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'Working-Class Organizing Wins': Troy Jackson Pulls Ahead in Race to Replace Platner in Maine
"We're well on our way to getting the government that we deserve," said Jackson.
Jul 19, 2026
As Democratic US Senate candidate Troy Jackson pulled far ahead of his opponents in the race to replace Graham Platner as the party's nominee on Saturday, one commentator credited the former state Senate president's campaign with an "extremely impressive organizational feat"—one that was focused on nominating a working-class champion.
Eight of Maine's 16 counties held in-person and virtual delegate nominating meetings on Saturday, deciding on the first 319 of 500 total delegates who will vote for the Democratic nominee at next weekend's convention, which was rapidly organized after Platner dropped out of the race last week following rape allegations that he denied.
At least 290 of the delegates who were chosen in the first eight counties backed Jackson, the Bangor Daily News reported. The former logger, who previously ran for governor, has deep union ties, and has been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), won at least 148 of the 149 delegates in Cumberland County, all 44 delegates in Penobscot, and 22 of 23 in Hancock, dominating in several other counties as well.
The rest of the state's counties will vote on delegates at similar meetings on Sunday, but as one election watcher said, "Troy Jackson will almost certainly be the next Democratic nominee for Maine's 2026 US Senate election."
Jackson appeared confident enough in Saturday's results to announce a celebratory tailgate planned for Sunday in York County as voters there would be selecting delegates. The Maine State Nurses Association also announced its endorsement of the candidate on Sunday morning.
After Saturday's county meetings, Jackson addressed some of his supporters virtually, giving his volunteer network credit for quickly organizing on his behalf after many had previously expected to be campaigning for Platner, who spent nearly a year mobilizing Mainers from across the political spectrum with a platform focused on taxing billionaires, ending US "forever wars" and military aid for Israel, and passing Medicare for All.
"I can't tell you how much I appreciate all the hard, hard work. I've been getting text messages all day about what a great job I did. I didn't do a goddamn thing, all of you just smoked it," said Jackson in a video posted on social media. "It's really, really incredible, so thank you so much. We're well on our way to getting the government that we fucking deserve, and that's what I'm excited about."
Organized volunteers attended some of the county conventions, some wearing "Jackson for Maine" t-shirts leftover from the candidate's gubernatorial run and passing out flyers with the names of the pro-Jackson delegate slate—supporters whom volunteers had spent the past week calling to secure their commitment to the progressive candidate.
The eight remaining counties will select 181 more delegates on Sunday. Another 101 Democratic state committee members have already been chosen to attend the statewide convention on July 25. Together they make up the 601 delegates who will vote for the party's nominee.
The party's nominee will face five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins, whom Jackson has condemned in recent days for voting to fund US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which he has called to abolish. An ICE agent fatally shot 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine last week.
A poll by Wedgewood earlier this month found Jackson leading Collins in a hypothetical matchup, 48-43, with 9% of voters undecided.
Ahead of Saturday's meetings, Jackson addressed a crowd of about 100 supporters in Portland.
"I'm running for the logger in Allagash who does not think that anyone in Washington knows about them," said Jackson. "I'm running for the nurse that's working another double shift because their hospital is understaffed, and all the while billionaires and massive corporations are making record profits, buying influence in Washington, and telling the rest of us that there is just nothing that we can do."
“I’m asking for your vote, but I’m also asking for more than that,” he added. “I’m asking you to organize... I’m asking you to talk to your neighbors. I’m asking you to show up at your county meetings, make the calls, send the texts, and bring even more people into this movement.”
Writer Cole Sandick suggested that despite the excitement that Platner's campaign had generated, many of his supporters appeared to have quickly pivoted toward Jackson, also a Medicare for All supporter and opponent of military aid for Israel, in an effort to ensure progressive priorities are represented in the Senate.
"Working-class organizing wins," said one Maine-based writer.
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Trump’s Board Has Made Gaza the Most Dangerous Place on Earth to Be a Child
In Gaza, where “the essence of childhood has been destroyed,” even the smallest acts of humanity have become acts punishable by death.
Jul 19, 2026
Mohamed al-Wahidi, 57 years old, a husband, father and grandfather, spent his days doing what aid workers do in a place with almost nothing left: clearing rubble, reopening roads, repairing a leaking pipe, filling a community water tank, or building tents for families with nowhere else to go. In his spare time, he carried out a “perilous project” setting up screens and generators across Gaza so people could watch the World Cup. On the eve of Egypt's match against Argentina, Israel killed him along with the 33-year-old taxi driver as well as two young brothers, ages 8 and 10, walking nearby. Israel's military said it was investigating “the incident.”
As it almost always does, Israel commits murder first, then trumps up a pretext after the kill.
Al-Wahidi is one name in Gaza's daily killing rituals under the supposed ceasefire. Israel has murdered more than 1,100 Palestinians in the Strip since October 2025—265 of them children. Not a single Israeli civilian has been killed on the other side. This is the "peace" Trump's board is managing.
Nearly 1 million people remain trapped in tents through a Gaza summer where temperatures reach 35°C. Season after season, they are left exposed to the elements: first a freezing winter, then the merciless heat of summer. Families survive in tent cities or beneath dangling concrete slabs in destroyed buildings. Meanwhile, Israel continues to block shade nets and plastic sheeting at the border, just as it blocked warm blankets during the winter.
This is what the Board of Peace normalizes: an occupying power expanding while a one-sided truce remains in force, a starvation policy rebranded as a stabilization success.
Children bake in tents, while Israel keeps pushing the civilian population into smaller corridors. When the so-called Board of Peace was formed, Israel occupied 53% of Gaza. A month later, 60%. By late May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the Israel Defense Forces to seize 70%, squeezing 2.3 million human beings into an ever-shrinking cage away from all the farming areas. Energy Minister Eli Cohen has said the quiet part out loud, telling Israeli radio that Israeli control will keep growing “until we reach 100%.” The next phase envisions corralling Palestinians into fenced “humanitarian shelters” near the ruins of Rafah as part of the ultimate ethnic cleansing program, cynically marketed as a “plan for free movement.”
Concentration camps built on the same mechanisms Nazi Germany used to cage Jews in World War II. A United Nations independent commission of inquiry released this summer found that Israel's killing of children in Gaza is not collateral damage of war but part of a strategy to destroy the biological continuity of Palestinian society. Acts that meet the legal definition for war crimes and the crime against humanity.
Israel has murdered or injured more than 10% of Gaza’s population since October 2023. At least 20,179 children, more than 5,000 under 5 years old, and another 44,143 injured. The number of murdered children is one-third of the total number of dead Palestinians in Gaza. The commission documented children shot by snipers and quadcopter-mounted rifles with a precision that ruled out accidents and cited Israeli soldiers' own testimonies where soldiers celebrate and congratulate each other after murdering civilians. The commission called Gaza the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child.
In June, a father named Bahaa Abu Al-Ajeen watched an Israeli soldier kneel and shoot his 3-year-old son in the head as the boy cried in his arms near Deir al-Balah. In April, 9-year-old Ritaj Rihan was shot through the mouth while standing in a classroom tent waiting for her teacher. These are not outliers under a ceasefire. They are the continuation of an Israeli genocide under the shadow of the ceasefire.
When Israel and the US launched their war against Iran at the end of February, Israel closed every crossing into Gaza outright. Not because there is any connection, but because of Israel’s malevolent nature and because it can get away with it under the fog of war. Weekly truck deliveries collapsed from an average of roughly 4,200 down to just 590. Kerem Shalom and Zikim remain the only crossings still functioning, and even now, roughly half the trucks arriving from Egypt are turned away rather than unloaded.
