Esencia No Va… Que No Va, Que No Va” (Esencia is a no-go, it shouldn’t go, it shouldn’t go) echoed throughout the march. Continual rhythmic chanting, drumming, singing, and dancing made the protest come alive as a potent force opposing the project. As a North American, I was touched to join in the familiar “El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido” chant and to sing “No Nos Pararon” (“they won’t stop us”) to the tune of “We shall not be moved.”
If we in the US and elsewhere are to use social strikes to retake control of our governments... we have much to learn from the joyful, creative protests of our Puerto Rican comrades.
Puerto Rican peoples are a mixture of African, Indigenous, and European heritage, and, as Dimaris put it, “It’s as if all our ancestry (was) coming alive and making peace in this land to protect it.” Indigenous heritage took center stage when the march stopped in front of the Capitol building, with the blowing of conch shells, chanting, calling in the directions, and leading an areito dance. And Afro-Puerto Rican ancestry was omni-present in the bombas and drumming.
One group wore purple T-shirts announcing “anti-patriarchal, feminista, lesbiana, trans, Caribena, Latinoamericana.” Another T-shirt depicted a plant and the words “sembrando rebeldias” (planting rebellions). Gay protesters snapped fans for percussion (one of their signature acts). The Puerto Rico Sierra Club was there, along with Para la Naturaleza, and AFSCME, and many other groups.
The protest had something I hadn’t experienced in the many many US demonstrations I have participated in since the 1960s: It was fun! It was actually a party, with masses of people dancing, drumming, chanting, singing, and reveling in the streets. It was a celebration of life—not only of Puerto Rico and being Puerto Rican, but also of standing up for Mother Earth, an affirmation of love, cooperation, art, and beauty by a diverse community organizing in self-defense and defense of nature, against the greed, displacement, ecological destruction, and extreme wealth inequality that Esencia embodies. Dimaris later told me that the protest resembled the spirit of Verano 2019, the 15-day protest strike which used creativity, art, and fun to topple Gov. “Ricky” Rosello, including evening dance parties in front of the governor’s mansion. If we in the US and elsewhere are to use social strikes to retake control of our governments, as Jeremy Brecher suggests, we have much to learn from the joyful, creative protests of our Puerto Rican comrades.
A final note. The Solidarity Economy movement uses the motto, “Resist and Build.” Movements such as the one opposing Esencia, which resist the take-over of our lands and lives, are key. Equally important are a growing number of efforts to build non-capitalist, community-based alternatives, which are sprouting up all around the world, such as Casa Pueblo and Plenitud in Puerto Rico, or, in the US, land development projects such as those of the Peoples’ Network for Land and Liberation.
In these dark times, here’s to inspiring one another as we resist and build, and to having fun as we do so! Esencia No Va!!!!!!
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