As of now, aid volumes have never recovered to where they stood before the Iran war, let alone reached the minimum the UN says Gaza needs. Four UN agencies have already warned that the famine the ceasefire was supposed to end could return without sustained access. Sixty-eight percent of Gaza's population is now burning garbage to cook because there isn't enough gas. Not one of Gaza's 37 hospitals is fully operational; only 19 are even partially running. Nearly half of essential medicines are out of stock, and Israel is delaying the surgical equipment needed to treat the more than 43,000 people left with life-changing injuries. More than 40,000 people who will likely become permanently disabled for lack of treatment are another phase of Israel's silent genocide.
The Board of Peace's own six-month progress report claims aid distribution rose 70% and that basic food needs have been “stabilized” for the first time since 2023. In the art of euphemism, 70% of zero is zero, and basic food has “stabilized,” meaning shipments are entering regularly, but not that it is adequate. Conspicuously absent from the report is any mention that aid truck deliveries have never returned to their pre-Iran war levels and remain well below the minimum the UN itself considers necessary.
The board's own biannual report to the Security Council spends its pages blaming the Palestinian resistance, with no mention of an occupying army that has pushed past the ceasefire's demarcated line, nor Israel’s order to aid groups like Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Oxfam to choose between handing over staff names to a government that targets humanitarian workers, or ceasing operations in Gaza entirely.
Even how to count the murdered journalists is contested. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) was pressured to redefine who qualifies as a “Palestinian” journalist. The move was intended to give Israel a license to kill Palestinian reporters with impunity. A CPJ board member who objected to considering Israel's request was removed within days of protesting publicly. The board ultimately kept its definition intact, but only after stripping 20 murdered Palestinian journalists from the count.
This is what the Board of Peace normalizes: an occupying power expanding while a one-sided truce remains in force, a starvation policy rebranded as a stabilization success, concentration camps as a housing plan, ethnic cleansing as free movement, and a licensed death toll that keeps climbing with impunity.
A grandfather who wanted nothing more than to give displaced families an hour of joy watching a soccer match instead became another name on the ever-growing list of genocide victims. In Gaza, where “the essence of childhood has been destroyed,” even the smallest acts of humanity have become acts punishable by death.
Peace was never the board’s plan. Genocide management was.
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Restoring Our Nation’s Soul From Mass Delusions
The present leadership in Washington has moved aggressively and efficiently—and with venality and myopia—to lay waste to our noble aspirations and our natural endowments. What can we do about it?
Jul 19, 2026
Has mass delusion overtaken America’s collective consciousness and eaten into its soul? Rather than “America the Beautiful," are we becoming “America the Delusional”? The question sprang from speculating that many of my fellow citizens might agree with statements that expertise and evidence have clearly undercut. Would a majority think there was truth in them?
After reading these statements, ask yourself if my concern is warranted.
- Technology will protect us from the ill effects of climate disruption.
- Next generation Americans will be able to maintain the standard of living they have now.
- The Earth will provide sufficient food and shelter for a population exceeding 8.3 billion.
- Vigorous enforcement of national borders and deportation of illegal migrants will stem mass migration in the US and across the globe.
- Fatal shootings in America will decrease as guns become more widely available.
- The US dollar will remain the world’s dominant currency.
- Black people and other minorities are narrowing the economic gap with white people.
- The US President is the world’s most powerful government leader.
- American universities and research centers will continue to be regarded as the best in the world.
- The American diet is comparatively as healthy as that of other developed nations.
Having enumerated them, I pondered the toxic effect of such delusions on the soul of our nation. That Washington has mounted a ceaseless campaign of disinformation, on everything from the Iran War to voting integrity to the Reflecting Pool, only adds potency to the poison.
A nation’s soul, writes Gary Kowalski, is its “capacity for valor and visionary change.” Valor springs from confronting fear or pain with firmness and a realistic sense of one’s challenges. Visioning similarly involves the courage and wisdom to chart one’s future course with both creativity and a realistic take on present circumstances.
Nourishing the soul of this nation for 250 years has been its idealistic aspirations and its remarkable natural endowment. Mount Rushmore is a fit representation. All four leaders depicted there exhibited valor and vision on behalf of America’s unique assets, both prior to and during their presidency.
In contrast, the present leadership in Washington has moved aggressively and efficiently—and with venality and myopia—to lay waste to our noble aspirations and our natural endowments.
Our soul is on “life support.” Democratic self-governance and equality of economic opportunity, two pillars of national aspiration, are evaporating month by month. Calculated governmental action—and inaction—are accelerating the arrival of climate-related disasters and diminishing our natural capital.
Despite a grim present, future restoration of the nation’s soul is possible. It begins with each of us accepting in large part the unreality of the contentions listed above and helping leaders and their constituents chart a course within that frame. Whatever form our civic engagement takes, seeing ourselves as unabashed truth seekers is essential. Valorous action and visionary change derive from a firm grasp on what is real, not what is fanciful.
Motivated and supported by allies, we can make a difference. All it would require is each of us focusing on a delusion or two, and through writing, advocacy, or group action, promoting clear-eyed resilience over wishful thinking. Project Soul Restoration begins individually, takes root locally, then spreads regionally and nationally.
Break the mold. Take on the mantle of “influencer” on behalf of the nation’s soul!
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What the Nation Can Learn From Seattle's Fresh Bucks Program
After more than a decade of implementation, Fresh Bucks offers evidence that targeted investments in healthy food can improve food security, increase fruit and vegetable consumption, and help reduce nutritional inequality.
Jul 19, 2026
As rising food prices continue to strain household budgets and food insecurity remains a persistent challenge, a successful Seattle program is attracting national attention. For over a decade, the city’s Fresh Bucks initiative has helped lower-income families afford fresh fruits and vegetables through targeted food assistance. Now, Congress is considering whether to test that success at the national level.
Seattle launched Fresh Bucks in 2012. The initiative seeks to “eliminate disparities in healthy food access for communities most burdened by food insecurity, economic hardship, and environmental injustices,” according to the program website. Specifically, according to city data, Black and Hispanic households in Seattle are twice as likely to experience food insecurity—which is defined as “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways” by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Today, Seattle’s Fresh Bucks initiative serves approximately 17,000 income-qualified households each month with benefits dedicated to purchasing fruits and vegetables. Research suggests the investment is paying off. A 2025 study by the University of Washington found that participating households experienced a 31% higher rate of food security than comparable households without the benefit. Additionally, the City of Seattle’s food insecurity dashboard shows aggregate declining insecurity rates since 2018.
The Fresh Bucks program also improves diet quality—not simply by increasing the quantity of food families can buy, but by making nutritious food more affordable. According to the same UW study, Fresh Bucks participants were 37% more likely than households on the program’s waitlist to consume at least three daily servings of fruits and vegetables.
A nationwide Fresh Bucks program would not reverse recent cuts to federal nutrition assistance, but it offers a practical, evidence-based way to reduce hunger while addressing one of inequality’s most basic dimensions: whether families can afford healthy food.
Those gains matter because access to healthy food remains deeply unequal. A 2017 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that healthier diets rich in fruits and vegetables often cost significantly more than heavily processed alternatives, which creates a financial barrier that affects lower-income households most. When income determines access to nutritious food, it reinforces broader inequalities in health and well-being.
Community leaders in neighborhoods served by Fresh Bucks say they see those challenges firsthand.
“In White Center and historically underinvested communities across King County, we see every day how rising grocery costs continue to strain working families, seniors, immigrants, and households already navigating increasing housing and living expenses,” Aaron Garcia, executive director of the White Center Community Development Association, said in a press release on new legislation to expand the program. “Access to healthy, culturally relevant food should not be determined by income—it should not be considered a luxury,” Garcia said.
White Center illustrates why programs like Fresh Bucks matter. One of the Seattle area’s most diverse communities, more than 61% of its residents are people of color and 27% were born outside the US. The neighborhood was historically targeted for redlining, which continues to shape poverty rates and income inequality across the Seattle region.
Census data show White Center has below-average household and per capita incomes and a poverty rate higher than the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan average. Residents of South Seattle, including White Center, face disproportionately limited access to grocery stores offering fresh, nutritious produce. Some advocates describe these neighborhoods not as food deserts, but as examples of “food apartheid”: the racial, geographic, and economic inequities that stratify society and dictate who has access to healthy food and who is relegated to nutritionally deficient diets.
Fresh Bucks was designed to confront those disparities in Seattle by making healthy food more affordable for families who have historically faced the greatest barriers to accessing it.
On the national level, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), whose congressional district includes Seattle, argued that the city’s local innovation can become a model to address broader food insecurity.
“[…] Seattle is once again leading the way with the Fresh Bucks program, which is successfully keeping people fed with nutritious food and reducing hunger,” Jayapal said. “We must pass this legislation to expand the program nationwide and get families in every corner of the country healthy produce they can afford.”
Jayapal introduced the Fresh Bucks for Fresh Produce Act on July 2. Modeled on Seattle’s program, the legislation would establish a pilot program within the US Department of Agriculture, providing households earning 80% or less of their area’s median income with $60 each month to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.
The proposal comes as federal food assistance is moving in the opposite direction. Recent analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has fallen by more than 4 million people after Trump’s budget reconciliation bill passed last June—roughly a 10% decline. Meanwhile, the Trump administration recently eliminated roughly $1 billion in food purchases for schools and food banks by ending the Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program.
Other federal policies have also increased food costs. As The New York Times reported in May, executive tariffs on imported steel have driven up the cost of canned fruits and vegetables, because packaging accounts for roughly one-third of wholesale prices. Those increases disproportionately affect households that depend on affordable pantry staples such as canned corn and beans.
Public opinion indicates opposition to these trends. A 2025 Data for Progress survey found broad bipartisan support for SNAP and other efforts to help families afford food. A nationwide Fresh Bucks program would not reverse recent cuts to federal nutrition assistance, but it offers a practical, evidence-based way to reduce hunger while addressing one of inequality’s most basic dimensions: whether families can afford healthy food.
The proposed federal pilot would allow policymakers to test whether Seattle’s results can be replicated elsewhere. After more than a decade of implementation, Fresh Bucks offers evidence that targeted investments in healthy food can improve food security, increase fruit and vegetable consumption, and help reduce nutritional inequality.
That evidence is especially valuable as the USDA has suspended its annual report tracking food insecurity, making it more difficult to measure the full scope of hunger nationwide. Seattle’s experience suggests that local governments can serve as laboratories for policies that address inequality—and that successful municipal innovations may provide models for broader adoption.
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From Fracking to Data Centers—Hamster Wheels and That Same Old Song and Dance
The current system is set up to protect industry, capitalism, and the profits of a few, not the people and environment.
Jul 19, 2026
As a community organizer and environmental activist for over 15 years, I’ve often used the metaphor that “we are spinning on a hamster wheel.” That phrase gets mixed reactions. Some nod in agreement, and some get angry. The truth is not always easy to hear. I understand that from my own experiences.
In 2012, I learned that fracking for natural gas and oil was happening in my community. I started researching fracking, and found out about air pollution, toxic chemicals being injected underground, threats to water, farmland being bought up at an unprecedented pace, and tax incentives subsidizing all this. And in the end, the community wouldn’t even have lower energy costs.
The fracking boom was hitting communities all over Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Colorado—anywhere the fossil fuel industry sniffed out profits—and people were angry. So my neighbors and I tried to use the tools we had been taught we have in our supposed democracy.
We went to local and state officials, regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Health Department, and environmental organizations. With help from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), we passed a citizen initiative to ban fracking. The people voted for it—but then two drilling companies sued to have our democratically enacted law overturned for violating their corporate “rights.” The court agreed with them and overturned our law.
Maybe we can work together in community to build grassroots power, take direct action, disrupt unjust systems, and resist corporate encroachment.
Afterwards, I convinced myself that it was our fault. I believed that if more communities took action like we had, positive change would come. So, I started organizing with other communities across Ohio and in other states that found themselves in the same position. But the same cycle of corporate power overriding the people was repeated over and over. The people in these communities had no legal authority to stop fracking.
Some communities, like New York, banned fracking. However, they didn’t ban the use of fracked gas, so my community and many others were sacrificed to make sure Times Square stayed lit up. No offense to New Yorkers, but that’s the hard truth. It is how the system is set up to work.
Other communities turned to regulations. People convinced themselves that if frackers had to have further setbacks from schools and homes, we’d be protected from toxic water injections, airborne chemicals from waste pits and hundreds of trucks, and water depletion due to the between 1.5 and 16 million gallons of water used for each frack well. Communities enacted stricter regulations, but the harm continued.
It became all too clear that we the people were indeed like hamsters spinning in a wheel. All the tools that we grew up believing would protect us and our communities didn’t work. They were just diversions to keep us occupied as the government and the fracking industry drilled well after well.
Now it’s 2026, and communities are up in arms again over an issue that causes many of the same harms as fracking: data centers. I get calls and emails every week from communities all over the country with people sharing concerns—farmland being purchased at unprecedented rates, massive water withdrawals, air pollution and toxification, astronomical energy usage, skyrocketing power rates, and tax subsidies for mega tech corporations. Sound familiar?
It reminds me of the Aerosmith song, "Same Old Song and Dance." The song is about how the “justice system” does not apply equally to all. The band wasn't singing about fracking or data centers, but it may as well have been. Whether we use metaphors like spinning in a hamster wheel or cliches like “same old song and dance,” this is how the system is set up to work: It protects industry, capitalism and the profits of a few, not the people and environment. Folks fighting mining, toxic waste, big agriculture, industrial energy of any kind, clear cutting of forests, plastic pollution, etc. are all trapped in the hamster wheel.
We must jump out. This will take facing hard truths, like the fact that holding up signs in front of public meetings, writing letters, and giving testimony to regulatory agencies won’t protect you and your community. Once we can begin reckoning with these truths, maybe we can turn toward each other and turn away from the existing system. Maybe we can free our imaginations and creativity to experiment with new ideas. Maybe we can work together in community to build grassroots power, take direct action, disrupt unjust systems, and resist corporate encroachment rather than jumping back into the hamster wheel. Maybe we can start being effective.
My colleagues and I at CELDF have some ideas and would love to talk with you to share our experience and to listen to yours. If nothing else, we can be here to soften your landing when you finally decide to jump off that hamster wheel.
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Have You Even Heard of RASCOM? A Command for America's Robot Army
Lawmakers are pushing for a new combatant command they say will speed up the military’s uptake of robotic and autonomous systems. Experts warn they are ignoring serious flaws with this approach.
Jul 19, 2026
Even as the Pentagon mulls culling its combatant commands to reduce its bureaucratic bloat, lawmakers are itching to prop up another one — based on robots and AI.
Combatant commands like CENTCOM (Central Command) and AFRICOM (Africa Command) — sprawling military headquarters which oversee operations and activities across their assigned region or function — are notorious for their high operational costs and continued pushes for more responsibilities, including entanglements abroad.
The Department of Defense has weighed paring the commands back in response, floating restructuring plans last December that would reduce their number from 11 to 8. But lawmakers are going in the opposite direction, pushing for a new combatant command they say will speed up the military’s uptake of robotic and autonomous systems.
As experts tell RS, the new command is poised to create more redundancy, waste, and inefficiency — and the mission creep that comes with it — while stifling efforts to deploy such technologies in practice.
Embracing the future of warfare?
Tucked into the Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2027, a provision called section 917 would allow for the creation of a Robotic and Autonomous Systems Command (RASCOM).
By centralizing oversight over autonomous systems, lawmakers hope RASCOM will help the military adopt them as quickly as possible. In particular, they aim to overcome difficulties that have plagued previous procurement efforts.
In a press release, SASC chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) hailed the prospective combatant command as a means to help the military “embrace 21st century warfare.”
RASCOM “would standardize the way the entire armed services use unmanned systems in combat,” Wicker wrote, The armed service branches would be able to set up offices within RASCOM, “ensuring that [they all] adopt the latest systems.”
Runaway bureaucratic bloat
But another combatant command would be at odds with the Pentagon's stated goal of reducing its sprawling bureaucratic overhead.
DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth “has righteously complained about bloat in the GOFO [General and Flag Officers] corps, saying he wants to cut the number of [four-star generals] by 20%," Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, told RS. "Another place to park a four-star and his buddies flies in the face of that.”
A new combatant command would also take up work the Pentagon is already doing through its deployment of uncrewed systems across its operation. And, as Jennifer Kavanagh, Defense Priorities’ director of military analysis, tells RS, the administrative structure needed for a new combatant command will “duplicate functions provided elsewhere, including at the leadership level.”
What’s more, combatant commands rarely remain limited to their original missions. Instead, they often push for greater budgets, more responsibilities, and more sway over the direction of U.S. military policy.
“If RASCOM is created, it will face the same institutional incentives to expand its mission,” Gary Sampson, a national security strategist and retired U.S. Marine Corps intelligence and international affairs officer, told RS.
“Just like the Navy pushes for Naval spending and CENTCOM pushes for wars in the Middle East, RASCOM would act as a sales team for robotics and autonomous systems,” Logan predicted, referencing CENTCOM officials’ persistent support for continued U.S. military engagement in the Middle East. “That is the job of companies who manufacture autonomous systems, not the U.S. government.”
Standing up and maintaining another command would also be costly. “This is the last thing the Pentagon needs given its already massive budget,” Kavanagh said.
And, once established, RASCOM may prove difficult to get rid of. As Dan Grazier, who directs the Stimson Center’s National Security reform program, tells RS, “there would be entrenched interests that... have a stake in seeing it continue.”
“Even if the [command’s] headquarters is stood down later, many functions, personnel, and institutional interests tend to persist and migrate elsewhere,” Sampson said.
Throwing a wrench at military preparedness
Beyond concerns over bureaucratic bloat and mission creep, experts observe that RASCOM’s proposed organizational structure could create other operational problems.
For example, most existing combatant commands are organized around geographic missions, or by function. In contrast, RASCOM would be structured around a class of tools.
Brandon Carr, a senior studies associate at the Quincy Institute, tells RS this “logic is well-intentioned” but “likely to be counterproductive.”
“So many future robotic and autonomous systems will become part of an individual service member’s personal equipment,” Carr said. The “technology does not lend itself to a unified command with centralized control.”
To best promote innovation, he said, “robotic and autonomous systems should be integrated and deployed down to the lowest levels of each service.”
Others contend RASCOM’s centralized approach could hinder autonomous systems' use on the battlefield.
David Deptula, the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, wrote last month that a combatant command “would risk centralizing control in a way that makes [autonomous] capabilities less responsive to the commanders who need them most.”
That could create a “seam in command and control” that adversaries would exploit in combat, Deptula wrote. (The Mitchell Institute is financially supported by weapons contractors.)
More broadly, Grazier cautioned against an over-reliance on autonomous systems, warning that adversaries will inevitably look for and leverage their weaknesses.
“We’re spending a crazy amount of money building this robot army. When it’s disrupted [by enemy combatants], our skills to operate without it will have atrophied,” Grazier warned. “We’re actually building in the means of our own defeat.”
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The Pentagon Is Stealing From the Working Poor to Pay for War and Enrich Contractors
The average US taxpayer in 2025 had over $4,000 taken out of their paychecks to fund the Pentagon; in the coming years, that amount is set to rise as Congress considers a $1.5 trillion war budget for 2027.
Jul 19, 2026
In an era of high prices for fuel, food, and housing, an extra $4,000 could make a lifesaving difference for many families. But instead, that’s what the average household had to shell out for the Pentagon last year.
That’s right: The average US taxpayer in 2025 had over $4,000 taken out of their paychecks to fund the Pentagon, according to the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. In the coming years, that amount is set to rise as Congress considers a $1.5 trillion war budget for 2027.
For the growing number of working poor in the United States, that money can mean the difference between making rent or falling behind, or between being able to afford an emergency trip to the doctor or going without care.
Money directed to the Pentagon represents nothing but betrayal for many Americans. A large majority oppose our wars, especially the latest conflict in Iran. And roughly half of the Pentagon’s budget flows to for-profit contractors, fueling the billionaire (and now even trillionaire) class.
The person who lost SNAP and the farmer who lost their income alike will be asked to foot the bill for the $1.5 trillion war budget.
Take SpaceX, one of many companies built on government contracts funded by taxpayer dollars. Elon Musk’s company would not exist without US taxpayers. As early Tesla investor Ross Gerber put it, “There would not be (Tesla and SpaceX) if it weren’t for the government.”
Early investments and contracts from the US government helped propel SpaceX to success, while continued awards from the Pentagon provided the stable revenue that made the government one of Musk’s largest customers. The company is now valued at more than $1 trillion. Private investors alone did not make Musk a trillionaire—taxpayers across the United States did.
But Musk isn’t the only person who made himself rich off the backs of American workers.
Lockheed Martin receives over 70% of its revenue from US government contracts. The numbers for Raytheon and General Dynamics are similar. These military contractors simply would not exist without the taxpayers—and a new $1.5 trillion budget would send hundreds of billions of dollars more to people who already have more than most Americans could even conceptualize.
At the same time, while taxpayers are subsidizing the military-industrial complex, the jobs those industries are allegedly providing are in decline, with the war industry creating over 2 million fewer jobs than it did 40 years ago.
Worse still, under the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” Republicans passed a year ago, the money for these ever-rising Pentagon budgets comes directly from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and other programs that help Americans make ends meet.
Under those cuts, millions of Americans—including children—have lost SNAP benefits already. And that’s impacting not just families but the farmers who helped feed them.
SNAP benefits were “guaranteed money in the pockets of farmers,” said Reese Amxy, a policy organizer at the Illinois Stewardship Alliance. But 150,000 people in the state have already lost eligibility.
It’s not just Illinois. Arizona has seen the steepest decline, with 50% of recipients—nearly half a million—already losing benefits. Louisiana (21%), Florida (20%), Oklahoma (16%), Virginia (16%), Texas (14%), Wyoming (13%), and Arkansas (12%) round out the rest of the hardest hit states so far.
Yet the person who lost SNAP and the farmer who lost their income alike will be asked to foot the bill for the $1.5 trillion war budget. This is Robin Hood in reverse. Worse still, the weapons those taxes buy are often to use to kill children like ours in Gaza and Iran.
The weapons and tech CEOs that would benefit from the massive war budget, and the politicians bought off by them, seek to keep this cycle going next year at an even grander scale. Americans need to demand their lawmakers say no more Pentagon spending—and invest in the things that actually keep our communities safe instead.
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Mamdani Says He Is Examining Whether His Government Can Arrest Netanyahu During NYC Visit
The mayor said he is in "an active conversation with our legal department" on the matter.
Jul 18, 2026
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times Saturday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made clear that he plans to take any action available to him to ensure the city complies with the International Criminal Court's warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the opportunity arises.
Netanyahu, said Mamdani, "belongs in The Hague," and he is currently examining whether his government has the authority to arrest the prime minister if he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September.
"He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court," said the mayor. "I will follow the laws that we have here in New York City because I believe that there is an importance in following the law as a leader who presides over our city."
He then clarified that "whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end."
WATCH: NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he is in "an active conversation" with the city's Law Department about whether he has the authority to order the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York for the U.N. General Assembly.
"I believe that Prime… pic.twitter.com/GZJAfbvWGU
— Clash Report (@clashreport) July 18, 2026
The mayor told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of the newspaper's "The Interview," that he is having "an active conversation with our legal department" to determine the scope of Mamdani's authority on the matter.
In November 2024, the ICC issued a warrant for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, who was killed by Israeli forces. Netanyahu was accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, where Israel began a relentless assault in 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack.
Israel and its top military funder, the US government, have insisted that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been targeting Hamas in attacks that are still continuing in Gaza despite a ceasefire that was reached last October.
But evidence has steadily mounted that children, aid workers, refugee camps, schools, and hospitals have been attacked, and experts found last year that Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza as a method of warfare.
More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and more than 173,000 people have been wounded. Israeli attacks have made Gaza home to the largest number of child amputees in the world, and have decimated over 90% of housing units in the exclave.
Garcia-Navarro questioned Mamdani on the "political weight" he gives to the issue of Israel and Palestine, which has seen a marked shift in US public opinion since Israel began its latest US-backed assault on Gaza. More than half of Democratic voters and nearly a third of all voters told The Associated Press last month that they viewed the war in Gaza as a genocide against Palestinians.
Three-quarters of respondents to a New York Times poll in May said they opposed continuing to send military aid to Israel, compared to 45% three years ago.
"It’s hard to explain to a New Yorker why their needs are not even being discussed, and yet we have billions of dollars to kill civilians halfway across the world," said Mamdani, who has been laser-focused during his term and his campaign last year on lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers and passing universal public programs.
"I think what we have seen from New Yorkers, what we’ve seen from Americans, when we talk about this hunger for a new kind of politics, it’s a hunger to move beyond the bankruptcy that characterizes a lot of politics today," said Mamdani. "And it is hard to find a more bankrupt policy approach than what our country has done to Gaza and to Palestine and how it hasn’t been specific to any one party. It’s been, again and again, an insistence to tell New Yorkers, and to tell Americans, that what they are seeing is not something they should in fact either be concerned by or believe in. It is hard to then turn to another issue and say, Believe me here."
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations said Saturday that Netanyahu will be at the UN meeting in New York City in September, despite Mamdani's threats—which date back to his mayoral campaign—while the prime minister said on a radio show this week that the mayor "hates America" and champions Hamas.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan said it was "pretty amazing to hear" Mamdani repeat his earlier conviction that Netanyahu should be arrested under the ICC warrant, given that he first publicly remarked on the issue "when he was polling at 1% in the Democratic primary polls and no one expected him to actually be mayor."
Netanyahu has thus far evaded arrest when traveling to countries that recognize the ICC's authority under the Rome Statute. The court opened an inquiry into Hungary last year when it failed to detain the prime minister when he visited. France also said it would not execute the warrant for Netanyahu because Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute.
UN Ambassador Michael Waltz responded to Mamdani's interview on Saturday, saying the US is also not party to the Rome Statute.
Journalist Zaid Jilani said that although the mayor of New York likely lacks the authority to arrest Netanyahu, "he can certainly troll him."
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'War Crime': US Attack on Water Desalination Plant Cuts Off Supply for Thousands in Southern Iran
Iranian officials said the country was suspending its commitments to June's memorandum of understanding following repeated US attacks.
Jul 18, 2026
About 10,000 people in nearly two dozen villages in southern Iran were without drinking water while the region was under an excessive heat warning on Saturday, after the US struck a water desalination plant in the village of Bonji in one of its latest attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure.
Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting said the drinking water supply was expected to be restored within a week, and emergency supply operations had begun.
Drop Site News reported comments from the deputy governor for political and security affairs in Hormozgan province, who said several missiles had hit power infrastructure and water desalination plants in the region near the Strait of Hormuz, which President Donald Trump has demanded control over as he's ramped up attacks on Iran in recent days, despite a ceasefire and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to end hostilities that was agreed to in June.
On Saturday, Iranian officials said the country was suspending its commitments to the MOU after the US violated the agreement repeatedly over the past week.
“The US has violated and suspended all its commitments within the framework of the Islamabad MOU," said Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi. “We also likewise have suspended all of our commitments as a result; we are no longer implementing those commitments."
He added that Tehran is now "busy defending the country."
A representative for Hormozgan province, Ahmad Moradi, told Iran's Tasnim news agency that over the past two nights, "about seven to eight people" have been killed in US attacks, all of whom were civilians. One attack targeted a bridge and hit two family cars. The neighborhood of Tappeh Allaho Akbar in Bandar Abbas was also hit, killing a woman and injuring a one-year-old, whose wounds required doctors to amputate.
At least 116 telecommunication towers were out of service in southern Iran Saturday, Al Jazeera reported.
The Iranian Embassy in India posted a video of the destruction of a bridge and also condemned the US attack on a maritime surveillance tower at the Chabahar Port, which US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth boasted about on social media on Thursday.
"For a state that once cast itself as the global champion of order, liberalism, and the war on terrorism, proudly displaying images of destroyed bridges and civilian infrastructure has become its only remaining 'victory,'" said Esmaeil Baqaei, a spokesperson for Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Saturday. "Yet with the collapse of every bridge, every tower, and every civilian facility, it is not merely steel and concrete that is being reduced to rubble. It is America’s moral standing—along with the entire architecture of international law and the civilizational claims of the West—that is crumbling before the world’s eyes."
According to Drop Site, US attacks have targeted nine bridges, two airports, a railroad junction, and a road tunnel since Wednesday. At least 41 Iranians have been killed and 408 have been wounded in US attacks so far this month, with Iranian authorities reporting that at least three women and one child are among those killed.
In a letter to United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran's permanent UN representative, wrote on Saturday that US attacks had “targeted and caused extensive damage to ports, transportation networks, communications facilities, logistics hubs, radar installations, coastal defense systems and other infrastructure indispensable to the civilian population, and to the functioning of the national economy."
“The continued commission of these unlawful armed attacks poses a grave threat to international peace and security, freedom of navigation, regional stability, and the security of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” wrote Iravani.
Iran has retaliated against the US this week by striking American allies, including Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. Kuwait's government Saturday said a power plant and water treatment plant had been attacked for the second time in two days, as well as an oil facility.
Two US soldiers were killed and a third was missing after an Iranian attack on a US military base in Jordan—the first American service members to be killed from hostile fire since an initial ceasefire was brokered in April.
Roxane Farmanfarmian, a professor of Middle East politics at the University of Cambridge, told Al Jazeera that Iranian forces are "using Kuwait, in particular, as an example of what they can do in retaliation."
“The US is clearly hitting the south in Iran and hitting airports, desalination plants, and bridges, and so the same kinds of things are being hit now in Kuwait to show what kind of effect Iran really can have on those countries that are hosting American bases," she said.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, echoed Iranian officials' condemnation of the US attack on the southern water desalination plant on Saturday, saying it was "not a legitimate military target."
"It is a war crime to target it," he said.
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'One-Way Ticket to Extinction': Trump Admin Again Guts Endangered Species Act
“In the midst of an extinction crisis," said one advocate, "the Trump administration is gutting protections to benefit industry interests."
Jul 18, 2026
“Yet again, the Trump administration has sold out our endangered wildlife to the highest bidder,” said one biodiversity advocate after the US Department of Interior, in a Friday news dump, issued two new policy changes that would weaken the Endangered Species Act and make it easier for corporate polluters to prioritize their own bottom lines over habitat protection.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) rescinded a policy that has been known as the "blanket rule" since 1975, which has given threatened species the same protections from illegal killing, trapping, harassment, and other forms of "take" under the ESA, as species that are officially designated as endangered.
The rollback would apply to species that have been newly declared as threatened, including the Florida manatee, the Pygmy rabbit, the Aztec Gilia, and Clover's Cactus—which could now go for years without protections despite their habitat loss and declining populations.
“Today’s decision represents a profound failure by Interior Secretary [Doug] Burgum and his department, and it amounts to an utter abdication of the federal government’s responsibility to protect America’s wildlife," said Sara Amundson, president of the Humane World Action Fund. "The department’s role is to faithfully implement—and certainly not to dismantle—the Endangered Species Act.”
The other policy change will require the FWS to consider the economic impact on various industries of designating areas as "critical" habitats in order to protect threatened and endangered species. The agency has previously had discretion over whether to consider economics when making habitat protection decisions.
Under President Donald Trump's new rule, said the Center for Biological Diversity, the FWS will be forced "to accept at face value claims by corporations and landowners of economic impacts from designating critical habitat, which could greatly limit the amount and quality of habitat protected for imperiled wildlife."
“Trump is bending over backward for corporate polluters by ripping away the blanket that protects so many struggling wildlife species as well as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the natural places where we seek peace of mind."
"The way this is written, a landowner could falsely claim they planned to build the next Disneyland on their property, so designating critical habitat would supposedly cost them tens of millions of dollars,” said Noah Greenwald, CBD's endangered species co-director. “This rule is clearly intended to prevent the protection of the wild places that endangered animals and plants need to survive. It’s a despicable move that cheapens the value of our most imperiled wildlife so corporations can make more money. Anyone can make outrageous claims about how much their property is worth, but that shouldn’t be taken as gospel.”
Advocacy groups said both policy changes amounted to giveaways to the logging, mining, drilling, and cattle ranching industries. The latter industry has long lobbied against land being designated as a critical habitat for the ‘I‘iwi bird in Hawaii, Clay Samford, an attorney with the environmental legal group Earthjustice, told The Washington Post.
“It’s part of this administration’s push to reduce protections for public lands and wildlife that are enjoyed by all Americans, in favor of narrow business interests,” Samford told the newspaper.
A senior attorney for the group, Elizabeth Forsyth, said in a statement that "the Trump administration is turning the law on its head by letting extractive industries dictate where critical habitat can be destroyed."
"This prioritization of industry interests over science is fundamentally at odds with the clear purpose of the Endangered Species Act," said Forsyth. "We won’t let this dangerous giveaway go unchallenged.”
There is currently a backlog of more than 500 species awaiting consideration for listing as threatened or endangered, and the rule changes, along with the Trump administration's 18% reduction in the FWS workforce, are expected to leave imperiled species waiting even longer for protections.
“In the midst of an extinction crisis, with hundreds of species like the Florida manatee and the wolverine desperately needing stronger protections for their habitats, the Trump administration is gutting protections to benefit industry interests," said Ryan Shannon, a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife. "Where we see our nation's irreplaceable wildlife, they see dollar signs. But our federal lands and waters, and the species they support, belong to all Americans, not to the logging, drilling, and mining industries that oppose all limits on maximizing their private profits.”
In a statement, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asserted that the ESA has long been "weaponized to stop almost any new project in America, driving up costs for families, weakening our competitiveness, and undermining our national security,” continued Secretary Burgum.
He added that the endangered species list has "fallen short," with 97% of listed species remaining designated as endangered, and called for "species recovery and delisting."
But Defenders of Wildlife noted that the ESA "has succeeded in preventing extinction for 99% of listed species."
"Public support for protecting our native wildlife remains overwhelmingly high, with 84% of voters supporting the ESA, according to nationwide polling conducted by Defenders of Wildlife," said the group.
The rules announced on Friday came days after the Interior Department proposed a new rule under which management of threatened grizzly bears would be transferred from the federal government to the states, where Republican leaders have pushed to end protections for the species.
The administration also exempted oil and gas companies from having to protect endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico, and earlier this month changed the regulatory interpretation of the word "harm" in the ESA.
“These rules are a one-way ticket to extinction for our most imperiled animals and plants, from monarch butterflies to giraffes to alligator snapping turtles,” said Greenwald. “Trump is bending over backward for corporate polluters by ripping away the blanket that protects so many struggling wildlife species as well as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the natural places where we seek peace of mind. This is the last thing we need in the middle of an extinction crisis, and we’ll fight it with everything we’ve got.”
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A Global Fossil Fuel Phaseout Is a Challenge 'Big Enough to Solve'
The immediate challenge is to develop a global phaseout road map that’s ambitious enough to stabilize the climate system and equitable enough to drive a resilient, renewables-based development in even the poorest parts of the world
Jul 18, 2026
It’s no secret that the climate negotiations are failing. The simple fact is that the carbon concentration of the atmosphere continues to rise, rapidly and along a pathway that threatens—but does not yet guarantee—true catastrophe.
That said, there’s little agreement on why the climate negotiations are failing, or what their role would be in the emergency global transition that’s so desperately needed. Such a transition will have to be very widely accepted as fair if it is to have a chance of success, and the negotiations as we have them are hardly rising to the challenges of global climate justice. Is this likely to change soon? Perhaps not, but such a change is both necessary and possible, and the goal has to be to increase the odds.
One promising way of doing so is to concentrate effort on launching a global push to phase out fossil fuels—that is, a phase out of both fossil fuel extraction and consumption, and the simultaneous development and global deployment of a fossil-fuel free energy economy. Such a phaseout would not solve the whole of the climate problem, let alone the still larger ecological crisis, but it would make solutions possible. The phaseout challenge is one that, as Dwight D. Eisenhower used to say, is “big enough to solve.”
The Road to Santa Marta
The story of the climate negotiations can be told many ways. I like to tell it as a story of failure, and renewed effort, and late, inadequate, steps forward. Such a process gave us the foundational United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Paris Agreement, and the hard-won breakthrough at 2023’s COP28 in Dubai, where the world’s nations agreed to “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” The question is if the current impasse, which settled in after Dubai, will play out in similar fashion.
How rapidly can the world’s civilizational dependence on fossil fuels be broken?
But first, know that a great burst of joy accompanied the Dubai agreement’s inclusion of the words “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” It broke a firewall that had held for decades, one in which a blocking coalition led by the Saudis and the American oil companies, playing a long and Machiavellian game, was able to keep fossil fuels from even being mentioned in a formal COP decision.
This silence has long been excoriated by climate activists around the world, but its origins are too seldom brought to light. To see them, drop back to 1992, when the Framework Convention was being finalized. Back then, the world’s climate diplomats were able to make substantive decisions. Some of these, like the agreement that countries would act in proportion to their “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” were inspiring and visionary. But the founders fell short in at least one enduringly negative and perhaps fatal way—they were unable to agree to a majority, or even a super-majority “last resort” decision-making system. They got close, but the fossil coalition blocked all paths, and the result, by both default and design, was consensus decision-making.
Consensus decision-making, alas, is a special kind of problem. It appears to be a commitment to deep democracy, yet in practice it means everyone has a veto, which is not exactly what you want if you’re trying to negotiate a life-or-death global transition that requires the interests of wealthy and powerful minorities to yield to those of the global community as a whole. On the contrary, it empowers blockers, allowing them to endlessly force the deletion of ambitious text, and thus it keeps both fossil phaseout (which is blocked by the fossil cartel) and meaningful finance reform (which is blocked by the wealthy countries) forever off the table. Over time, it has driven the negotiations into a realm of shadow play far divorced from the realities of the actual world.
It is difficult to pinpoint the original sin here. The Saudis, after all, have a point. Their economy is indeed threatened by any phaseout of fossil fuels. So why should they not fight like hell to preserve their power and their privilege? Everybody else does. But there’s a deeper problem as well: the climate finance problem, which continues to loom forbiddingly over any possible international climate accord. Ultimately, the deadlock in the climate negotiations is defined by the intransigence of the Global Rich, most of whom reside in the Global North, on key justice questions—finance in particular. Bluntly, the rich refuse to pay their fair shares. This intransigence makes any real breakthrough impossible, in part by empowering blockers on all sides.
At COP30 in Brazil, push came to shove. After a large group of activist nations failed to land an agreement to negotiate a “roadmap” away from fossil fuels, those nations, many of them frustrated beyond words, made a new move. Led by Colombia and The Netherlands and with a great deal of support from civil society (the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative in particular), they forked off a more informal process, which launched the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, held in April 2026 in Santa Marta, Colombia.
Santa Marta seemed immediately to be a game changer. Here, for example, is Tzeporah Berman, founder and chair of the Treaty Initiative: “After years stuck in endless debates about whether to phase out fossil fuels, finally we are focusing on the how. We are no longer fighting for recognition of the problem, but creating solutions. It’s like watching a dam break—all that pent-up experience, knowledge, and passion suddenly flowing into concrete ways to phase out dirty fuels. The hope is contagious.”
The hope is also strategic. With President Donald Trump’s people in control of the US government, and doing everything in their power to undermine both the Paris Agreement and the Framework Convention itself, everyone could sense the opening. Which is why Santa Marta, as climate diplomacy’s favorite play-by-play announcer Ed King noted, was “weirdly” optimistic. One observer even described it as an “euphoric” experience.
Beyond any review of the formal takeaways, Santa Marta was a conference of the hopeful: 57 countries (plus California) representing about a third of the global economy, were present, and they all represented countries, or factions within countries, that wanted to face the fossil energy challenge. The US government, obviously, was not among them. Neither were the Gulf oil states, or Russia, or (more controversially) China and India. There was no formal negotiating. Civil society had its venues and made its declaration (a heroic synthesis), the academics had theirs, and a high-level science panel set the stage. The official discussions were universally reported to be congenial, even when it came to the equity question, which is always a reliable source of inconclusive discord.
The second Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels will be chaired by Tuvalu and Ireland. It will be in 2027, after COP31 in Turkey, which one way or another will have to react to Santa Marta and its outcomes. Moving forward with the transition is now on the official diplomatic agenda. Formally, this means defining national phaseout road maps and a global phaseout road map to plug them into. In reality it means much more, because even good road maps will mean little unless they’re accompanied by the financial and institutional breakthroughs that could bring them to life.
The Santa Marta Breakthrough
How rapidly can the world’s civilizational dependence on fossil fuels be broken?
The good news is that the renewable energy revolution is finally arriving in force, and this has made countries of all kinds willing to countenance a sharp break with fossil energy. Thanks in large part to China’s immense commitments to electrification and mass manufacturing, the cost of wind and solar, and the batteries that convert them into “firm” baseload power sources, has plummeted.
The US-Israeli war against Iran has accelerated the renewables buildout, by convincing countries to prioritize domestic energy production. Fadhel Kaboub, a prominent southern observer of today’s geopolitical ferment, put it well: “A world less dependent on oil would be less vulnerable to the weaponization of tanker routes, refinery disruptions, and sudden fuel-price shocks,” adding that “a renewables-based system does not make peace automatic, but it does make energy blackmail much harder.”
To avoid a future in which vast areas of the Earth become almost uninhabitable, the world’s governments will have to pick up the pace.
Further, the global renewables boom, which began before the war, may well be reaching its own inflection point. Solar evangelist Danny Kennedy cites 2025 as the big year, because that’s when China and India—the two largest energy consumers in Asia—together reached a historic tipping point. “For the first time, fossil fuel generation fell in both countries simultaneously: China down 0.9%, India down 3.3%. These are not small numbers.” Then, in 2026, as the war dragged on, China’s solar exports hit all-time records. “This is not charity. It is commerce. It is nations choosing energy security, economic agency, and lower costs over the inherited architecture of fossil fuel dependency.”
There are provisos. China and India still struggle to avoid new coal even as they scale up renewables. Also, China’s clean energy technology dominance, coupled with the Global North’s political inability to adopt robust industrial policies, seems destined to deepen deindustrialization and despair, particularly in the United States and Europe. But, though critical, these remain only provisos, because China’s mass manufacturing prowess shows a way forward. In fact, as the cost of electrification has dropped, it’s become difficult for the fossil cartel to convince the world’s people that their dreams of prosperity—or even stability—depend on the continued burning of coal, gas, and oil.
Alas, technology alone will not stabilize the climate in time. Renewables are displacing coal in particular, but the oil and gas story is more mixed. Thinktank Ember’s view is authoritative: “if demand and clean electricity growth continue at their recent pace, then fossil fuel generation will plateau before starting to decline consistently from the early 2030s.” Which is great, but not even close to fast enough to hold the 1.5°C line. To do better, it’s also necessary to stop fossil fuel extraction—drilling, fracking, and mining—as the second front in the phaseout battle, the second blade of the scissors.
This imperative has been obvious for decades. In 1998 at COP4 , Oilwatch, Amazon Watch, the Rainforest Action Network, and Project Underground launched a campaign to stop new exploration to avoid breaching the 1.0°C limit. The difference, 28 years later, is that the world has retreated to a far more dangerous 1.5°C goal, and could well retreat again. Moreover, the demand to “keep it in the ground” is now coming from the main stage. At Santa Marta, the science panel’s “action recommendations” included “halting all new fossil-fuel expansion” and “prohibit[ing] fossil fuel advertising.”
It’s easy to see why local communities that directly suffer the pollution, corruption, and abuse that typically accompany fossil fuel extraction have long been demanding its abolition. But why did it take so long for global actors to come to the table, and does their arrival indicate that the tide has definitively turned?
Probably not.
Pause to consider how the goal of “halting all new fossil fuel” investment would sound among the good citizens of Houston, or Oslo, or Riyadh, or Basra, or Moscow. What’s the way forward for nations whose economies are deeply entangled with fossil fuel revenues, or people whose lives are dependent on fossil fuel jobs? Such questions could be glossed over at Santa Marta, but they cannot go forever unanswered.
At Santa Marta, the signs were, as Orwell used to say, in front of your nose. Colombia represented the Global South and its co-host The Netherlands represented the Global North, but both countries will have very difficult times escaping their entanglement with fossil fuels. Colombia exemplifies the predicament of poorer fossil exporters: Over 75% of its energy demand and 35-50% of its export revenues are met by fossil fuels. The Netherlands, for its part, is far richer, and is not a fossil fuel exporter, so it will be far easier for it to extricate itself from its fossil entanglements. Easier but not easy: The Netherlands relies heavily on fossil fuel distribution and refining—the port of Rotterdam is Europe’s primary oil and gas gateway.
To avoid a future in which vast areas of the Earth become almost uninhabitable, the world’s governments will have to pick up the pace. At an absolute bare minimum this means eliminating the subsidies that promote fossil fuels. In practice, however, even this entirely rational reform slams directly into the stranglehold that fossil capital has on all countries. One excellent example is the so called investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows fossil fuel companies to sue governments for lost future profits if they move, however timidly, to regulate away even odious advantages that these companies have built over the years to maximize their profits. It’s an absurd and entirely corrupt legal and economic barrier to phasing out fossil fuels and, incidentally, it’s one that The Netherlands helped create in the 1960s. The ISDS was explicitly on the Santa Marta agenda, but was reduced to one meaningless sentence in the formal takeaways: ISDS “by some were perceived as creating barriers, while the extent to which these barriers are perceived varies.” Asked to explain this rather evasive blather, Dutch Minister and co-host Stientje van Veldhoven said. “This was not a negotiating conference, and therefore different parties, different countries have different positions.”
Sooner or later, a serious negotiating conference will have to take meaningful positions on ISDS, economic diversification, external debt, and many other difficult issues. To that end, it will have to distinguish the core problem of extractor dependence—especially in poorer extraction nations—from the broader problem of economic entanglement. Because all nations, rich and poor alike, are entangled with fossil fuels. The crucial step is to put the interests of the poor ahead of the entanglement of the rich, even as the world’s people struggle to face the realities, and the necessities, of climate stabilization.
One immediate question, as Tuvalu and Ireland prepare to host the follow-up conference in 2027, is which countries to invite. Santa Marta was widely praised as a leadership conference, but its attendees included countries, including co-host The Netherlands, that do not seem likely to halt fossil fuel expansion anytime soon, at least not voluntarily. And this while China, the undisputed leader of the clean energy transition, was not on the invitation list. Which is why one well-known, long-time activist (anonymously) suggested to me that the recent UN General Assembly vote on the International Court of Justice climate ruling might offer a convenient and logical first screen for admission to future conferences. Only signers would qualify. Eight countries, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the US, voted against the ruling, but another 28, including India, Turkey, Qatar, and Nigeria, abstained.
Sorting out this problem would be a step forward. But the real game changer would be for a wealthy major extractor to repudiate fossil fuel expansion. One would do, though such a repudiation would ideally be followed by a working consensus that fossil fuel extraction (and not just its expansion) must end first in the rich world. Alas, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Norway, The Netherlands, and Brazil, all countries that attended Santa Marta, continue to expand domestic extraction, while the UK, France, and Italy are home to major corporations with growing international operations. All this must stop, and soon, and there will be no real breakthrough until it does.
The Structure of the Challenge
Santa Marta launched three work programs:
- Develop national fossil-fuel phaseout road maps;
- Transform the global financial system to support the transition away from fossil fuels; and
- Advance toward a fossil fuel-free trade system.
The details are many, but the real challenge is that any program must be executed within a profoundly divided world that is pressing hard against physical planetary limits.
Given this, any workable phaseout strategy will stretch the politics of the possible to the breaking point. How could it not when the climate system is already destabilizing? Much of the relevant science leverages the notion of the remaining emissions budget—the total amount of carbon dioxide that the world can still emit before crossing a given temperature threshold—and, for any Paris-compliant temperature, this remaining budget is perilously small and rapidly shrinking. Indeed, fossil-fuel emissions must very quickly be drawn down to “real zero” and this will be impossible unless the extraction of fossil fuels ceases.
The second challenge is extreme inequality, which comes to us in two dimensions: between rich countries (the Global North) and poor countries (the Global South) and also between rich and poor classes, in all countries. Yet everything will nevertheless depend on an ability to cooperate in a robust solidarity that can resist the attacks of the fossil cartel and survive even as climate-driven damage and destruction decisively increases. Such cooperation to navigate the turbulence of the climate transition is unlikely without meaningful steps toward a global safety net and paths forward for the world’s poor.
Fossil fuel extraction must be phased out at a breakneck pace with almost complete cessation by 2050. Similarly, the build-out of fossil fuel infrastructure must stop immediately. There’s no room—even in poor countries—for new oil and gas fields or coal mines. All effort must go to the construction of zero-carbon infrastructure.
Yet none of this is even conceivable unless the overall effort is very widely accepted as fair. This judgement will be made in many ways and many places, and not in abstract terms. For example, the tension between “phasing down” and “phasing out” fossil fuels is anything but abstract, and it won’t be easily reconciled. At Santa Marta, the “oil-rich African nations” insisted they would keep drilling as they transitioned to renewables. Onuoha Magnus Chidi, an adviser to Nigeria’s regional development minister: “Not phasing out—phase down. That is the message… We are phasing down, and we are saying that there should be early planning. It must be fair to all.”
I find his point impossible to dispute. The alternative has to be: If a phase-down strategy is pursued with adequate ambition, and if it takes proper account of both the North-South and rich-poor divides, then it becomes a phase-out strategy that can honestly be defended as being “fair to all.”
Chidi put his answer in concrete terms. “People are going to lose their jobs… How are you trying to re-engage them in other sectors?” he said, before stressing the need for debt reform and other financial assistance to make such change possible. Countries that are highly dependent on extraction will need more time to disentangle their societies from fossil fuels and build new economies. This will be extremely difficult even in rich countries like the United States and Saudi Arabia, but far harder in poor countries such as Nigeria, Iraq, and South Sudan, where fossil fuels account for large fractions of national revenue.
Given these challenges, what’s the way forward? This is the central question of phaseout justice. Fortunately, this question, too often treated as subsidiary, was taken seriously at Santa Marta:
The countries present in Santa Marta still have structural dependencies to overcome, including fiscal dependencies, debt constraints, the dependence of the financial architecture on fossil fuels and the need to enable fossil fuels-free trade systems...Transitioning away from fossil fuels is more than replacing one energy source with another. It requires broad economic transformation to overcome structural dependencies, overcome debt constraints, expand reliable energy access, and support diversified, resilient economies. This must be planned with workers and communities, ensuring a transition that is fair, rights-based, and delivers tangible benefits for marginalized groups.
To give poor extracting countries a chance to rapidly phase down, rich extracting countries must very quickly phase out. In fact, to hold to the 1.5°C limit—really, to minimize the time spent in 1.5°C overshoot—the richest fossil fuel extractors like Canada, the United States, Norway, Australia, and the UK must abandon extraction by the very early 2030s. This logic is inexorable; it holds unless you’re prepared to accept a catastrophic level of warming or assume a magical level of carbon dioxide removal. To hold the 1.5°C, or anything close to it, even poor fossil fuel extractors will have to phase out quickly, which they will not be able to do without support from the rich world.
System Change
In his speech to the Santa Marta plenary, Colombia’s former President Gustavo Petro went beyond the usual practice of reading out a bill of complaints against fossil interests. ”There is inertia in the power and the economy of this archaic form of energy—fossil fuels—that lead to death. Undoubtedly, that form of capital can commit suicide, taking with it humanity and [other] life,” he said, going after fossil capitalism itself. “The question that needs to be asked is whether capitalism can truly adapt to a non-fossil energy model.”
This is exactly right.
The world is threatened by a suicidal form of capitalism, yet it is simultaneously clear that the reforms necessary to stabilize the climate, while momentous, do not demand wholesale revolution. Mandatory extraction limits, in particular, do not require an end to private property, though states strong enough to direct investment do seem to be necessary. Those devices must prove sufficient because there simply is not time to shift to a post-capitalist world. The goal has to be to shift to another, non-suicidal form of capitalism, assuming that such a thing exists.
Fossil capitalism will have to be forced from the stage, and to that end everything must be done.
The immediate challenge is to develop a global phaseout road map that’s ambitious enough to stabilize the climate system and equitable enough to drive a resilient, renewables-based development in even the poorest parts of the world. To that end, there is much to reconsider, beginning with the global finance architecture and, just as fundamentally, the fact that so many countries, so many elite cabals, and so many techno-economic systems have long co-evolved with the fossil cartel, and have become inextricably entwined with it.
Ultimately, because it is essentially political, the climate challenge is solvable. Formal negotiations could indeed push further the ball Santa Marta set into motion, and by so doing restore faith in multilateral governance, without which there’s no chance of success. But the truth is that the Tuvalu-Ireland meeting could just as easily degenerate into another pointless talking shop that fails to take any meaningful, galvanizing steps. This outcome must be avoided at almost any cost.
Fossil capitalism won’t yield to half measures. Neither market signals nor pipeline protests will reduce emissions at the necessary pace. Fossil capitalism will have to be forced from the stage, and to that end everything must be done. Technology, science, industrial policy, and global climate justice are going to have to line up on the same side, and even then something else—international solidarity—will also be required. But given that under capitalism money makes the world go round, there will be no meaningful international solidarity without international finance.
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